Get to know Wolt
The following few chapters are a brief intro to Wolt for anyone who wants to know a bit more about us: what our people are like, what we stand for as a team, how our different teams work, and how our work is meaningful. We're sharing this short doc with anyone who wants to know just a bit more about us.
What we stand for as a team
During the few years we have built Wolt, we've noticed that we value especially the following characteristics in our people.
💪 Attitude
We take ownership beyond the obvious.
We do useful things no one told us to do.
We look at what needs to be done, then get cracking.
Even when it’s hard, we start with the most impactful thing and do that first.
We rarely say “whatever, it’s not my problem...”.
We pick up the trash on the office floor.
We act like owners: We build the company for the long term, not for this week’s goals.
💯 Excellence
We do common things uncommonly well.
We reach for the best-in-the-world.
We understand the near-endless power of getting the details right.
We rather do something well today than keep coming back to it later.
We patiently work on a problem until we solve it.
We rather make a really tough call today than postpone it.
We get a lot done through working efficiently, not through working 24/7.
We base big decisions on analysis of facts and long-term goals.
We treat our customer and partner data with utmost respect.
🚀 Ambition
We think big but stay humble.
After considering “How can we make this a tiny bit better?”, we follow up with: “How can we make this the best?”
We’re humble about our competition.
We admit our mistakes openly and even take pride in them. They make us better.
When we hear candid feedback, we genuinely adjust our behaviour.
We set big goals but are patient about reaching them.
We know when to work our butts off and when to take a break or a holiday.
💙 Heart
We do right by people, we treat others kindly and justly.
We look for chances to help each other.
We try to behave at the office in a way that makes others excited to come to work.
We try to make any contact with a customer, restaurant or a courier partner such that they’d feel happier after talking to us than they were before.
We don’t take ourselves too seriously.
We listen to our conscience, and we speak out if we see something that we feel is not right
🤓 Will to learn
We recognise that if we don’t learn, we don’t stay still but fall behind.
We love asking stupid questions. It means we want to get better.
We support our intuition with studying the data.
We support data findings through talking to our customers, restaurant and courier partners.
We look for mentors inside and outside the company.
We read.
We don’t take things for granted just because they’ve been done like that before.
When we see someone do something new and useful, we ask them to teach us how it’s done.
🙌 Will to teach
We remember that Luke was Yoda's greatest achievement.
When it comes to insightful information, we start with the question: “Is there any reason not to show this to others at Wolt?”
We share or document what we've learned.
When we feel like complaining about someone in the company, we ask ourselves: “Have I given this feedback openly to the person? Have I given them the opportunity to improve?”
We give praise in public but criticise in private – preferably face to face.
We share at #learning on Slack.
What is it like working at Wolt
At an offsite, we asked our people what they think we stand for as a team, and what is it like working at Wolt.
A quick intro to our teams
Have a look at how we divide into teams! It should give you an idea of how our team of 5,000+ people (48 % women, 46 % men, 6 % other or N/A) works.
Product, Engineering, Design and Analytics teams (i.e. "Product+")
Product+ is a collection of all competences and teams that make up the engineering, design, analytics and product management of Wolt. We are the people who build, design, maintain and advance all the applications, services, tools and infrastructure that is Wolt.
And we don't just mean our consumer apps for iPhone and Android. We mean the web interface at wolt.com. The courier app that our courier partners use to effectively take care of their deliveries, see the best routes and get paid. The merchant app that the restaurants use to accept and handle their order flow. The merchant insights tool that the restaurants use to see how their sales have been progressing. The picking app our retail merchants use to pick the items for delivery. The internal admin tools that we use in our customer and merchant support. The elegant logistics algorithms and backend solutions that power it all. And so much more.
We have more than 35+ different highly autonomous teams, each focusing on a distinct ownership area. Some of these teams can consist purely of engineers, but most are a mixture of team members from all sides: product, engineering, design and analytics. The composition of each team depends on the area they work on, but each team is usually between 4 and 10 team members strong. These teams have high ownership over the products they are building, and the amount of ownership and impact are said to be one of the most loved qualities about working in our Product+ organisation.
Our Analytics team, then again, works hard to make sense of all the data we gather. How to present it in a form that's easy to understand? How to help us make better small and large decisions?
