The future of work in a post-pandemic world: evolution not revolution

Over a year has passed since the world was hit with the novel coronavirus pandemic. It was a time when we all had to react fast to what was going on around us and trust in our leaders, healthcare systems and frontliners to lead the way. In just a few days, many aspects of life as we know it were turned upside down, leaving us having to navigate ourselves throughout these unprecedented times.

Despite the igaming industry being dynamic and fast-paced, we really never had to adapt so quickly. Proactive and agile decision-making was key, having to make the decision to offer the possibility to all our employees to work remotely within 24 hours. Moreover, working within a tech and online business, we actually experienced accelerated growth within our industry. Being faced with a higher workload, increased productivity levels and immersed in a remote setting, we really had to balance our work and life with all external factors.

Prior to the pandemic, the global trend was steadily moving towards flexible hybrid and remote set-ups, but Covid-19 accelerated this process. For us HR professionals, this provided us with a ‘global experiment’ – a golden opportunity to test out remote work and flexible working models. At Hero Gaming, we already had a flexible approach to work pre-pandemic based on trust between employees and managers, coupled with clear goals – but never to this extent across the organisation. We also always had a remote aspect to our work too, since like many companies we have offices in different locations. Being all put in the same work setting really contributed towards greater cross-functional collaboration, also bridging that physical distance between our two offices in Malta and Sweden.

Throughout the past months we made sure to measure engagement and productivity levels in order to understand how people and people managers were feeling whilst working remotely and flexibly between home and the office. It soon became clear that increased flexibility was here to stay in the long run – first of all because our employees earned it through their professionality and high productivity levels and since for some people and teams it was working out really well.

At Hero Gaming, we truly believe in mixing the new and the old ways of doing things into a hybrid model – but one might ask what is a hybrid model? The answer to that question is unknown at this stage. The social and workplace experiment has just started, and we need to tread carefully to make sure that we make the right decisions for our people and also for our business objectives. Our approach will continue to be cautious and calculated, based on our people metrics, health authority guidelines and the feedback we receive from our people.

As the world comes to terms with all the changes of the past year, the future of work is really evolving at a fast rate. Our workspaces, leadership styles, technology, culture, work-life balance are all areas which we still need to develop and focus on. We are committed towards building a flexible hybrid model that suits all of our teams and will work in the long term.

We strive for evolution – not revolution – of the workplace. Although flexibility is here to stay, it is still too early to come up with any rigid hybrid models, and there is the need for true flexibility for teams and their leaders to adjust to the new way of work. Hero Gaming will continue to set the pace for change and the evolution of our workspaces as we know them. That will, in turn, help the company succeed as well.

Andrea Saliba is the people and culture manager at Hero Gaming, a multi-brand igaming operator, where he is responsible for people experience, organisational development and culture within their operations centre in Malta. He has over six years of HR experience, specialising in talent acquisition, performance management, employee engagement, talent development, reward and recognition, and learning and development. Saliba holds a MSc in Human Resource Management and Training from the University of Leicester.