Deliveroo is the fastest-growing technology company in the United Kingdom, and the first-ever to win Deloitte’s UK Technology Fast 50 two years in a row. Founded in 2013, the food courier service achieved a three-year growth rate of over 15,000% to 2018, expanding beyond its London base to operate in 14 countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, from Spain to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

“G Suite products work really well, with no steep learning curve. As a fast-growing company, our strategy is to go to G Suite tools first to find immediate, effective answers within one integrated solution.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

The company runs multiple offices in each of its 14 markets, manned by more than 2,500 full-time staff. “Around 2016, we made a clear decision,” says Asif Akmal, Director of IT at Deliveroo. “As the company was scaling, we needed a strategy for all our offices to scale with us, and we needed the right infrastructure to do that. We can’t afford to have downtime, or to have tools that confuse staff, rather than help them.”

Together with Google Cloud Premier Partner Netpremacy, Deliveroo created a strategy around G Suite that emphasizes the speed and efficiency the company needs to set up offices and train new staff.

“G Suite products work really well, with no steep learning curve,” says Asif. “As a fast-growing company, our strategy is to go to G Suite tools first to find immediate, effective answers within one integrated solution.”

Putting videoconferencing at the core of the business

Videoconferencing is central to the Deliveroo business model. “Many of our international offices rely on operational staff from headquarters, whether for daily one-to-ones or group meetings,” says Asif. “Some of our engineers are constantly present in remote offices on a permanent live video stream, with a screen at the desk where there would be a chair. That makes it mission critical for us to have the correct infrastructure in place in order to do videoconferencing.”

Because internet connectivity can be inconsistent at new offices, Deliveroo teams occasionally need to be able to dial into videoconferencing over the phone, as well as connect through the internet. Previously, Deliveroo used a separate videoconferencing solution in order to have this feature. Now, as G Suite Enterprise users, Deliveroo employees can use Hangouts Meet for the same dial-in functionality, higher quality reception, and up to 100 participants on each call.

“Videoconferencing is crucial. And with Hangouts Meet we can have just one AV person in the whole business setting up and overseeing the infrastructure in 14 countries.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

“It was a simple decision to switch to Hangouts Meet,” says Asif. “It came with the enterprise package that we were already on, so we made a substantial cost savings by stopping the other solution, which cost almost £15 a month per user. Financially, that made it a no-brainer, but Hangouts also works better from a technical and integration perspective.”

“One of the first things that we address as a company moving into a new office is: Where do we get the videoconferencing system in place so we can start doing calls straight away?” says Elliott Shafii, Google Technology Engineer at Deliveroo. That’s why Deliveroo has a blueprint for video conferencing rooms, specifying the equipment required and the size and acoustics of the rooms where they’ll be installed. Once the necessary Hangouts Meet hardware has been delivered, the Deliveroo AV Manager flies out to the location, installs the equipment in two days, signs off on it, and flies back.

“Videoconferencing is crucial,” says Asif. “And with Hangouts Meet we can have just one AV person in the whole business setting up and overseeing the infrastructure in 14 countries.”

Issuing new devices in one-tenth of the time

Deliveroo facilitates its exceptional growth rate by minimizing the time teams need to spend getting to grips with new tools. “With G Suite, users don’t have much that they need to learn,” says Asif. “That means we can deploy the solution in any country and be comfortable that people can walk into a room and connect to a meeting without problems.”

Asif and his team worked closely with Netpremacy to make training in G Suite tools efficient and accessible, for new starters and anyone who wants to learn. “Collaborating on Docs and Sheets, and using Drive to share files instead of sending attachments allows us to move more rapidly than any other business,” says Asif. “That’s why we have permanent staff in the IT team who concentrate exclusively on the onboarding process, so anyone can learn to use one of the G Suite products in just one hour.”

Introducing Pixelbooks is the latest step in Deliveroo’s pursuit of speed and efficiency. “Previously, it took an average of 50 minutes to set someone up on a laptop,” says Asif. “With Chrome devices, that induction period is down to five minutes. We just open the box, enroll the device, and hand it over.”

Creating a cloud-based company

“Our strong relationships with Netpremacy and Google Cloud product managers mean we can align our internal strategies with them. Working together, we can create the ideal environment for our culture of collaboration.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

Using G Suite, Deliveroo is building its ideal workplace to support a more mobile, agile approach to work. “By the end of next year, we should have the vast majority of new starters using Pixelbooks,” says Asif. “We expect that to increase the use of Docs and Sheets and other G Suite tools, in place of other applications. We want to see ourselves as a cloud-based company, and G Suite is ideal for reaching that goal.”

