Home sweet home: How Kindred became one of the best places to work in the UK

When I arrive at Kindred House in Wimbledon, I am greeted by a receptionist. She is both friendly and welcoming, but in this instance she is largely superfluous as I am told to sign in on an electronic tablet. After I click confirm, my own customised lanyard is printed off in seconds, complete with a WiFi code for the building.

As I sit and wait for Kindred Group’s chief HR officer, Gavin Hayward, the scene around me is one of sliding glass doors, coded keypads and wafer-thin monitors. This vast array of equipment would feel more at home in Silicon Valley, or in Iron Man’s lab during Avengers: End Game. Inside at least, this does not feel like an office building tucked behind the high street of a leafy, south west London suburb.

I tag along on a grand tour of the building, which houses 414 permanent members of staff, and my favourite fact is that there are beehives on the roof, which are taken care of by a round-the-clock beekeeper. All employees are gifted one pot of homemade honey at the end of each year. The bees are hard at work, and so should you be. My mind immediately fast-forwards to a parody people news story on the EGR Intel website: Betsson poaches former Kindred Group beekeeper. Do they advertise the role on LinkedIn, I wonder?

Kindred Group’s chief HR officer Gavin Hayward

The new-look Kindred House has been the operator’s UK home for almost two years now since a summer spell on London’s Southbank in Westminster. It had proven difficult for the operator to find big enough real estate in the Wimbledon area to cope with employee growth, so they had to be patient and power on elsewhere while the building was renovated.

“We had a reasonable experience at Southbank and it demonstrated that if we wanted to move somewhere else in London then we could, but I think we have a better balance here,” Hayward tells EGR. “We don’t seem to struggle too much in attracting people to come and work here,” he adds.

Reaping the rewards

As we make our way up to the top floor, it is easy to see why. We wander through the canteen and the first attraction of the tour is a free-to-use ice cream machine – and I thought those only existed at Pizza Hut. When we get to the top, the views are stunning. The sunshine helps, but you can see for miles, all the way across Wimbledon Village and up the grassy common towards London’s tallest landmarks, with the unmistakable loom of Canary Wharf just a fingers width.

However, the reason for the visit is because Kindred Group has just been voted the 30th best place to work in the UK by the Great Place to Work audit 2019. The operator was ranked in the large company category, which assessed firms of between 251 and 1,000 employees. Kindred Group was the only egaming firm on the list, while global tech giants including PayPal (14), Adobe (5) and Workday (1) also ranked highly.

Kindred has entered the awards on an annual basis for the last six years as part of ongoing employee engagement efforts and a focus on sustainability, all of which have come to the fore since the company transitioned to Kindred Group from Unibet Group back in 2016, under current CEO Henrik Tjärnström.

Hayward says: “The decision to move from Unibet to Kindred was part of a broader multi-brand strategy and we are at the stage in our maturity where confusion of Unibet as a consumer-facing brand, and as a corporate brand, has gone away now. Our values are at the centre of everything we do, reinforced by the fact we scored very highly on friendliness, team building and collaboration, but also on innovation – and our diversity scores are some of the highest in the UK.”

“It is not just about the great benefits and the free ice cream, because people will start to see through that fairly quickly”

Kindred is an international company with four main hubs in London, Stockholm, Malta and Gibraltar and a physical presence in Sydney, Paris, Denmark, Italy and Madrid. The operator boasts 1,550 permanent employees of 54 different nationalities across the globe, including 39 different nationalities in Kindred House alone. As part of Brexit planning, Hayward realised that 26 of the 28 countries to make up the European Union were represented in the Wimbledon office.

Opportunity knocks

Hayward believes a genuine opportunity for career progression for every single one of those employees is another element that helped set Kindred apart in the Great Place to Work survey. “We have great stories of people joining us in our customer service functions and progressing right the way through the organisation, and through our management trainee programmes, to get to the very top,” he says.

Perhaps the best example of this is Kindred Group’s current chief experience officer, Britt Boeskov. Boeskov joined the operator as a trainee in 2005 and enjoyed three rapid promotions before being made COO in 2009. After seven years in her first C-level role, Boeskov became chief experience officer in 2016. Now in her 15th year at Kindred, Boeskov is responsible for strategy, delivery and customer experience. She is also a truly respected industry veteran, serving on the boards of the CasinoCoin Foundation and the Racecourse Media Group, and appearing as a regular panellist
at conferences.

