Job satisfaction: how the gambling sector has set up for a pivot to hybrid working

A year into the pandemic, Covid-19 has changed our lives in more ways than we could have imagined. Wearing a mask to the supermarket and standing two metres apart from people in the street has become the societal norm in next to no time. Pre-March 2020, these restrictions would only have been seen in dystopian science fiction films. One of the biggest impacts on our daily routines has been a switch to remote working. Most offices, especially in the UK, have been closed for 12 months now in a bid to restrict the spread of the virus. What were once bustling London hubs filled with nine-to-five workers have now become concrete and glass ghost towns.

Society is hopeful that the vaccines will allow life to return to something resembling normality in summer 2021. But the future of work is likely to look very different.

In February, the Financial Times contacted more than 20 companies and most said they anticipated introducing hybrid models of working where staff split time between the office and home. Indeed, PwC carried out a survey of its 22,000 employees and early findings suggest most are keen to return to the office for three or four days a week, with the remainder spent working from home.

Gambling companies are doing something similar by surveying staff and knocking boardroom heads together to try and figure out the best way to proceed when this pandemic nightmare is over. For many, it has been a period filled with angst, illness and isolation, but there have been silver linings. These include spending more time with family and being afforded the opportunity to step back and re-evaluate what is really important in life.

While the cancellation of sport in March and April of last year seriously damaged sports betting firms, the gambling industry as a whole was better positioned than most sectors for the pivot to remote working, retail bookmakers aside. Many tier-one operators have teams across the globe, which meant digital communication was already a priority, while software developers and traders are by and large more comfortable working on their own devices than on legacy office tech.

Kindred Group internal communications manager Jamie Abbey tells EGR Intel: “We were a pretty remote-ready organisation prior to the pandemic. We’ve invested a lot of money, resources and expertise into making sure that our systems and tools are available to employees from anywhere. While obviously we didn’t foresee the pandemic, we were able to transition to a remote workforce effectively and without too much business disruption.”

Abbey says there were no teething problems from a tech perspective, but the sporting blackout meant a reorganisation in some teams to focus on verticals that were still alive and kicking. This pivot demanded an increase in communication, which has become a key theme of the pandemic as proven by the meteoric rise in the use of online software like Zoom, Teams and Slack.

“We were doing weekly communication to staff from leadership and talking about the business response to Covid-19, making sure that everyone was aware of the commercial situation,” says Abbey. “We were also reinforcing the fact that health and wellbeing was the number one priority, and we were keen as a business organisation to play our part in reducing community transmission. Therefore, working from home was absolutely the right approach,” he adds.

Kindred Group was able to quickly shift to remote working thanks to its pre-existing tech strategy

Mental block

Covid-19 can have a devastating effect on physical health but mental health also came to the fore during the pandemic. Social interaction was dramatically reduced almost overnight and must have been particularly tough for employees who live on their own and rely on work and colleagues to combat loneliness. Igaming affiliate KaFe Rocks has always been a fully remote-working business, but this did not insulate it from difficulties resulting from the pandemic.

CEO Simon Pilkington said: “A lot of our employees who don’t work in Malta are younger, single people who work in big cities like Milan or Madrid or Barcelona, where apartments generally are one-bed and small with no garden. They went above and beyond the English lockdowns for a time, where you couldn’t even venture down to the street without having a very good reason, so we were really concerned about the mental health side of things,” he adds.

Pilkington found that changing his CEO email round-up from monthly to weekly helped to reassure staff over the commercial situation, as did guaranteeing early on that no jobs would be lost as a result of the pandemic. As the situation began to deteriorate, KaFe Rocks even offered financial support to employees if their partners or families had lost their jobs or been made redundant.

But small gestures also made a difference. “It’s amazing how this has become such a cliché in a really short time, but we did loads of stuff from Zoom poker tournaments and Zoom yoga to murder mysteries. The biggest thing we did was ramp up our communications because we were used to working remotely. It doesn’t mean that as people we’re used to being forced to stay inside. We’ve always prided ourselves on giving flexibility and freedom, but that doesn’t mean people can just go and do what they want. It means we understand that life gets in the way and that sometimes you need to not be working.”

Striking the right chord of work-life balance will truly differentiate companies post-Covid, according to Chris Herd, CEO and founder of remote team management solution Firstbase. He has spoken to more than 1,500 people about remote working over the last nine months and condensed his findings into a Twitter thread, which went viral and earned 9,000 retweets and more than 22,000 likes.

