Why we ask every team member to head out and do deliveries every month

When you join Packfleet, you’re joining a team committed to building the best delivery experience on earth. We hire for a huge variety of roles across every discipline and it’s really important to us that every single person understands what it’s like to deliver parcels out on the road.

So we ask everyone, regardless of role, to head out once a month and do a day of deliveries. From engineers, to designers, to operations managers; once a month you’ll clear your calendar and focus on getting our customer’s parcels delivered safely and on-time.

Not everyone is able to or feels comfortable driving a van, so they can choose to do a ridealong day with one of our delivery drivers. They can still deliver the parcels, use our driver app and get a feel for what a typical day looks like. And of course, we tailor it to everyone’s individual needs so that if you can only do part of this, we’ll work with you to make it work.

Why do we do this?

Asking everyone to do this takes a significant time commitment; a whole day every month is a real chunk. But we see huge benefits in doing it that make it well worth it.

• It helps everyone across the business get to know each other, especially if you’re doing a ridealong day. You get to spend multiple hours together and really get to know each other. In businesses like ours, it’s very common to see a large divide between office-based staff and delivery teams — but by fostering these relationships, we hope to contribute to reducing this as much as possible.
• It enables our office-based team to really get a feel for what it’s like doing deliveries. It’s a tough job! You’re out on the road all day, carrying parcels and interacting with recipients, and building empathy for that job is really important.
• It’s a great way for our delivery team to share feedback with the office-based team. Whether it’s about our processes or product, focused one-on-one time to chat through the details is incredibly valuable.
• We get to meet our amazing merchants in person — see their warehouses, chat to their teams, and learn how we can best support them
• And it helps with capacity on busy days! When we have lots of holiday days or at peak times of the year, more potential drivers available to help is a huge benefit.

And we’ve seen many of these benefits come to fruition

Every time engineers go out for a delivery day, they come back with a list of app improvements to make to our delivery app — and then go and build it! The same is true for our ops team getting to see our operational processes from a different perspective or our sales-focused team meeting our merchants face-to-face on the job and seeing what that looks like. And best of all, it’s a great way to disconnect from your day-to-day role and get out and see more of London!

As we grow

There is a significant time commitment involved with this approach and it will get more difficult as we continue to grow, not least because the specific knowledge needed to do deliveries increases over time. But for as long as possible, we’ll keep doing this; tweaking it as we need to make sense for our current scale and in the process, working to build that world-beating delivery experience!

If this sounds like the sort of place you’d like to work, check out our careers page or get in touch 😄