Case study: How foodpanda's people strategy led to 30-minute deliveries

Organisations with people and technology at the core focus of everything they do need to ensure they actively promote a happy, efficient and engaged workforce to remain innovative.

The leaders have to do this by ensuring strong links are being formed between various teams at different levels – which is exactly what foodpanda aimed to achieve when implementing its employee team programme.

“When we focus on our people, it benefits all other aspects of our business. This has played a part in how we have managed to get our average delivery timings down to just 30 minutes, which was a key business goal for us,” says Madeeha Arain, head of people and talent acquisition at foodpanda, Singapore.

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To achieve this, foodpanda focuses on these three aspects – mental wellbeing, physical health, and rewards for hard work – and targeted them in different ways through team building activities.

Under wellbeing, it organises a series of regular team activities such as football games and gym passes for employees to encourage a focus on health and wellness.

Beyond this, it has delivery rider barbecues, where IT co-ordinates barbecues at East Coast Park. This helps connect its riders with foodpanda employees, who might not frequently cross paths day-to-day and who could risk feeling disconnected. Often running late into the night, this ensures that everyone is able to enjoy the event, even after a late delivery shift.

For rewards, foodpanda holds a weekly Tasty Thursdays event using its new corporate platform, which allows all employees to order from their favourite vendors straight to the office for free. The company also holds a weekly “Beer O’Clock” unwind session on Friday.

“These are softer, unstructured activities, however, they are ingrained in our culture and go a long way in establishing a nurturing and fun environment for our teams to work in,” Arain says.

When it comes to staff’s physical health, foodpanda takes a proactive approach, providing full health assessments as well as robust health insurance programmes for all employees.

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All new programmes have their challenges – for foodpanda, the main challenge was measuring the effectiveness of these programmes.

“To ensure we are gaining a solid ROI, we plan to implement more structure into how we organise these activities. Some activities are for fun, but others can play a bigger part in overall performance and identifying issues, obstacles, systems and skills that need to be developed,” Arain says.

foodpanda plans to use gap analysis to prioritise the objectives of its team building activities, as well as plans to survey employees on the perceived effectiveness of programmes, and alter them from there.

As a result, foodpanda finds its employees remain committed to the overall business vision.

“We work in a dynamic industry, and by ensuring we cultivate a strong, collaborative culture, we are anecdotally seeing an increasingly high performing team being established,” Arain concludes.

For more case studies from SCIEX, Grey Group, IKEA and Singapore Airlines, and tips to create your very own team building programme, head over to the Human Resources' January-February feature. 

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