BlaBlaCar: how our culture helped us navigate the Covid-19 crisis
Back in 2013, as we entered a long-lasting phase of hypergrowth, our team crowdsourced internal principles that would serve as the foundation for BlaBlaCar’s culture and values, and would evolve over the years. They would allow us to grow far and wide, across countries and markets, while staying true to ourselves and our core mission. We call them our BlaBlaPrinciples.
While we didn’t exactly have a pandemic-induced worldwide travel ban in mind when creating these principles, we knew we wanted them to serve as a compass through uncertain times and help us manage big changes as a team.
And they did. The coronavirus crisis, putting the travel industry on standby for over a quarter, was the ultimate test for our company culture. I’d like to share our business story through this prism — how each and every principle helped us manage the crisis and come out stronger as a result.
Our first principle: Be the Member. We share the road with our members to better understand them. As active users of our services and members of our community, we have empathy for their needs, stay in touch with our product, and create real value for our members.
During the coronavirus, Be the Member took on a new meaning. BlaBlaCar, helping over 90 million travelers share the road, had to find another way of bringing people together. We felt we had a responsibility to evolve to match the new needs of our members, who were no longer in cars and buses, but for the most part confined at home.
That’s where BlaBlaHelp — our community app to help each other with grocery shopping — came to life. In April, we ran a call for ideas to find out from the community how BlaBlaCar and its global network could be of service. After an outpour of suggestions from inside and outside the company, it was clear that BlaBlaHelp, connecting the most vulnerable with volunteers who could go grocery shopping, was where BlaBlaCar needed to be. Just 24 hours after the launch, over 10,000 people had already signed up.
As the world started to emerge from lockdown, we needed to think like a traveler again. We sent out a survey to our top drivers to understand their fears as they hit the road. We put in place strict and bold sanitary measures, such as our Only One in the Back feature in cars or barring every other seat on a bus. Even if such measures were not initially optimising for our bottom line, trust was the most important currency to gain back from our members.
Our second principle: Share More. Learn More. Sharing is a big part of how we operate and grow as a team. We have weekly team-all BlaBlaTalks and Tech Demos, for instance, where teams are invited to talk about a project and answer questions about their work. We do this to align on strategy, but also to allow every one of us to learn skills we wouldn’t have in our individual scope.
If Share More Learn More was important in normal times, it was as critical as ever during the crisis, which involved the entire team going 100% remote. We had to accept that uncertainty was the new normal, and that it would be for some time. With so much volatility in the air, we had to be transparent with our team on the impact of the crisis, keep spirits high and our team aligned on key decisions every step of the way. We maintained our weekly team-alls, introduced weekly team check-ins, sent regular CEO emails, and had frequent Q&A sessions with the executive committee.
Share More Learn More is also about sharing with the outside world. To support the industry in the transition to remote, our People team created a unique set of Work at Home Tips & Guidelines, a show of solidarity in times of uncertainty. With our members, I also maintained constant communication to show them we care and to remain transparent in our crisis response.
Our third principle: Fail. Learn. Succeed. What’s innovation without a healthy dose of failure? When you revolutionize the way people travel, you accept the risk of making mistakes along the way. Failure is critical to our work at BlaBlaCar — we embrace it, celebrate it, and collectively learn from it as a team.
Throughout my 20 years of experience, I’ve lived through two major crises — the 1990s dot com bust and the 2008 global recession — and even a major restructuring of BlaBlaCar in 2017, when we had to close down a few markets. BlaBlaCar has had its fair share of failure:
- Operating with a thin cash balance and being unprepared for “unknown unknowns”;
- Living in denial and waiting for confirmation for too long when such “black swan” events occur;
- Not preserving our engineering talent, therefore sacrificing long-term innovation.
These failures, I have seen, done and felt deeply. Crises are incredible accelerators of failure and of success, and they reveal the true temperament and culture of a company. It’s fair to say that our past experience with crisis and failure allowed us to enter the crisis without panicking, without tapping into emergency funding, but with focus and a clear set of priorities. There is no ‘magic’ amount of experience that can help you manage a global pandemic such as this one; there is, however, the ability to treat past failure as key to success and to act decisively with a long-term vision in mind.
Our fourth principle: Dream. Decide. Deliver. BlaBlaCar was founded on a dream. That dream was materialized with bold, thoughtful decisions and the diligence to deliver on them. That’s how we structure our decision making: when building a solution that doesn’t exist yet, there is always a time to dream, a time to decide, and a time to deliver.
Although the crisis called for a lot of reactivity and quick decision-making, it did not interfere with our ability to think big and keep working towards our long-term vision. Our Product & Innovation roadmap remained unchanged. In fact, the travel ban and halt on our activity allowed us to accelerate on core projects while experimenting with new ideas and pursuing what we wouldn’t have dreamed of in normal times.
During the crisis, we decided to:
- Keep our engineering team at full capacity.
- Accelerate our vision on the carpool and bus marketplace — we had the confidence that after the crisis, people would favor bus and carpool as a safe and affordable travel alternative.
- Launch new services like BlaBlaHelp.
Last but not least, BlaBla Ride! We decided to join the world of micro mobility, integrating e-scooters to our multimodal offer of buses and carpooling. Our partnership with Voi Technology, leading Swedish mobility player, came at a strategic time when we felt we needed to diversify our offer and provide more alternatives to private car ownership in the city.
Our fifth principle: Be Lean. Go Far. This one is all about efficient resource-management. This principle applies to how we build sustainable long-term growth as a team, but also to how we create a clean and simple user experience.
What we learned very quickly during this crisis, was the importance of taking strong measures early on. All in two weeks, just as the crisis was ramping up across Europe in the month of March, we decided to:
- Cut marketing spend — these are big variable budgets, and there was no point in advertising for our services in an uncertain and anxious context.
- Suspend our bus lines — we had to avoid the high cost of operating bus lines when the only responsible thing to do was to tell your users not to travel.
- Freeze our hiring plan — we knew we were going to enter a difficult financial period and were not in a position to provide visibility to new candidates.
- Move half of the BlaBlaCar team to partial activity, while ensuring fairness in their partial work conditions across markets.
We favored the risk of being wrong over the risk of not taking measures to protect the company, our employees and our users. This time around, it turned out to be the right decision.
Our last principle: Fun & Serious. This is what defines our culture at BlaBlaCar. If we work hard individually, take what we do at heart, there’s always room for collective fun.
At the office, we’d always have something going on: zero-waste, knitting or bike repair workshops, speakers for our Friday breakfasts, or our BlaBlaBand practicing in the basement. However, with lockdown, these activities are challenging to put on virtually. We even had to cancel our team-all retreat, a long week-end of sports, performances and other team-bonding activities.
To keep our Fun & Serious culture alive, we offered remote yoga and fitness classes, introduced weekly cooking competitions, as well as eco-challenges that would make life in confinement a little more eco-friendly. Of course, these initiatives cannot replace the value of physical human interactions, but they’re an important way of telling our employees that we’re here for them no matter what.
I can safely say that our BlaBlaPrinciples passed the test. They gave us the ability to separate the short-term from the long-term, and to act quickly and decisively on cutting our activity, communicating clearly and cutting costs overnight. They also gave us a clear vision that this was also a moment to innovate and to double-down on engineering.
While I could give all the credit to a set of principles, it’s truly the teams and individuals who embody them, and infuse them in their everyday decisions and interactions who should be cause for celebration. A big thank you to our team of dreamers and doers who took the crisis in stride and carried BlaBlaCar through to the other side with your diligence, agility and ambition.