Local teams
Every single Wolt country (there are 20+ already, divided into Wolt North, Wolt Central & South and Wolt East) is run by a local team. The team consists of a General Manager, people getting the restaurants on board (Restaurants Partnerships Managers), people training and supporting the restaurants' business (Restaurant Development Managers), someone leading the courier partner and support operation (Operations Manager), the people running that support operation (Support Associates) and someone trying to get us more users and keep the existing ones coming back more often (Marketing Manager). There are even people who do a little bit of everything (Operations Associates).
Together, this group lives and breathes Wolt in that country and opens new cities as they feel fit.
Global Operations
The Global Operations team supports the country teams in their efforts to become better every day. Their role is to be the oil that makes the machine work, making sure knowledge and learnings are transferred between country teams, and that whenever a local Operations Manager or a Marketing Manager has a problem or a question about a best practice, there's someone there to help them out. The Global Ops team has people such as Global Procurement Manager, as well as counterparts to the country team roles: a Global Marketing Manager, Global Operations Manager, and so forth.
Expansion team
The Launchers and Expansion Managers in the Expansion team are the people who know Wolt inside and out and go to new countries to start operations there. When a Launcher enters the country, they start recruiting for the local team, finding an office, checking the local legislation and so forth. When the team starts to form, the Launcher helps them learn the ropes and is there to support the country off to a good start, while also working as a link between the new team and the HQ. When the country is up and running, the Expansion Manager heads to a new location. A typical launch stint in a new country lasts for a few months.
Marketing, Brand and UA teams
Our marketing- and brand-related teams are the home to our marketing designers, brand people, our performance marketing expertise and so forth. These people try to figure out how we can help new people find Wolt and remind existing customers to keep coming back. They try to come up with ideas insightful and polished enough to be taken into use in all the Wolt countries. And they do some very data-driven work trying to understand questions such as: "What's the total cost of getting you to try out Wolt compared to the money that you're going to spend on Wolt?"
Talent Acquisition
If you're eyeing this document because you're interested in Wolt as a place to work, there's a chance that you are here thanks to one of our amazing Talent Acquisition team (some of whom mainly recruit for Product+ and some for Operations and central roles). They spend their days trying to find the people that are the best fit for Wolt. They talk to candidates that have applied for an open position as well as look for interesting candidates in new and existing markets. They handle the first interviews and make sure the whole process from first contact to a new person signing their contract goes well.
Finance and Legal teams
Our Finance and Legal teams form the supporting backbone without which we could hardly move anywhere. The Finance team takes care of the day-to-day financial forecasts, budgeting and administration, including making sure that people get paid, handling our accounting, paying our bills etc. They also handle reporting for internal and external use, our board and our investors. They give financial support and advice to the country teams, including handling restaurant payouts, courier partner payouts and the sorts.
The Legal team handles all things...legal: employee and external contracts, GDPR and other compliance, new market legal setups, figuring out employment law questions, partnering with local law firms and advisors in our 20+ markets, analysing risk related to you-name-it, dealing with public policymakers, etc. You'll love Legal!
Communications & PR team
Our Comms & PR team helps share the story of Wolt with the outside world. The team also supports our country teams and HQ with all things media (we get dozens of media inquiries each month). At Wolt, communications, however, is not only a supporting function. It's at the heart of affecting what we do and how we do it. For example, when we are asked good questions, we don't always have great answers. In those situations comms pushes the rest of the organisation into new directions – and, voilá, we change into something better.
People team
Our People team makes sure new people are off to a good start at Wolt and, after that, ensures that life goes well. The People team, together with our Expansion team and Global Ops teams, handles our onboarding process and new employee training as well as providing resources such as what you're reading right now. The People team tries to make sure we would be happy at work while we develop and grow. The team also works on things from internal policies to HR systems, or from what makes for a great office to how our working culture is like. If you're feeling tired, stressed or in the need of a hug, you can reach out to these guys 24/7.
Our HQ
Our headquarters is located in downtown Helsinki, Finland. The address is Arkadiankatu 6, 3rd floor. It's a cozy little space (well, not that little anymore...) in the extremely central and easily-accessible Kamppi district.
Is our work at Wolt meaningful?
Let us mention a few things that get us out of bed.