As part of the further deployment of G Suite tools, Deliveroo plans to roll out more Jamboards, in addition to the 14 already in use across the business. “Previously, we would take photographs of whiteboards and share those,” says Elliott. “I remember seeing someone wheeling a whiteboard back to his desk from a meeting, and thinking ‘That poor guy is going to have to sit at his desk and copy everything down.'”

“At that point, before Jamboards, we actually made a significant financial investment in another interactive whiteboard solution,” adds Asif. “Now that solution is collecting dust, because we’ve got Jamboards, which are much more cost-effective and work brilliantly within the G Suite system.”

“Our strong relationships with Netpremacy and Google Cloud product managers mean we can align our internal strategies with them,” says Asif. “Working together, we can create the ideal environment for our culture of collaboration.”

Embracing the cloud helps Deliveroo both to enable rapid collaboration and to minimize the maintenance and management of infrastructure: an ideal combination for a fast-growing technology company.

As the pandemic forced millions of people to work from home, many of us found ourselves spending more time in video meetings and in our inboxes as a way to bridge the distance from our colleagues. When the workplace became the living room or the makeshift home office, and as professional and personal responsibilities sometimes collided, we had to find new ways to manage time and attention and to sustain human connection. 

When it comes to work emails during the pandemic, we were sending more of them, to more recipients, and we often sent them outside of normal business hours. A study conducted by the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School assessed email statistics eight weeks before the start of the pandemic-related lockdowns and eight weeks after. The study concluded that after lockdowns, employees sent 5.2% more emails a day, emails had 2.9% more recipients, and about 8.3% more emails were sent after business hours. 

Many of the latest Google Workspace features are designed to help people save time, find focus, and manage tasks more efficiently, whether it’s with smarter emails, writing suggestions, Google Assistant, segmentable working hours, or predictive search. These features combine to save the equivalent of a full working month every year, per person, so that you can spend more time on what matters instead of managing tools. 

With that in mind, let’s take a deeper look at how Gmail can help you better manage time and attention.

1. Use dynamic email to help recipients complete tasks directly inside an email message. With the new dynamic email support in Gmail, you can easily send and receive emails that enable the reader to take action directly from within the message. This removes the burden of opening multiple documents and tabs. Email recipients can grant access to Drive files, respond to or resolve comments in Docs, Slides, or Sheets, and RSVP to events—all without leaving the message. Learn more.

2. Stay productive, even when you’re offline. Gmail Offline lets you read, reply, delete, and search your Gmail messages when you’re not connected to the internet. Once you set it up, an outbox will appear in the left panel. When a connection later becomes available, Gmail will automatically send the messages from your outbox, and download any new messages to your inbox. This is great for those working on the frontlines who need to stay productive and informed, even when they’re offline. 

3. Get organized and prioritize your work with Tasks in Gmail. This feature allows you to easily convert emails into tasks with just one click. You can create due dates that will automatically appear in your calendar, and check tasks off as you complete them. Baked directly into the side panel, you can create, view and manage your task lists without leaving Gmail.

4. Spend time innovating, not writing emails. Gmail’s template functionality lets you create standardized email messages that can be edited and sent out to different recipients in a matter of seconds. If this feature sounds appealing, check out Smart Reply and Smart Compose to learn more ways to write and reply to emails faster.

5. Get search results faster in Gmail. Search chips help you find what you’re looking for in Gmail faster, without needing to sort through irrelevant results or use search operators (e.g., from: marketing@company.com). For example, you can search a colleague’s name and further narrow your results by selecting search chips like attachment type (Doc, Sheet, PDF, etc.) or a specific timeframe. You can even exclude specific keywords and calendar invites from your results. You can also use search chips to search your Google Chat history, directly from within Gmail. To use search chips, all you need to do is type in a Gmail search, click on the search filter chips below the search box and Gmail will take care of the rest.

6. Tune out the irrelevant with the Gmail mute feature. Because we’ve all found ourselves trapped in unnecessary email threads, we created the Gmail Mute feature. With two clicks, you can mute email threads that aren’t relevant or that you no longer wish to follow. All future responses to that thread will now be automatically muted so you can focus your attention elsewhere. If you decide to rejoin the conversation, you can unmute the email thread just as easily.