The demands of an HR team are never easy, and the Covid-19 pandemic made it that much harder. So many firms in the gambling industry had to manage the transition to working from home, and some did it better than others. On the affiliate side, Catena Media has successfully got everyone working remotely, and they did it pretty quickly. Our Becky Liggero Fontana caught up with Fiona Ewins Brown, Chief HR Officer of Catena Media, to see how they did it.

The challenge of shifting to remote work isn’t the same for every operation or country. “We have offices around the world in a few different locations, so each country has been a little bit different in terms of obviously how the local governments have actually been handling things, so we’ve needed to follow a little bit of their guidelines,” Ewins Brown said. “The first office that we had that started working from home was our Italian office. They’re based in Rome, obviously that happened now, very, very early on, Italy was impacted very quickly so that was an easy decision to make that they all started working from home.”

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But Catena Media was set up very well for a quick transition. “As a company we are lucky that we’re in a situation where we were able to make a decision in all of the locations pretty much from one minute to the next that people could work from home,” she said. “We have the tech setup, and we have the capabilities that we can do everything remotely. So that really helped us. And I know that a lot of game operators that have customer service teams or live studios or any of those types of things, and that was a bit more of a challenge, but as an affiliate, we didn’t have that problem.”