Case Study: Deliverd Culture Hack

We recently led a culture hack to help innovative and fast growing tech start-up Deliverd (deliverd.com) to deepen their understanding of their organisational culture and harness the creative talents of all staff to explore and agree the culture and behaviours they need to ensure sustainable and successful business growth.  Deliverd partners with exciting local kitchens to create delicious and healthy boxed lunches then delivers them to busy people in offices all over Sheffield. They have big ambitions to grow to other cities and internationally. As well as partnering with local kitchens, Deliverd partners with local social projects, providing skills based training to individuals, helping them gain valuable qualifications that may lead to long term employment.     

All staff were, and continue to be, involved in reviewing and contributing to reviewing, clarifying and building on the core purpose, values and vision of the business, and ensure that these are aligned with the employee experience, brand and customer experience.    

What we did: Deliverd Culture Hack

To prepare for the hack, we engaged with Deliverd directors, to help them think through the process of aligning purpose, vision values and culture. this entailed:

• setting some clear goals and success criteria for the hack event;
• how to prepare for the hack event through staff and customer engagement;
• setting out their vision for the business;
• creating some “working draft” statements of values, purpose & vision
• creating a pragmatic plan for what would happen after the hack to ensure that all insights and learning were translated into business change.

Deliverd elicited input from all employees, directors and from a sample of their customers. We then analysed and made sense of this feedback, and incorporated it into the hack design, along with the draft values, purpose and vision statements.

At the hack event, all staff (including one via Skype) contributed to the draft values, purpose & vision statements to start, and spent time considering the behaviours and culture that they wanted to embed in the business as it grows. This was followed by a practical focus on how this collaborative thinking would impact on specific areas of the business (e.g. recruitment, performance management, dealing with customers etc.)

Culture Hack: Outcome & Next Steps

Deliverd believe that getting their culture right will ultimately be the biggest driver of commercial success. As a direct result of the culture hack, Deliverd have fundamentally reviewed, re-imagined and innovated every aspect of their business, their brand, their behaviours and their culture, to ensure that as they grow and take on more staff, the business grows in a healthy, sustainable way … one that continues to delight their customers and enables them to attract and retain the best talent in the business. Within days of the Deliverd workshop, we started working with two other businesses who had been referred to us by Paul Rawlings, co-founder & CEO of Deliverd. Thanks Paul.

“It was so important to us to create a positive culture here at Deliverd. We really are vested in it and are making sure that Deliverd is a place where people want to be was key to us so was something we wanted to take very seriously. Toby has been absolutely brilliant through the process, helping the team with the pre-work before the culture day and then creating a day that each and every person in the team will remember. Absolutely awesome.” Paul Rawlings, co-founder & CEO of Deliverd