We make cities better
So we’re making an app to get food. And, well, other stuff also these days! Why should you, or anyone else, see any meaningfulness in that?
Actually, why we exist goes deeper than an “app”, or something as fancy as a “being a platform company in hypergrowth mode”.
To be more specific, we want to make any city we enter into a better place.
We do that by – essentially – building new infrastructure. We build a connection between merchants that want to sell things, couriers that want to earn through delivering those things, and customers who want to get those things.
Why does that make the city a better place? Because by “better” we mean happier people. Happier merchants that have more business and that can employ more people. Happier couriers – more than 75,000 of them – that now have a flexible way to earn when they choose. Happier customers – more than 10 million of them – who now have more choice for a great meal or anything else, when they want it, where they want it – and who get some time back while doing so.
We make merchants happier
Let's take restaurant owners. They are passionate people. They work super, super hard to come up with great dishes that would taste amazing, and be healthy, affordable, original and good-looking. We help them find new customers. 9 out of 10 Wolt orders that a restaurant gets are new sales (this is a fact we've researched thoroughly). We can easily increase a restaurant's sales up to 20–30 % – and their profitability more than double that. We are also indirectly responsible for employing hundreds and hundreds of restaurant workers at any given moment.
We help couriers earn flexibly
A Wolt courier partner is usually someone who wants to earn flexibly within their own schedule. We offer that person the possibility to do so without any tight educational or language skill requirements, starting today. A courier partner gets a lot of freedom, and a lot of responsibility. They are free to deliver 2 hours this week and 20 hours next week, or do a 5-day full week every week, should they wish. They can also work with any other company they want, and we welcome and encourage that. It's not for everyone, but it's definitely for a lot of people: we partner with more than 75 000 couriers already (March, 2021) What's more, these people are genuinely happy to partner with us: they rated the partnership with Wolt as 4,1/5 in our latest anonymous courier survey.
We give customers their time back
We help you discover and get things delivered, sure, but we also give you some of your precious time back. What we mean by that is that using Wolt frees the time that you would normally use to shopping for salad ingredients, cooking wok at home, walking to the office cafeteria for a sandwich, standing in line for a takeaway sushi set, waiting for a tomato soup or a waiter at a restaurant, or waiting for the bill for a burger. Using Wolt more often than not can free up to several hours per your week, or literally days in your year (check the math for, say, 3 hours per week times 52 weeks – that's almost 10 days in waking hours!). That is time for you to do whatever you want, be it hitting the gym, having a date night, spending time with the kids, studying for school, preparing for a work presentation – or just relaxing. Is there really anything more valuable than time?
We take responsibility
When a company is growing fast, it's important to take responsibility of the footprint you have on the society around you. The following are examples of how Wolt tries to do that – read more here!
During the Covid-19 outbreak:
We offer a Partner Support Program that offers financial support to every courier partner diagnosed with Covid-19 or put into quarantine by health officials. We have also arranged all deliveries to be contactless. We also compensate the couriers for hygiene products such as hand-sanitiser and face masks.
We have launched a restaurant support package of several millions of euros. The contents of the package vary between Wolt's markets, but examples include completely removing commissions for self-pickup orders, providing restaurants with direct monetary kickbacks for delivery orders, spending large sums of money into driving customers to local, independent restaurants, and enabling restaurants to get paid as often as twice per week.
Always:
We have compensated and promise to compensate all of the CO2 emissions from every Wolt delivery ever made, and that will ever be made.
We offer free accident insurances to our courier partners already in several of our markets, and are working hard to include even more.
We do ample public policy work towards creating a future where platform workers can flexibly choose when and where they work while not needing to compromise on safety nets comparing to people in more traditional employment.
We work with global vendors to provide our restaurant partners access to ecological food packaging.
That was it!
We wanted to keep this one a quick read, but the more insightful you wanna get, the more you should reach out to us! Whether you're into doing customer support in Hungary or UX Design at the HQ, being in charge of marketing in Japan or developing our Android app or logistics algorithms in Finland, you can always find out more at careers.wolt.com. If it's something completely different, please ping us at support@wolt.com – we'll connect you with the right person asap!
What you can expect in all cases is that we'll do our best to make any new person, customer or partner feel welcomed when dealing with us. Hope to hear from you soon! <3