Hello Yellow Park and what the office means for us

Today, we are announcing our new home in Barcelona: Yellow Park! In this post, I’d like to share with you some details about the importance of this milestone for us and some reflections on our culture and the importance of office life at Glovo.?

I’ll start by saying THANKS TO BARCELONA. The city where I was born and where Glovo started in 2015. Barcelona is a natural magnet for international talent, and it’s been a key factor in our success. It offers one of the most unique work-life balance opportunities in Europe, with great weather, short commutes,? the beautiful sea and mountains close by, great gastronomy and culture, and a vibrant and growing international community. With this spirit in mind, Glovo has been international since day 1, and today we have people representing over 90 nationalities at Glovo, out of which 70 work at our headquarters (HQ) – corresponding to approx. 1300 employees – and what’s more many of them moved to Barcelona with us.

Getting where we are today at Yellow Park was not exactly an easy journey. After two coworking spaces and three offices in the area of Poblenou (one of the hip and cool districts of Barcelona, also known as home for the tech community), Yellow Park will be our home for many years to come. We wanted this new office to be the definitive one, and it came with a lot of pressure to design a great workplace that would adapt to our new ways of working and promote team collaboration.

Culture at Glovo

The truth is that Glovo has been the underdog since day one- and we are proud of it. For the first six years of Glovo, very few investors believed we would survive, given how large and well-funded all of our competitors were. In our Series B, more than 120 VCs (not a joke!) refused to invest in Glovo after being pitched. This only made us more hungry and pushed us to try harder. Food delivery was not an easy place to be in without strong funding and we learnt the hard way how to operate with less money. Teams get stronger together in adverse conditions and in long periods of scarcity in order to survive. It built within us the spirit of resilience. That, together with persistent work from our management team to define and integrate our values in our day to day, has built a very strong and unique culture.?

Glovo is the first company I have worked at, so it’s hard for me to compare our culture to other companies. But I hear it all the time from employees: Glovo has the strongest culture they’ve seen in their careers. Our Culture is ranked n.1 in employee surveys when asked about our Employee Value Proposition, and we are very proud of this. Of course, there is no one size fits all, and a strong culture like ours isn’t for everyone. I’ve learnt to take this as a good sign. I believe that a strong culture needs to be spicy and it can’t be a flavour everyone likes… It is part of our non-vanilla way of working.?

We have built this culture offline, with a lot of time spent together at the office. I personally struggled a lot during the Covid lockdown, which certainly impacted our culture. Working at fast-growing companies and start-ups can be challenging, and Glovo is no different. We have big ambitions and work hard, but we also celebrate a lot and often come together for events at the office, which are some of my best memories of Glovo.

What’s clear to us is that a strong culture is a basis for good performance, and for us, building that culture requires a great office atmosphere that provides a sense of community. We wouldn’t have built this culture without the office.

On top of that, we are also firm believers in all the benefits that an office presence brings. Teams move faster and problem-solve better when they can meet in person? several days during the week. Great products are built with teams brainstorming face-to-face. Serendipity is super important in a fast paced environment where change is a constant. Deeper bonds are built among team members, and more honest feedback is given. Quick feedback and short conversations that happen offline are necessary, especially for young developing talent who join the company and need experienced managers to learn from.?

For this reason, we are implementing a hybrid model with an office-first culture, where we expect all team members to be at the office several times per week. We expect leaders to show up even more often, as we think their presence is more relevant for coaching their teams and being present for relevant meetings.

By this point, you may be asking, “then why don’t you go back to the pre-covid 5-day? week at the office?”. First, because focus time is important, and we recognise that for most of us, quality focus time is better achieved at home. Second, it gives all of us a better work-life balance. We think combining remote and office every week is the optimal point for Glovo.?

My vision on remote and “fake” hybrid

Office presence needs group coordination; without? social interaction, it loses all value.?

