How Delivery Hero Scales Talent Alongside Fast Growth

Delivery Hero was already in a state of hypergrowth before the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing global stay-at-home mandates have driven even higher demand for delivery services. Operating in around 50 countries worldwide, the Berlin-based company recently celebrated the milestone of delivering 5 million orders for food and other goods in a single day.

In a recent Workday webinar, Alberto Sancha Solana, global senior director of people systems and operations at Delivery Hero, joined us to discuss how the company has successfully grown to over 27,000 employees worldwide, using Workday to better manage its talent and improve its employee experience.

Below are some highlights on how Workday helped the company manage talent throughout its international expansion and multiple mergers and acquisitions. 

What are some of Delivery Hero’s strategic goals? 

We want to achieve growth in every market, but if I talk about people and HR specifically, the first goal is to build an amazing employee experience. Our second goal is to be recognized as a leading tech player in the industry. We are actively working on increasing our reputation so that we can bring in top talent, expertise, and so on.

We’ve been growing organically and by acquisition. With each acquisition, we’ve gained a different way of working, different systems and processes—and sometimes no systems or processes at all. Workday helps us massively by enabling us to better align ourselves, understand ourselves, and, in the end, build this employee experience that we want to keep iterating. That has been the main driver to move into one system and one solution.

With so many regional differences, how did Delivery Hero approach a phased deployment of Workday?

We started in our headquarters first so we could align our processes up front. With so many different processes and data from our various acquisitions, we had to align before going live with Workday.

It took us three months of initial preparation and another three months of go-live prep with Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Talent Management for Germany and Austria. Our two technical people had no previous experience with Workday, so they took part in the basic training and some configuration workshops, and then joined all the workshops with our consultants to understand the processes we were building.

We also built a team of experts from every business area—some in recruitment, some in compensation, and other areas. They documented their current practices and how they would like to work in the future, but it didn’t require intensive resources, which was another reason we selected Workday. You don’t need an army of people internally to roll out this system. Of course, if you grow, you will have more employees and more countries, so you’ll need more resources, but to go live, we had what we needed.

IT played an advisory role when integrating Workday with all our other solutions and helped us get synced and signed in through Workday. They embraced Workday as a single solution because it streamlines user access and support significantly. That’s key because our IT staff resources are quite limited.

How does Delivery Hero use Workday reporting and insights to improve its global workforce? 

Moving into one system, one set of data, and one set of processes was the key driver to our decision. Workday delivers “the Power of One” for the full lifecycle of an employee—from a candidate’s application to that employee’s last day. There is one common place where you can find absolutely everything that has happened to this employee in terms of human resources and people management.

With a distributed company like ours, having data for all of our employees in one place enables us to measure performance and link performance to other processes. It adds another dimension for us compared to our previous flat database that was completely distributed without any processes.