How Slido is helping Glovo to drive transparency and manage change at scale

With its presence spread across 1,500 cities in 25 countries, Glovo is one of the top players worldwide in multi-category apps.

A people-centric business at its core, Glovo strives for a culture of impact that’s fast-moving, ambitious, and caring.

In this story, Mathilde Rimbert, Global Head of Internal Communications, Culture & Events at Glovo, tells us how Slido helps the company build transparency and manage change across its fast-growing global teams.

Unifying the Glovo employee experience

During the initial stages of its growth, Glovo operated in an HQ-focused business structure. As their global employee base grew to more than 4,000, the company had to think of certain change management in terms of how internal communications are handled.

This was a big change for Glovo. When you're in one country, where you are a small group, you don't actually need someone like me, an Internal Communications Lead, at that moment. But when you start expanding, how do we make sure that there is a sense of belonging in the company globally? I think that was one of our biggest steps for growth, explains Mathilde.

Mathilde was one of the key roles brought in to address this gap three years back. I created the Internal Communications team when I joined Glovo, she shares. In her role, Mathilde ensures that the company strategy and culture are successfully communicated to the employees in a transparent, inclusive, and value-driven manner.

As part of the efforts to improve transparency globally across its growing teams, Glovo added Slido to its leadership Q&As in early 2020.

A team that bonds across borders

For meetings that were streamed across countries, Slido Q&A proved to be particularly helpful for Mathilde when collecting questions ahead.

Our goal was to share information as soon as we can, as much as we can, to everyone, and we put Slido in place very early for Q&As with our leadership team, Mathilde adds.

But they soon found yet another exciting way to use Slido in their global hybrid events such as weekly all-hands and bi-annual Culture Days. By employing Slido polls in a clever way, Glovo was able to move faster toward building its company culture globally and at scale.

When addressing a global audience, you need a tool that is going to make everyone feel engaged. With Slido, wherever you are sitting in the world, you can actually take part in the discussion, she elaborates, adding that they now use polls extensively in all of their global meetings.

Moreover, Glovo is intentional in how it looks for interaction opportunities at their global events.

When working on content, the Internal Communications & Events team proactively asks presenters to look at sections where it makes sense to have insights and opinions from the audience.

Apart from the Communications team, Glovo’s Onboarding, as well as Learning and Development teams, are also trained to use Slido for their specific use cases.

We use the tool for that part of onboarding making sure the employee experience is global. Some of our country-wide teams or departments are starting to use Slido at their all-hands meetings with smaller audiences, Mathilde shares.

Managing change faster together

With Slido fully integrated into its company-wide communications strategy, Glovo finds it much easier to manage larger organizational changes.

From addressing communication team restructurings to a change of reporting line at a high level and creation of new business units, Slido continues to help bring clarity and alignment for Glovo wherever possible.

We go through those changes quite often and we always use Slido to address those changes with the impacted teams first and then at a more global level when this makes sense to make sure we answer any doubts, concerns, and questions shares Mathilde.

Glovo leadership is able to continuously provide assurance to the employees and explain the changes in detail through Slido Q&A.

Engagement is not negotiable

Primarily taking place in a hybrid setup, Glovo’s company-wide standup meetings and all-hands meetings recently witnessed a 20% increase in attendance.

Their secret? The Internal Communications & Events team redesigned the meeting formats with more relevant and engaging content through Slido and switched to a bi-weekly frequency.

Drawing from her experience conducting meetings in fully remote as well as hybrid setups, Mathilde believes that companies need to rethink how they run meetings with large audiences.

Especially the content of the session and how you're going to run it. It is very important to focus on both interaction and inclusivity, making sure that everyone can contribute, she points out.

When looking back to when they started, Slido usage at Glovo has been increasing in a natural, organic way.

Without pushing for any usage, it's happening. People are asking for Slido and they are seeing the potential of the tool with no specific push. And that means something, concludes Mathilde.