“Scope for progression is definitely one thing that makes us a great place to work,” says Hayward. “It is not just about the great benefits and the free ice cream, because people will start to see through that fairly quickly. There has to be something substantial behind it,” he adds.

Working in gambling certainly has its perks. The industry is never boring and there is a lot of money to be made, which means that employees are generally well compensated and enjoy benefits that other sectors could only dream of. Betsson Group has an in-house hairdresser to keep its Malta employees looking spick and span, while one Nordic operator is even rumoured to have offered staff paid pet paternity leave, allowing for time off to train a new puppy or kitten.

Despite this, it can often be hard for egaming firms to find, and attract, the right calibre of person. Operators comparing themselves to Facebook, Google and Netflix has become a worn cliché, but in fairness they are competing in the same tech pool of talent as these international giants. Racing Post CEO Alan Byrne believes gambling’s tech talent shortage is down to the poor public perception of the industry. “One of the problems for gambling is that we are fishing in a smaller pool because there are some people that don’t want to work in the sector,” Byrne said last year. “This is disappointing, but it reflects the public coverage of the sector and a souring in the mood.”

Employees at Kindred House in Wimbledon during Mental Health Awareness Week

Hayward concedes that graduates choosing to self-exclude from gambling is an ongoing issue. He adds: “You are never going to stop that and we wouldn’t want to because it comes down to personal choice. But hopefully people will see that through the work we do, and the way we promote ourselves, that we are right up there when it comes to high levels of responsibility and integrity.”

The battle for talent only intensifies in places like Malta, where online gambling is one of the country’s biggest employers. Kindred combined its St Julians and Gzira-based staff in a new 400-person office at Tigne Point in June 2018 and sits alongside other Nordic-facing gaming firms including Betsson, GiG and Global Gaming on the island. The shortage of talent means operators often end up competing for the same individual or trying to poach talent.

“Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important topic for all operators and that is one of the ways we try and distinguish ourselves from other operators,” says Hayward, when asked whether Kindred can point towards its social responsibility measures and corporate culture to gain a competitive advantage when hiring. “We don’t look over our shoulder at what other operators do in terms of the work environment and career development. We set our sights really high and through the Great Place to Work survey, we are setting a benchmark against the top tech employers globally,” he adds.

Remote control

Hayward works three days a week at Kindred House when he’s in the UK. Internal communications manager Jamie Abbey, who is also present at the interview, works to the same schedule when he commutes to London from his Dorset home. “We are low on policy when it comes to flexible working but high on practice,” says Hayward. “Our focus is on performance.”

Kindred monitors this performance through a system called Objectives and Key Results (OKR), which has become a popular management strategy for goal-setting within organisations. The official online definition says OKR is to “connect company, team, and personal goals to measurable results while having all team members and leaders work together in one, unified direction”.

According to Kindred’s HR chief, OKR allows for greater transparency across the business and helps to establish trust, as all staff can log in to see each other’s objectives. Slightly intrusive, you might think, but it stops slightly short of an initiative used by London-based exchange operator Smarkets, where employees can set their own salaries – and these too are publicly scrutinised.

“It encourages people to deliver in their roles, and if they are going to deliver then it doesn’t matter where they are based,” says Hayward. “With the tools available now, it is very easy to work remotely and flexibly, but also well together. There are occasions when everybody needs to be in the office and pulling together, but we try and promote flexible working wherever possible,” he adds.

Kindred is one of the best places to work in the UK, but how do prospective employees get a job there? Hayward and his HR team put an applicant’s ability to fit in with the operator’s working culture above all else. Most roles require education to degree or equivalent level, but those who pass the first stage of the process are made to do a cultural fit assessment. Hayward says: “What we have found over the years is that a skill or a capability gap is far easier to close through a structured training and development programme than it is through a total mismatch with our values and our culture.”

He adds: “I am not saying that education and qualifications aren’t important, but if we think they are a good cultural fit with the ethos and values of Kindred, then we will give that quite a lot of weighting in any selection process.”

At the end of our interview, I bid Kindred House staff farewell and prepare for the bustle of the District Line on my commute back to the office. As I exit through the revolving doors, the woman at reception shouts after me: “Excuse me sir! May I have your lanyard back please?” I sheepishly do a full rotation, unwrap the ID card from my neck and hand it back to her with an accompanying apology. There are still some things that technology can’t do.