How Slido is helping FREENOW engage its employees across locations

Europe’s Mobility Super App, FREENOW has carved out a considerable market share since its inception in 2009. Covering over 150 European cities, the company has been growing at an exponential rate, with a user base of 48 million in nine markets.

Besides taxis, PHVs and carsharing, FREENOW is also micro-mobility solutions, such as e-scooters, e-mopeds and e-bikes. In this story, Laura Neusser, Senior Internal Communication and Employer Branding Manager of FREENOW joins us to share how Slido has been helping them drive employee engagement.

An informed workforce equals an engaged workforce

In her role, Laura ensures that FREENOW’s employees are aligned, informed, and fully engaged in the company’s mission. She enables this by outlining a transparent communication strategy around how, when, and what kind of content is being communicated to employees.

Our vision is to provide mobility that sets people free. Whether you’re a working student and intern or someone from the senior management, we want every employee to remember that we’re contributing to that bigger goal and that’s something we try to bring into our communications, Laura begins.

One of the biggest challenges Laura’s team faces while executing this strategy is the distributed nature of their workforce. With its 1000+ employees working from across Europe, the FREENOW team is consciously working toward avoiding an HQ-focused work culture and providing equal opportunities for all of its employees. Slido has been playing an important role in helping FREENOW achieve this goal.

Equalizing the meeting experience across locations

For Laura, the disparity between teams onsite in Hamburg and smaller teams located elsewhere was most felt during their all-hands meetings and ask-me-anything sessions.

If we have 20 people located in Italy, they are not a lesser part of the team. For me, it’s crucial that they should feel just as included and should have just exactly the same possibilities to ask questions and to participate in global meeting formats just like the 200 people who are sitting in the event hall where the event is being live-streamed from. So for me, having Slido in place for these kinds of events is super important to enable fair conditions for everyone, she says.

FREENOW’s company-wide meetings normally see over 600-700 live participants. Laura is religious about kicking off their all-hands meetings with an icebreaker poll or asking the team about their silent hero to encourage peer recognition. Apart from providing a buffer while people join the meeting, she feels that poll plays a critical part in ’locking people in right from the beginning.

We have a live Q&A part at the end of our monthly all-hands meeting. The culture we have at FREENOW is very open. Everyone is allowed to ask any question without fearing any consequences, she explains, adding that leadership takes up any unanswered questions in an open slack channel or in 1:1 with the employees after all hands to provide clarity.

Among features, highlighting, upvoting and archiving are the most valuable for FREENOW, providing visibility and transparency for leaders and employees alike.

Having the interactive Google Slides integration is also very important for us, Laura adds. They also make it a point to display the QR code on every slide to make it easier for employees to join and ask questions throughout the meeting.

A purpose-driven feedback loop

Beyond her duties associated with all-hands and company-wide meetings, Laura also finds Slido beneficial for change management. If we announce something, we sometimes share a Slido code first. The team can write down all the questions on their mind. Then, we give them another meeting or another frame to talk about it. We want people to process the message first, then settle down a bit and ultimately we provide them with a specific Q&A session. she clarifies.

She uses Slido summaries to look at participation and engagement of the workforce. It’s obvious that Slido does bring added value. Even if it’s only 5% of the employees asking questions, we want to give that 5% the platform for it. she explains, as we wrap up the conversation.