There were some tough times, but passion and enthusiasm are absolutely crucial to any organisation’s culture. You have to have that drive and positivity, but we wanted to build a culture that would inspire all of our employees, even from the early days. From a leadership perspective you have to have a real sense of purpose or you may never achieve your goal.
The four key areas of building our culture at Just Eat were energy, understanding, motivation and information. That’s about showing up with the energy and motivation to inspire others, having the empathy to lead a diverse workforce, and finally information—communicating and being transparent with all workers.
For example, being an open and transparent company, we ran into some issues around the IPO where we had to ensure we didn’t breach any insider trading regulations, but at the same time wanted to keep employees informed on the company’s performance and their own. We found that using a colour coding system on key performance metrics rather than reporting specific numbers helped us solve that challenge. That was really important in maintaining the culture of transparency we had built.