In the tech world, we’ve spent the last few years obsessed with the idea that we can do everything from anywhere. We’ve built incredible tools to track every click, every line of code, and every minute of a meeting. Because our products inhabit a digital world, at some point we started to believe that our culture could live there too.
But let’s be honest: you can’t build a high-performing team through a screen alone. Over the past few years, I’ve felt the conversation around remote and office work has become distorted. We’ve spent too much time talking about the comfort of the seat or counting days on a calendar, missing what actually matters: delivering massive value, super fast. Building a top-tier team doesn’t come down to a choice between working from home or working from an office. It comes down to performance, collaboration, ownership, and culture.
Efficiency is easy to measure, but culture fit isn’t. It’s the culture that makes a team move from just doing their jobs to changing an industry, which usually happens in the moments between meetings. It happens when you’re grabbing a coffee, or when you see the look on a teammate’s face and realize they’re struggling with a problem before they even say a word. To build a truly high-performing team, we have to bridge the gap between our digital tools and our physical lives.
Autonomy requires a high bar and radical accountability
It is my belief that high performers are fundamentally self-motivated. They don’t want or need to be babysat. If you give exceptional people clear ownership, complete autonomy, and the flexibility to manage their execution, they will do incredible things.
But flexibility is a two-way street. True autonomy only works when paired with a relentless high bar. We owe it to our goals and to our own development to set incredibly ambitious targets, move quickly, and expect a work-hard mentality across the board.
To sustain a culture like that, you have to be highly diligent. You must recognize and reward top talent and hard work loudly. But you also have to act quickly, cleanly, and decisively when performance falls below the standard. Failing to act on low performance isn’t being nice; it’s unfair to the high performers who are carrying the weight and seeing how we, as leaders, allow it. Building a winning team means holding everyone, starting with ourselves, radically accountable.
Why “Being There” Matters for Excellence
This is exactly why I believe a hybrid model is the best structure for high-growth businesses. It is very hard to build a shared set of values when your only interaction is a video call where half the people have their cameras off. Real excellence in service requires a level of coordination that’s almost like a dance. It requires trust.
While remote work gives people the quiet focus time they need to execute individual tasks, true collaboration needs a physical room. When a team sits together around a table, projects become immediately leaner and more efficient. You skip the endless back-and-forth emails, you kill the friction of scheduled alignments, and you solve messy problems in minutes instead of days. Getting together in person forces us to cut the fluff and stay straight to the point. Trust is built much faster when you’ve shared a meal, walked through a city together, or spent an afternoon huddling around a whiteboard trying to fix a bug.
More importantly, it’s how culture is built. Culture isn’t written on a poster on the wall or zipped in an onboarding PDF. Culture is what happens spontaneously during the day: the quick chat after a tough meeting, the spontaneous brainstorming session, and the shared energy of hitting a massive milestone together.
Keeping the Tech Human
Building high-performing teams in a fast-changing landscape is incredibly hard work. We don’t always get it perfectly right, and there is always room to improve how we support our people through intense periods of growth. You cannot lead a city you don’t walk in. This is why Glovo focus so much on local interconnection. Whether we are helping SMEs grow their sales or working on supporting the shift to non-combustion, those aren’t just “tech” wins: they are human wins.
If we want to continue delivering value at velocity, we have to look past the screen. We need to start embracing a hybrid approach that values speed over bureaucracy, trusts people with genuine autonomy, and uses the office as a tool to collaborate faster and keep our culture sharp. We want our employees to have “the ride of their lives,” and that only happens when we work together, in person and with flexibility, with the same goal in mind: excellence in everything we do. At the end of the day, our most important asset is the person sitting right next to us.
