This is how billion-dollar scale-up Aircall unites its international teams through social interaction

When a young company, such as Aircall, starts growing exponentially, it becomes harder and harder to keep employees' well-being in check and make sure that the company culture isn’t deteriorated by the necessity of scaling fast.

Who better than Aircall - a golden company in the global startup ecosystem that reached Centaur status only eight years after its conception - knows how to scale internationally, and fast?

During these years of exponential growth, Aircall faced the challenge of speeding up its recruitment process while nurturing the existing talents and keeping all team members happy and fulfilled.

We talked to Annaelle Bondon, Office Manager at Aircall, to learn how the company faced the exponential rise of remote work and fueled its growth while using social interaction to keep its employees scattered around the world happy.

How Aircall is adapting to a new, hybrid, way of working

The rise of remote and hybrid work changed the way we all experience work and the workplace forever. But for companies in hyper-growth, with offices all around the world, this new way of working meant a complete change in the company’s operating methods, not only with their clients but also within teams based in different countries.

“We had to adapt everything that we used to do to this new way of working. The small things that we used to do in the office without even noticing, like talking to each other or quickly catching up, became pivotal for the functioning of teams.”

Annaelle Bondon

Workplace Manager

Us being an international organization, with people based around the world, meant that we were already used to working in a somewhat remote manner. One thing that we had to really work on was keeping our company culture strong, alive and well.

At Aircall, we love to meet up and do things together — events, experiences and retreats are a big part of our company culture and at first, it was quite difficult to pivot while also navigating all the issues that all businesses had to face during the shift to a remote-first work model.

The way we work has changed forever and that isn’t any different for Aircall. With more and more people working from home, choosing remote or hybrid work options, keeping the company culture alive and morale high can be tricky, but not impossible.

We had to adapt all our rituals and perks for this new way of working, but it can be difficult to make sure that every team around the world feels included and taken care of when I am not there with them. I am based in the Paris office and it can be complex to plan events taking place on the other side of the world, in a completely different time zone.

Being able to organise weekly virtual and in-person events and seminars for all teams around the world through Jurnee has been a big help to me and the rest of my team in keeping all our teams strong. The relationships between colleagues are not only work-related anymore — we spend so much time with each other that is necessary for us to create real, long-lasting connections between people that work in the same team and even the ones that don’t usually work together.

Bringing teams from around the world closer through social interactions

We were concerned by the fact that the sense of belonging could take a hit – leading to lower employees motivation and engagement – and this impacted the work of Office Managers but also our HR department and team leaders.

To fight this erosion of the sense of belonging and keep their company attractive for new hires, Aircall (just like a lot of other companies) doubled down on team bonding to bring their employees together and foster deeper human relationships. Organising a high volume of events on different continents, it’s tedious, time-consuming and impossible to automate internally. HR, finance teams and office managers would have to vet and incorporate hundreds of suppliers that most likely won’t integrate well into the company processes. Doing this for one team would be extremely complicated, doing it at scale for an international company is impossible to handle internally.

One thing that really helped us create more cohesion between teams that work in different countries was the creation of a ‘Culture Club’. We have one representative per country that proposes activities to do in a specific office or simultaneously across all offices and remote teams. This helps us know all team members better, learn about different cultures and brings us closer together but it would still be extremely difficult to organise if we didn’t have a company-wide tool in place.

The fact that all our team leads have access to Jurnee means that they can independently book the events for their team, ask other teams if they want to join, invite their colleagues to vote for their favourite activities using Jurnee’s polls and never have to waste time confirming budgets or getting invoices. On the other hand, HR and finance teams always have a clear vision of spending and never have to worry about chasing documents.

Company culture is ever-changing, and listening to your employees is the only way to improve

With a hiring market that is becoming more and more difficult to navigate, workers are searching for more than just a job that pays the bills. Strong company culture and particular attention to employees' well-being and social interactions can really be a game-changer for companies that need to hire and want to retain their precious talents.

We are constantly striving to improve what we do when it comes to building connections so we really value all employees' feedback, which is why the possibility to add your team to Jurnee to vote for their favourite activities has been so great for us. That also pushes them to be more open about what they would like to do and choose experiences to do with their team more freely. With the huge variety of activities present on the platform, we have always found something new to do.

Using Jurnee to manage all team events means that companies only integrate with one supplier to unlock hundreds of curated events from vetted partners. The platform's flexibility allows it to fit companies’ budgets, payment policies and compliance. Managers don’t have to be event planners anymore – they can book experiences all over Europe in a couple of minutes without worrying about organising.

Being able to use one tool in all countries has made bonding between teams so easy sometimes we even forget we are so far from each other.