The habits of tech companies

The world we live in started to be revolutionised by tech companies in a couple of decades. Not just because they started in a garage, but because they found different ways to do business. The good news, people don’t need to be a tech company in order to function like one. Now, there are many opportunities for companies that are not tech-led, some of these companies include casino gaming. 

In other words, even gaming companies can adopt some tech ways to do business. It doesn’t matter if it is a regular tech company, gaming company or a casino developer. Like this, they will have the benefit of efficiency and innovation. 

Marion Gamel has worked for a decade in two leading tech companies, Google and Eventbrite and then she became the CMO for Betsson. Now, as an executive coach, she helps leaders in gaming, casino and other industries, by transforming the way they function, focusing on agility, accountability, players and talents. 

Agility

Gaming companies, especially casinos, can evolve best in fast changing environment. In the case of iGaming, these companies need to always have something new, which has to fit for the casino community. There is a permanent need to adapt, and this calls for an agile workforce as well. 

The workforce has to be comfortable to frequent changes as well. By adding change, the culture of agility will be fostered. This will make the team more comfortable with change, and it is the required first step in guiding the workforce towards agility. 

Even in life, change is inevitable, in business, change is vital. These are the words of Warren Bennis. Change is important for leaders to understand the process of change, it is like a brain thing. The brain is not really fond of change. Doing the same tasks over and over again is easy and reassuring. And embracing new ways consumes a lot of brain-energy, because it demands full attention. 

Accountability

Accountability means the clarity of who’s responsible for what, what are the employees and teams commitments and transparency on progress and results. The workforce of some companies is very busy, but nobody knows exactly who is doing what. When something goes wrong, nobody knows who or what went wrong. This can lead to finger-pointing. 

There are also other companies that have a workforce where everybody knows about their area of responsibility and commitment. Here, when something goes wrong, the responsible team or individual steps in and look for an explanation, solutions and learning. Usually tech companies are in this category. 

In order to achieve a high level of accountability, tech companies use tools, like OKRs. Invented by Intel decades ago, the OKRs is a technique of setting and communicating individual objectives. This makes sure that everyone works towards the same strategic goals. The tool ensures that everyone knows what is expected of them, what they can expect from others, which drives an efficient collaboration and accountability. 

Implementing the OKRs is simple, the most important and a big part of the job is to decide if the organisation is ready for this level of clarity and commitment. If the organisation is ready, then one person has to be the one with OKRs. After the introduction of OKRs, the project manager is given a couple of months to train everyone into OKRs. In time, this will become a habit and everyone will collaborate with each other. 

Talent

Companies know that the workforce can be the root of accomplishment or failure. However, companies can encounter talent issues, where unfortunately, they rarely go away by themselves. Talent is not an HR thing but a responsibility of every leader. When the time comes to improve talent acquisition or retention, the HR cannot come overnight to fix the mistakes or oversight of a leader. 

There is no such thing as talent issues, however there is leadership issues. Leaders should focus about a third of their time on talent, like acquisition, retention, growth, path and efficiency. 

By embracing these facts, this should put leaders in a good place to solve their company’s talent issues. If there are talent issues in small markets like Malta and other industries like gaming, it can be severe for the company. In order to find the company’s talent situation it is better to look at recent business disappointments and the accomplishment of others. Leaders have to look into skills, manpower, leadership, organisational structure. Leaders shouldn’t start thinking about talent using HR data as attribution. 

Last Words

Tech companies have revolutionised the way of conducting a business. Casino gaming developers are already putting this type of wisdom into their companies. They emulate the way they tackle agility, accountability and talent, because of this, these casino companies can be on a par with the optimal digital growth.

This is the right time to focus on these ways, because gaming, from video games to online slots, will be fully into the digital industry. There is a bit of tech wisdom for everyone, by starting to add agility into a team, which will then put the company into an advance of the accountability and moving forward with the right talent.