He recognised that the rise of remote working will lead people to re-evaluate their priorities. If those priorities are not met, they will find a job elsewhere as fast-moving firms capitalise on the talent pool. Herd says: “Organising your work around your life will be the first noticeable switch as people realise they are more than their job and this will lead to a deeper purpose in other areas.”
He also notes that the lack of a commute would give staff extra days to focus on their health and wellbeing. “Workers will exploit the freedom they have to organise things more freely in their day. Afternoon runs and morning meditation are two things that a lot of people I know now do,” he adds.

This already rings true for Pilkington, who worked from home even before he joined KaFe Rocks. While a member of Perform Group’s betting team in Leeds, he lived in Bristol, spending three days a week in the office and two at home. He says: “The biggest thing for me is that it becomes more like a lifestyle rather than a job in the traditional sense. If my kid’s nursery rings up and one of them is sick, my wife won’t have to take the time off work because I can go and get them knowing I’ve got complete flexibility and trust from senior leadership.

“I’ve always loved the freedom and autonomy that you’re given and, being honest, I think that I’m just more productive working remotely. Having worked in some big office spaces, the ability to procrastinate is on another level,” he adds.

Productive people

Productivity was a major concern for companies at the start of the pandemic, many of which presumably feared staff would end up watching TV in their pants all day without someone from the office to keep them in check. However, according to Herd, the opposite is true, and burnout will become a big problem in future. Pilkington himself admits he logs on before 9am, doesn’t take a full hour at lunch and often stays beyond 5pm – a schedule many readers will surely be familiar with by now.

According to both KaFe Rocks and Kindred Group, productivity should never become a legitimate concern if your recruitment process is up to scratch in the first place. Both firms place huge emphasis on company ethos from the earliest communication stage, which leaves applicants in little doubt over what will be expected of them.

On this subject, Pilkington says: “Not everyone is set up to work remotely. Even if it’s a nice thing in theory, productivity can be missing as the capacity for procrastination is huge. One of our core values is trust and we put a massive emphasis on this, while another is about being self-driven. We don’t track or put a day-to-day focus around productivity, but it’s pretty hard to hide in our business because you’ve either completed the work or not,” he adds.

Long-term outlook

So, what does the future hold? Soon it will be safe to return to the office and there is a percentage of the workforce desperate to get back as soon as possible. Most are suffering from digital fatigue and others will be thankful to see the back of home-schooling. The break will also benefit personal relationships, which may have been wound too tight due to the claustrophobia of Covid-19. The chances of the office being nine to five, Monday to Friday are increasingly unlikely however, and a hybrid-operating model now looks most likely.

Kindred has established a group to investigate ‘activity-based working’. It will assess how to get the best use out of its offices while enabling remote workers to thrive at home. Kindred’s Wimbledon HQ in London is a state-of-the-art facility but it has remained empty for some time now, and Abbey admits it could be tweaked to create a more flexible collaboration space.

Kindred rival Sky Betting & Gaming (SBG) has pledged to promote a ‘working from home’-style environment at its new 136,000 sq ft headquarters in Leeds. The move to the 4 Wellington Place development will significantly increase floor space and more than double meeting rooms from 37 to 79, while consolidating 1,400 staff members from two separate offices into one single space. Employees will no longer have a fixed desk in the office, with six desks now being used for every 10 people.

In addition, SBG will set up ‘neighbourhoods’ for each operating department, which employees can also connect to from home. “We’re trying to promote working from home when you want to and coming into the office when you need to, which we think will be about 40% of the time,” SBG brand, creative and sponsorship director Michael Afflick told The Yorkshire Post.

KaFe Rocks is lucky in that it was already way ahead of the game in this regard. The affiliate has an office space in Malta which opened in 2020 despite the pandemic. Employees can pick and choose when they visit and can even combine weekend visits with a dip in the communal pool. The company remains fully remote, with no pressure to work from the office. Pilkington is concerned they have lost major competitive advantage, though, as other igaming firms have become wise to the benefits of home working.

Kindred is one of those firms. The company now faces a pivotal decision that could impact company culture and commercial performance for years to come, as do many igaming operators. Abbey says: “We absolutely accept that times have changed and people have been able to work effectively from home, but we, as an organisation, see inherent value in having people in offices due to the social interaction and networking opportunities that come with that.”

He concludes: “We also recognise that we’re going to need to be flexible with how we use our offices, and that how we used them in the past might not necessarily be how we use them going forward.”

Watch this (office) space.