Grab’s People team recognised that in order to help the business adapt to a very ambiguous environment, it needed to find a balance between maintaining a strict focus on business processes and operations, and demonstrating empathy and providing support for employees.

In response, the People and regional security teams quickly established critical relationships with a range of internal and external stakeholders, such as government agencies, and conducted daily environment scans to ensure that they had continuous access to the most up-to-date information.

They also developed a real-time, rapid and empathetic communications approach to reach their employees and their external partners, such as their partner drivers, across eight countries.

To ensure consistency but also enable communications to be issued rapidly without lengthy sign-off processes, the team developed a central communications approach based on three key principles:

Timely – trying to remove any sense of worry, fear or concern through near-daily communications to keep employees informed of the latest developments and requirements. The team also established a microsite to support virtual working, which included information on how to take care of yourself, how to stay productive, where to get the right information, and how to manage teams in a virtual environment.

Transparent – explaining why decisions (e.g. no co-mingling between split teams, even in a social setting) had been made in order to build trust, demonstrate transparency and grow the team spirit. FAQs explaining why announcement decisions had been made were attached to communications to provide additional context and clear reasoning.

Motivational – showing care doesn't have to stop with kind words, and empathy for employees was demonstrated through understanding co-worker anxieties, by listening and by being supportive. The central People team created a dedicated inbox that received an influx of questions ranging from official business questions through to requests for more personal advice. The People team always took the time to listen and tried to respond within the day, no matter how big or small the matter was.

This combination of clear, easily accessible and timely information to keep business operations underway, and the empathetic approach to navigating any concerns, helped to instill confidence in Grab’s employees to maintain its services even when faced with daily uncertainties.

Grab recognised that having access to as much information as possible from both a strategic and operational perspective would be critical to enabling Grabbers to successfully navigate such an ambiguous environment.

By empowering Grabbers to raise concerns, the People team could also work at pace to remove any barriers, which enabled employees to ‘keep moving forward’ and continue with operations.

Conversations took place through an email feedback channel and a central intranet area where all Grabbers could view communications, ask questions or raise any issues. Having questions asked and responded to publicly helped to demonstrate transparency and prevented the team from having to respond to the same query multiple times.

To support the business financially and to lead by example through a challenging time, Grab’s senior leaders voluntarily took pay cuts of up to 20% early in the Covid-19 crisis.

At the same time, Grab wanted to ensure the company could support their drivers who were badly hit by the lockdowns by setting up a Partner Relief Fund. This gave employees the opportunity to make voluntary donations, which were matched dollar-for-dollar by Grab, to demonstrate solidarity with the drivers and provide practical support.

The People team also recognised that demonstrating empathy for employees’ situations and ensuring that they stayed healthy and happy would be critical to enabling them to be agile and responsive, and maintain business operations.

With many employees isolated at home due to lockdowns or other restrictions, mental health was a key concern for the People team. The organisation’s mental health resources were quickly enhanced and promoted to Grabbers. In addition to the Grabber Assistance programme and online resources and tips, the People team sought to normalise mental health by having leaders and employees share their own experiences of mental health challenges in their Grab podcast series.

To help tackle the loneliness of the lockdowns, Grab created opportunities for social connections through their ‘Carl Connect’ bot, which connects Grabbers across different functions. ‘Carl Connect’ encouraged them to meet up and offered a pre-approved expense claim item for these catch ups. The team also created ‘GrabRadio’ to share the latest news in Grab. This features different leaders to help Grabbers connect with them more personally, and provides a break from their daily tasks.

Maintaining a physically healthy workforce was critical to ensuring both employees and customers were confident to continue using Grab’s services.

As Grabbers started working from home, the Grab People team expanded the GrabFlex programme (a flexible benefits offering that enables employees to claim for health and wellbeing expenses based on their own needs) to allow Grabbers to purchase home office equipment such as desks.

They also created a series of offerings to support Grabbers’ wellbeing. This included GrabCalm, which is a daily meditation session that Grabbers can join virtually each day, and GrabFuel, which is a series of microlearning sessions covering topics ranging from mental resilience through to physical energy. As part of this, Grab even had their CEO, Anthony Tan and his wife lead a short high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout session over Zoom.

At the same time, Grab also wanted to protect the physical wellbeing of their partners and customers. They quickly rolled out a series of initiatives that ranged from securing personal protective equipment, such as masks, for Grab’s drivers, through to introducing contactless food delivery. In-app alerts in Singapore reminded customers to wear masks at all times and not sit in the front seat during their car rides, and geo-location data was also used to nudge drivers to maintain social distancing when gathering on breaks.

This rapid protection response helped to ensure drivers were confident to continue providing services, and customers felt safe continuing to use Grab’s services.

In a time of economic disruption that hit Grab’s driver partners especially hard, Grab implemented various measures to help support their financial wellbeing. This included working with Governments to allow their drivers to access other sources of income, such as allowing them to take on food or groceries deliveries. Grab also provided one-off loss of income support payments, free-of-cost Covid-19 insurance and other financial assistance such as rental waivers if the driver was hospitalised for Covid19.