How bet365 has optimised staff productivity as it moves to the new hybrid working normal

Much has been written on the role video conferencing has played during the pandemic. Critically, how it's helped organisations to maintain operations as people transitioned from the shared space of the office to the isolation of their homes.

However, while tools like Teams, Skype and Zoom have helped facilitate communication, it quickly became clear at Hillside Technology (bet365's technology business) they were no match for the natural collaboration and dynamism of the office environment.

Although essential, we found that arming everyone in Sports Development with a laptop and headset was the bare minimum needed.

Diverse Development and Deployment

Sports Development is responsible for developing, enhancing, and supporting our sports betting platform from the delivery of real time content across multiple devices to the processing and settlement of transactions driven from that content.

The Sports Development team employs over 300 people, we operate as a full stack team. Core skills are diverse covering Golang, Typescript, Kotlin and Swift. The tech stack also covers SQL, .Net MVC, Web API, Nodejs, HTML5 and CSS 3.

There is a huge amount going on at any one time and it is a testament to the everyone involved that the last 18-months have seen us both maintain business-as-usual and innovate our offering in line with business needs.

Working from home on mass provided new challenges, which meant we had to adapt and change how we worked. We divided the work into small, workable chunks and created an atomicity that could be executed without dependents. This ensured we kept as much momentum as possible.

Working Behind Closed Doors

But there are also crucial elements of the office environment that can't be replicated at home. When you work from home, you are operating in a far more formal space, where more is diarised and planned.

Lost is the dynamism. The ability to pull a team together at a moment's notice to deal with a technical challenge or to find a solution a new requirement.

Lost is instant collaboration and the immediacy of support. The ability to come together and creatively brainstorm or tap your colleague on the shoulder and ask for help.

Lost is availability. The ability to Interrupt. When you do work that is beyond rote and prescription, you need creativity and problem solving. Without interruption, it's difficult to fill the gap.

Certainly, video conferencing tools are highly effective for communication, but they did not provide a close enough mirror for collaboration.

You can use them to share code, make presentations, and plan. But they don't solve the issues of creative debate, off-the-cuff conversation, and immediate availability that are so essential to effective and efficient software development.

Three Critical Questions

To solve the issues arising from the loss of these critical factors, we set ourselves three tests:

1. How do you ensure you can maximise workloads and deliver on the massive potential of the talent in your department?
2. How do you maintain creativity and problem solving?
3. How do you spot people who are struggling?

The scope of work in Sports Development is broad. There are those people working on the daily tasks of updating and debugging code. We have people working on new applications and services, which will see them ensconced on a project for months, and there are those who are pioneering new ground, for which the projects can last well over a year.

Each requires a different approach to management, collaboration, and interruption.

Increasing micromanagement was one answer. But people don't want to be micromanaged. They want to be supported, but they also want to be left alone to get on with their work. It's why we explored agile and took on many of its practices.

The problem with homeworking and the new hybrid normal, is you can easily find yourself backsliding into the micromanagement space.

Bridging the Productivity Divide

Ultimately, we found the answers in a mix of data-driven technologies whose insights we've used to inform team planning, workload management and comms.

We were already using a system that helped us monitor the quality of the code and ensures our people are meeting the architectural requirements of the business. Not that we are looking for perfect code because we don't have time for that. But it does have to be uncluttered and performant.

However, while this type of technology gives you a good view of the end-product, it doesn't tell you how well people are working together, whether they have understood what they've been told to do or highlight when they are struggling.

For that we needed another application. One that would give us a behavioural view of an individual coder's momentum. An application that would enable us to understand the pace people worked at and how we could play to their strengths.

When you analyse this type of data, you see people settle into patterns. It gives you an excellent view of the kind of work you can give them but also help direct team selection and the role different people will play in that team.

Leveraging Personality and Behaviour

We saw several different profiles rise out of the data. You have your perfectionists. People who like to hone their code until it's the best it can be. You have your keyboard warriors. People who motor through work and aren't phased by unplanned activities.

There's your nurturing mentor. They are not as active on the keyboard but brilliant at developing juniors into your next cohort of senior developers. Then there's the architects. People who will become your next tech leads. They are the ones who dive into the ticket activity. They're hard-wired to find solutions to problems.

This has two key outputs. First, you can ensure that your teams are optimised and have the right profiles of people in them to maximise output. Second you can start pitching work to the right kind of developer.

You can also spot work ethic and burnout. Who is the person who is overworking themselves? Who isn't switching off? It's not just about productivity and effectiveness but also about wellbeing and welfare. Spotting the signs of burnout early.

What's also become clear is it isn't just about team cohesion. Leadership behaviours must also change. You must identify what good behaviour looks like, document it and formalise it into your leadership model. It's like tooling for teams.

It's also critical to share what you are doing with your team. To show them the tools and the insight. To explain the benefits and impact they are bringing. When you do that people aren't shocked by it. They see that it's not about monitoring but enabling them to become the best developers and teams leads they can be.

Ultimately, hybrid working not only changes behaviours and relationships. It changes the way you manage people. As we have less 1-2-1 contact, technology is helping to fill the gap for what used to be filled by good old-fashioned experience.

It's about hybridising the role of management. The tech is a necessity to the way we work and keeping things relevant. It allows you to anchor your relationships against workload and management style.

You no longer need to rely on the interruptive nature of working because you can now ensure that everyone is as productive as they can be because the management style and workload is matched to their ability and personality.