Swiggy aims to make its customers’ lives easier, and a little happier, too. Its mission is to elevate the quality of life for its customers by providing unparalleled convenience. It’s no surprise, then, that Swiggy chose Slack as its productivity platform.
Starting out as a food delivery service, India-based Swiggy has now expanded its network of solutions. This includes grocery deliveries with Swiggy Instamart and running errands on demand with Swiggy Genie.
Today, the company employs more than 5,000 people nationwide, who work with more than a quarter of a million delivery executives.
Leaping into remote-first working
While many team members work in the office, or on a hybrid model, Swiggy has operated as a remote-first workforce since 2020—no easy feat considering it has employees working across 500 Indian cities.
“We saw a clear opportunity for the company to evolve for the future,” says Ramasubramanian Kumaresan, Swiggy’s Assistant Vice President of Human Resources.
“We already had a culture that suggested we could succeed as a remote-first company. Our people are good with tech, and we communicate really well.”
To enable this, it needed a scalable collaboration solution that would allow its employees across India to connect, without sacrificing productivity. The solution also needed to unite the Swiggy team around a north star—having a total focus on the customer.
That being said, it was conscious of the barriers to effectiveness that can come with remote work.
“Our CFO’s biggest worry was about productivity—how could we ensure that work was moving forward?”
The key to ensuring adoption and enhanced productivity was two-fold; Swiggy had to understand how its employees would use the platform while also having tools in place to help it measure and surface employee productivity and engagement.
Driving adoption with a data-driven approach
Kumaresan and his team created a framework around collaboration, productivity, and holistic wellbeing.
“We figured out ways to measure employee productivity. But it’s more than just work—we want our employees to feel happy and engaged with their work, so they feel motivated to deliver,” he says.
“Once a framework was in place, we charted what our north star would look like and the steps we needed to get there.”
When it came to rolling out Slack, Swiggy’s technical teams were already familiar with the platform, having used it for internal collaboration for three years. This meant that when the organisation broadened the implementation to cover the whole business, it already had structures in place to make the process smoother.
“We knew the organisation needed to go through a transformation that would help us infuse our company mission into our day-to-day work. It was a culture change that required strong change management, a culture of learning and also leadership adoption from the get-go.”
Senior management beyond the tech team were the first to be onboarded onto the new system. “We saw leaders being active on our general channel, which showed other employees how Slack could be a useful collaboration tool,” says Kumaresan.
Swiggy ran orientation workshops for all employees new to Slack, focused on creating dedicated team channels, and crowdsourced a collection of #slackhacks to help everyone hit the ground running.
“We now have channels full of customer-obsessed professionals who are building new products, features and even policies that are valuable for our customers.”
Uniting teams around one mission
From sales teams and technical staff, to the delivery team and kitchens, many functions make up the Swiggy team.
“Slack gave us a beautiful way for everyone to be part of the conversation,” says Kumaresan. “It became a great cross-pollinator for us. As soon as we launched, ideas started flowing,” says Kumaresan.
The team set up dedicated channels—dedicated spaces where people could organise around a single goal, like a project or topic. Channels allowed teams to come together with a shared view of their work.
Conversations were possible in real-time, with colleagues spread across diverse geographies able to quickly develop ideas into action.
“We now have channels full of customer-obsessed professionals who are building new products, features, and even policies that are valuable for our customers,” says Kumaresan.
“Slack enables the flow of work, all in one place. This means fewer barriers, and fewer barriers mean better adoption and a more engaged workforce.”
Slack also helps Swiggy minimise distractions thanks to integrations—the ability to integrate industry-leading software and custom apps right into Slack. The team is able to discuss progress, share documents, and even bring their emails into Slack.
“So they’re not disrupting their flow of work, our people are able to centre their notifications in Slack, not separate apps or email,” adds Kumaresan
For example, the HR team has moved its ticketing tool to Slack, meaning people can resolve tickets and queries faster and in a central place.
Iterating and improving every day
With Slack, Swiggy has been able to propel a group of 850 professionals who are connecting every day, sharing learnings, wins, and ideas.
“Someone might share some feedback from a customer that sparks a team conversation. We’re able to iterate and improve our services in the moment.”
“Slack enables the flow of work, all in one place. This means fewer barriers, and fewer barriers mean better adoption and a more engaged workforce.”
