Uber boss Dara Khosrowshani: "We want to be the supplier for the next hour"

Mr. Khosrowshahi, before we talk about how the Uber offers are doing, first something else that is occasionally being overlooked at the moment: the pandemic is at a stage where many restrictions have been lifted and we can finally meet more often in person again .

How is this reflected in your company?

Alexander Armbruster

Responsible editor for business online.

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Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Carsten Knop

Editor.

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We have introduced a 50-50 rule as a guide.

Our employees can organize their working hours so that they can work about half of it in the office and the other half from home or wherever they want.

What worked well during the peak of the pandemic via video services like Zoom were the structured interactions and meetings.

But just the informal conversations in the hallway, where you can find out how a person is doing, what they are doing or what project they are working on - these spontaneous interactions are something that we have all been missing, I am convinced.

Is this now Uber's permanent home office rule?

I think nothing is permanent.

But for the foreseeable future?

50-50 is currently our best estimate.

Employees can organize this time as they wish.

You can do this on a weekly basis or, for example, come to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

We will not calculate whether it is 50 or 40 or 60 percent.

Employees may also individually choose to work remotely entirely, and we will approve this taking into account their particular circumstances, role and other considerations.

But we found that the interaction with the teammates and the energy that presence creates is just awesome.

It feels good at the moment, but we will remain very flexible.

Didn't you have to offer special incentives to get colleagues to come back to the office?

We have incredibly good food in the office.

We don't doubt that.

As a manager, you have to act smartly here.

For example, we organize various events.

All of our engineers and developers were invited for a few days to get together and talk about all the cool things we're working on.

We try to make the office a magnet for teams.

And I find that I'm in the office more than 50 percent of the time myself.

But on the other hand, this also makes working at home a pleasure.

You know, working from home became a little bit of a grind - but now I feel that combining the two can be a better solution.

What is your most important takeaway from the pandemic so far?

Companies have to be flexible.

Flexible in how they work internally, but also in the offerings they build and how they face the world.

If you look at where we are post-pandemic, the transformation for us is pretty extraordinary: meal delivery was just 15 or 20 percent of our sales volume before.

In the meantime, the delivery business represents a very large proportion. At the same time, we are now also seeing that the mobility business is coming back very strongly.

Ultimately, we believe that we are a company capable of building an extensive platform for real-world delivery and mobility business.

However, we must remain flexible in a constantly changing world and must not commit ourselves too much to one thing.