How Swiggy is building a values-first organization with Slido

For an average city dweller in India, Swiggy equals convenience. Since 2014, this young brand has been on a mission to elevate the quality of life for urban consumers in India through a range of multi-category delivery offerings. Be it grocery, food delivery or cloud kitchens, Swiggy has been driving innovation through the heart of it all.

Swiggy has also been one of the pioneers spearheading innovative ways of working in India. The Bengaluru-based organization’s remote-first work practices currently range from their quarterly in-office meetups to workations to monthly town halls with the leaders.

With 5,000 plus employees working from across 487 different cities across the country, Swiggy is striving to build a values-first organization. In this story, Swiggy’s Internal Communications Manager, Soumya Shetty joins us to share how Slido helps Swiggy make the company values more tangible to its employees.

Creating connection in a remote environment

Becoming remote-first was a post-pandemic decision for Swiggy. The company’s future-of-work model is based on flexibility and currently allows many of its employees to work from anywhere.

In her role, Soumya serves as a custodian of company-wide communications, primarily focusing on socializing the company values across the organization and finding more meaningful ways to connect in a remote-first environment.

When operating in a largely virtual workspace, we want to be able to connect with our employees in more interactive and more engaging ways. For this, we use Slido, especially during our town halls. Our leaders also want to be regularly connected to everyone. Slido allows us to do this by driving engagement in a more interactive manner, begins Soumya.

Though she uses Slido for her team meetings, to gather and understand the sentiments of meeting participants, town halls are where Soumya currently sees the most potential for Slido.

Bringing values to life at work

For Swiggy’s internal communications team, interaction is a powerful means toward driving purposeful engagement. Though they started out focusing on icebreakers and fun quizzes, Soumya’s team soon went a step further with Slido during their town halls.

We’ve used Slido to create these value quizzes to gauge whether our employees understand our company values well. Some of our business values are long sentences. So we illustrated our values in sentences using emoticons and asked people to guess them using a Slido quiz, she explains, adding that they’ve been able to make their values more memorable with this innovative approach.

Beyond values, Slido is also helping Swiggy communicate its fast-growing business model to its employees. To help our employees understand the value proposition of each of our new businesses, we use Slido, Soumya shares.

Culture first, communication first

But what do Slido interactions add up to for Soumya? Here’s what she told us: In terms of understanding company culture, Slido helps me get a direct view of what’s going on in the minds of our employees. This way, Slido helps us build a deeper connection with our wider team especially when we are working remotely. Slido helps break a key barrier in communication, by enabling that slight interaction which is otherwise not possible with remote conversations, she adds.

The feedback they have received from the employees is further proof of Slido’s success Soumya reiterates: Whenever we have used where we have used Slido, we receive feedback saying This was a great town hall. Enjoyed the way you’ve positioned the values for us to understand it better. So, for us that feedback is very transparent when our employees are telling us that this works.

Soumya is looking forward to building out their town hall meetings further using Slido. I was talking to Kiran TV, our UC Engineer, about using the Google Slides integration. I think it would make the whole experience more seamless. Now that I know that there are a lot more features – such as getting question upvotes from participants during Q&A – I’m looking forward to seeing how I can leverage them better in our meetings, Soumya shares, as we wrap up the conversation.