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Hello team



After reviewing the list of questions, I’m canceling this afternoon’s Q&A. There hasn’t been a great participation in # of questions and votes. Most of the questions are not business related but complaints around HR policies/decisions and our value proposition to employees. There are questions from 10 people (out of 3500 employees), and the highest voted represents <2.5% of the Glovo population. 


In my experience, having all the team connected for an hour listening to how we respond to HR-complaints from a minority of our team is not only a very expensive use of our time but also very demoralizing for all of us.


I have to admit, after 8 years, we still haven’t found a way to have good and engaging Q&A’s with all the Glovo team. VPs and I often do Q&A’s with smaller teams, for example, when I visit a country or when participating in a team all-hands. In smaller forums, we always get great questions, a lot of participation and it’s a good way to connect with the team and show transparency. We’ll keep thinking about it and see if there’s a way to make them work with the entire team.


As for the questions received this time, I’ll try to answer them here below. For any other doubts comments, you now leaders at Glovo are very approachable. Feel free to slack me directly or any of the VP's anytime.



Oscar



People questions: work-life balance, office policy, office vibes, engagement, attrition,...


We care a lot about having the right talent engaged and motivated at Glovo. Right talent means high performers with great cultural fit. As a company, we invest important resources in understanding how people feel about their job, their leaders and the company; and improving their overall satisfaction and motivation. Surely, Glovo is not a company where everyone will fit in and feel comfortable. Glownership means that "Glovo goes 1st, and we (employees) go 2nd”, and therefore we can’t optimize to make everyone happy. 



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In terms of the new hybrid policy: we’ve explained the reasoning of this new policy several times in the past. We believe spending more time together will make us a better company, and the current policy is the right balance for us. We talked to +150 leaders and many more employees before taking the decision. And yes, we perfectly understood there would be a fraction of our team that would dislike it. According to our last Glovoice, there was a single-digit % of you that complained about the policy. I totally respect and understand that some of you want to prioritize being more remote. 


If you are still outraged about our hybrid policy, then Glovo is not the right fit for you; and the best for you and Glovo is that you leave. This is a new rule in the company and we all must adhere to it.



To the attrition comments: so far we have not seen an increase in the average attrition in teams due to the new hybrid. However, when we took this decision we accepted this could eventually happen and we are ready to rebuild teams. We have very healthy pipelines of new talent applying to our open positions, who do align with this new policy and come excited with the project. Over 100k people apply to Glovo every year. 


On a separate note, it is true that lately we have taken several decisions to improve our company performance and velocity. I believe that in the last 4 years, Glovo has lost the hunger and ambition that we had in the early years. This is of course a generalization, as many teams have kept a huge self-motivation to keep delivering at high levels. However, we have competitors that are executing faster with similar resources, becoming users favorite choice above Glovo, and this puts our company at risk. I don’t like that we are responding to it because a competitor is doing better than us; we should have high ambitions regardless of competitors. But the reality is that it has forced us to wake up. Today we believe a reaction is needed.


At Glovo we care about work-life balance and we want everyone to keep a healthy balanced life. But that is a very subjective concept and some people might not find the work-life balance we offer as enough for them. What should be obvious to everyone: Glovo won’t be known for having the easiest work-life balance in the labor market; it’s not the metric we obsess to be #1 at. What we obsess about is to become the best multicategory delivery app for customers in all markets.


We have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. We are literally transforming the way thousands of cities look and the way people get access to anything in their day to day. What we are building is not easy: big volumes with tiny margins and with a very complex geographical set-up. We have fierce competition with world-class talent. The opportunity is big but the journey has always been intense and hard, and I don’t think it will ever get any easier.  


We believe Glovo will keep attracting ambitious, top-class professionals that are excited for our mission, that want to learn and grow fast, work with very talented people, and solve difficult problems that have a huge global scale. Also, talent that values that we invest in having fun and we keep a friendly culture. It is important that each of you assesses if Glovo is the right fit for you at this moment. 



Other more specific People questions:

(HQ): We keep working to improve Office Life at Yellow Park. I think we are mega-privileged to have the Yellow Park. we are aware the are still some improvements that can be done and we’re working on it. As a reminder, we will be opening some new floors in the second building, which will allow us to increase m^2 per employee everywhere.


We believe our compensations (salary + benefits) remain competitive, and we are not planning to review the benefits in the next few months.




“The 2022 impact report says we have 10 employees with disabilities. In Spain, the law requires companies to hire at least 2% of workers with disabilities. Are we compliant?”

Thanks for raising this. Sadly today we are not, however we are working on it and we are confident with the plan in place to keep on moving progress in the right direction.  


Actions we are working on:

Self-ID campaign > we are aware we have many talents in Glovo with a diverse ability without us realizing. Via a Self-ID campaign in Workday we gave our colleagues the option to share their disability with us so we can support them better, learn from their experiences and also encourage them to apply for the certification with the Spanish Government.

Increase awareness on DIB via our ERG Abilities with Sponsorship of Edu Ros. 

Scholarships > we are launching a scholarship program in Q4 focused on just out of university talent to learn and grow at Glovo. This scholarship program will have spots for 5 students first and will scale based on step by step learnings. 




“Other companies that use the GM model (or similar single-threaded ownership) like Amazon also have engineering report through the GM/STO. Was there any discussion around that with the re-org? If not, why not?”


We have not considered embedding engineering in the different teams at this moment. We believe engineering teams should be led by a CTO with a strong technical background. 



“Moving to annual planning could affect our ability to remain agile and cost-effective in response to the fast pace of the market, economics, and technology. Have we considered the option of adopting shorter iterations (quarterly planning)?”


My take is that we shouldn’t lose agility with this. We should adapt roadmaps as we get more information. In fact, we already do this all the time. I believe the company today has well established OKRs processes and reporting meetings to make sure things are reviewed and escalated with high cadence and agility.

Today planning consumes a lot of time and resources that we believe could be used to increase productivity. Moving to an annual planning cycle will also unlock more long-term thinking, more ambitious goals.



“DH stock price is hitting all-time low again. However, the company seems to be presenting good results and even announcing positive adjusted EBITDA. Can you provide a reasoning to it, and if possible also Niklas and DH executive vision?”


It is also hard for us to understand the markets these days. The overall scenario for tech stocks remains very negative and at low ebitda / revenue multiples. In the case of DH, yes the company is doing well, we are meeting our top and bottom line forecasts, and we are very bullish about the future of the company. The fact that DH is crossing the EBITDA break-even point during this year is certainly not helping their stock, as investors have a harder time at understanding the future profitability of the business. Hopefully next year things will look a lot better.