We want to avoid the so-called “fake hybrid policy”. That means having an office, but people choosing where to work, without enforcing presence and a lack of guidance and coordination.? Surely, there’s a clear short-term benefit to this strategy (access to a larger pool of talent), but long term, I struggle to see how businesses with this setup will build highly engaged and high-performing? teams. I believe that, in the mid and long term, a “fake hybrid policy” will lead to higher attrition and lower output levels.

As much as we hate enforcement, we believe the office would slowly become empty without it and eventually we would lose what we strive to keep. With no enforcement, everyone will eventually go to the office and hit the “Why did I come today if no one else is here?”. On the other end, office enforcement also requires good coordination to make sure it never gets too busy and teams have enough space to work well. Overall, it’s a very tricky balance to strike, and a complex coordination system that companies have to invest in. We are certainly still learning and refining it.

Here’s my vision for the future of remote. Frankly, I think there’s a general underestimation of the social, productivity, and psychological effects of people working alone from home most of the time. Many are signing up for companies that offer an office but with full flexibility. I believe these companies will never regain their pre-covid office atmosphere with this fake hybrid strategy. Sooner than we expect, the office atmosphere will become one of the most valued factors as many remote-burnout knowledge workers look for their next employer.

And here’s a recommendation for recent graduates and young talent: when searching for your first job, look for employers that guarantee you’ll spend face-to-face time with your manager and peers several days every week. Chances are you will learn faster, accelerate your career at speed, and have more fun.?

Remote, Hybrid, Office… this is a very complex topic and brings many polarising views and perspectives, so my recommendation to other CEOs is: you need to be all or nothing. If you want an office atmosphere and weekly presence, you need to enforce it and be strict about it to accommodate for it. That means taking decisions like, for example, rejecting a great candidate that will not commit to moving to your HQ city (!!). If you don’t value office time, it’s better to be clear about it and tell your candidates that they’ll be working alone at home or alone in an empty office. Being in the middle ground is culturally confusing. CEOs should also be aware that this is a no-return, or a hard-return, decision. It’s very hard to change minds and to get strict about office presence if you’ve been recruiting people living far from your HQ for the last few years.?

At Glovo, we are privileged to be in Barcelona, a city with short commuting times and a strong attraction magnet for international talent. I understand that this decision framework might have a different balance of pros and cons in other cities. Indeed, we have this beautiful advantage of being in Barcelona.?

Yellow Park

Back to the design of Yellow Park. Back in late 2020, when this project started, I had high expectations, and there was equally high pressure for the end result. Building walls and meeting rooms have a much higher cost of error than building mobile apps and algorithms. We estimated that over 1 million Glovo person-hours would be spent inside this building over the next five years. Having an office that was more productive and engaging than average was of massive importance. The pressure was on!

These were the leading principles before we had started the search:

• Everyone under one roof, inside Barcelona to avoid long commutes (not trivial with 2k people).?
• Modern working space distribution: double down on brainstorming areas, places for teams to get together and get creative, small amphitheaters... as well as better areas to focus.?
• Invest in the core: good IT in meeting rooms, good acoustics, enough phone booths and a lot of light.
• Non-luxurious, keeping the humbleness ingrained so deeply in our culture. Only invest in a few, high-value-adding perks: a small gym, a good terrace, and the best coffee in town (coming in February!).?
• An office building with the highest energy sustainability standards

Two years later, we are done with the work and finalized the move. The office still has tons of details that need polishing, but overall the team satisfaction is very high! It’s close to 30,000 square meters in the heart of Poblenou, with capacity for 3,000 people. We are now finalizing the ground floors, where we’ll have some areas open to the public to interact with the community of Poblenou too.?

It’s been a long and fun project where we engaged with all the Glovo people in Barcelona, so everyone could be part of important decisions, like wall painting, pictures on the wall, room decorations, designs and the naming of the offices.?Here two examples:

Thank you Olga de Mena Gil and Javier Vallés , and the rest of the Office team, for putting all your heart and energy into this project to make sure our new office felt like home.?

Let's keep building! Go Glovo! ????

#HybridWork #Glovo #Culture #Barcelona #Poblenou #Values #office