Anastasiia Pavlusiva, BETER’s chief human resources officer, explains how daily decision-making behaviours across 600 employees translate into commercial outcomes in a sector where speed defines the product.
Company culture plays a strategic role in how iGaming businesses execute their plans, drive innovation and deliver sustainable growth, according to Anastasiia Pavlusiva, chief human resources officer at BETER.
In an interview, Pavlusiva positioned culture a level beneath revenue, margin and market share, among the factors that determine whether a company can deliver on those metrics.
“You can have a strong strategy, advanced technology and talented people, but between strategy and P&L sits execution, which is the ability to turn plans into results,” she said. “When that link weakens, launches are delayed, opportunities are missed, management overhead grows and, ultimately, commercial performance suffers.”
Hundreds of Daily Decisions Shape Business Outcomes
Every day, hundreds of decisions are made across an organisation, from how quickly a client receives a response to whether a problem is escalated or solved locally, whether teams collaborate or protect their own interests, and whether someone takes responsibility or waits for approval, Pavlusiva said.
“The sum of all those behaviours is culture,” she said. “For me it’s not simply about providing a comfortable workplace. It’s about whether the way an organisation behaves accelerates its strategy or quietly works against it.”
That dynamic takes on particular importance in the iGaming and technology sectors, where speed forms part of the product itself, she said. Competitors move fast, client expectations rise accordingly, and a good decision made too late can cost just as much as a wrong one.
BETER combines technology, sports and esports content, trading and operations across several countries. The setup is complex internally, but for the client, it must work seamlessly as one system, she said.
“While clients don’t see culture directly, they do feel its impact in response times, product reliability, implementation speed, and how quickly issues are resolved,” Pavlusiva said.
At BETER’s scale, with more than 740,000 events each year, strong technology and products are not enough. The company also needs clear ownership, fast decisions and teams that can act without waiting for senior leaders at every step of the process, she said.
Pavlusiva cited McKinsey research that found only 22% of transformations focus explicitly on improving decision-making, even though slow or poor decisions are a common source of performance problems.
At BETER, one practical example of how the company addresses this issue is its monthly CEO-led town hall, where leaders and specialists from across the organisation share updates directly with the whole organisation. This keeps people informed, makes ownership visible and connects their work to business results, she said.
“That is where culture stops being an HR topic and instead becomes an important part of how the business operates and scales,” she said.
Culture Shows Up in Practical Business Functions
Culture affects business performance in very practical places, Pavlusiva said. It shows up in how people make decisions, work together and respond when something goes wrong.
Decision speed affects time-to-market. Cross-functional collaboration determines how much energy goes into internal alignment rather than serving customers. Accountability determines how many problems are solved where they appear, rather than being escalated upwards, she said.
Culture also shows up in how information moves through the organisation. In a healthy culture, people raise bad news early, challenge decisions when they see a risk and take on responsibility for solving problems. In a weaker culture, people protect themselves, decisions move upwards and issues stay hidden until they become expensive to fix, she said.
“Those behaviours are culture in action, and they directly affect how well and how quickly the business executes,” Pavlusiva said.
Autonomy Requires Clear Decision Principles
Granting people more autonomy only works when the culture supports it, she said. Delegating tasks is not enough, and the real shift comes when you move from “I know what needs to be done” to “the organisation knows how to make good decisions without me.”
That requires clear ownership, strong leaders, trust and shared decision principles. People need to know where they have freedom to act, where they need to escalate and what boundaries they cannot cross, she said.
A strong culture does not necessarily mean that everyone agrees, Pavlusiva said. In fact, healthy organisations often have more constructive disagreement because people feel responsible for the outcome. The goal is to use that disagreement to make a better decision, then commit to it and move forward.
AI has significantly raised the stakes in this respect, she said. People closest to a problem can now find insights, build automation and redesign processes faster than a traditional hierarchy can absorb their ideas. If every experiment still needs to travel through several layers of approval, much of that advantage disappears.
“What we want is for innovation to happen close to the problem, while the business provides clear guardrails around risk, data and security,” she said. “The goal isn’t to have less control. It’s about moving that control from individual managers into the way that the organisation operates as a whole.”
Motivation Differs Across Individuals
People generally want ownership, but not always for the same reasons, Pavlusiva said. They are motivated by different things: career progression, recognition, individuality, challenge, or gaining a greater sense of purpose.
A manager who assumes everyone is motivated by promotion will connect with some people, but miss the mark with others, she said. One person may be driven by career progression, another by recognition, another by the opportunity to prove themselves, and another by purpose.
“The leadership challenge is to understand what drives each individual and connect that motivation with the needs of the business,” she said. “That’s why good delegation is not simply about giving people responsibility. It’s about understanding what drives them and creating the right conditions for them to want to take on that responsibility. This is what ultimately turns ownership from an instruction into behaviour.”
BETER Scaled Decision-Making Alongside Headcount
BETER experienced this dynamic as the company continued to expand. Today, the company has over 600 employees, and as it grew, some decisions were still moving too far up the organisational chain. This had worked at an earlier stage, but at a larger scale, it really started to slow the business down, Pavlusiva said.
The company responded by moving decision-making closer to the teams, making ownership clearer, and giving leaders more room to act. It also paid more attention to what motivates different people and how roles could better match their strengths and ambitions, she said.
The result was faster decisions, fewer unnecessary escalations, and more senior management time for the issues that genuinely required it.
“The lesson was simple: scaling teams isn’t enough. To scale the business, you must also scale decision-making,” Pavlusiva said.
Warning Signs Appear in Daily Execution
Leaders can tell when culture is starting to become a constraint on growth by watching how work moves, not just what people say, she said.
Some of the main warning signs are decisions taking longer than they should, the same issues repeatedly reaching senior management, teams waiting for approval instead of acting, cross-functional work requiring too many meetings, and problems being discussed privately before they are raised openly, she said.
None of these issues will necessarily appear in a culture survey, but they will show themselves in terms of daily execution, Pavlusiva said.
“For leadership teams, that’s an important shift in perspective,” she said. “Culture shouldn’t only be measured through engagement or retention. It should also be assessed through the way work moves throughout the organisation.”
Culture Functions as Operating Infrastructure
Culture is not separate from the business, Pavlusiva said. It is how the business runs.
“Strategy sets the direction. Structure defines who owns what. Processes create consistency. Culture, however, determines what people actually do when there is no rule, and no senior leader in the room,” she said.
This becomes even more important as a company grows. More people, teams and markets bring more complexity. No one process can cover every single situation, but a strong culture gives people a shared way to make decisions, solve problems and move work forward, irrespective of the challenges involved, she said.
“Every company already has a culture. The real question for CEOs and leadership teams is whether that culture helps the business make better decisions and move faster, or whether it gets in the way,” Pavlusiva said. “That is why culture isn’t an HR initiative. It’s operating infrastructure.”
Anastasiia Pavlusiva is chief human resources officer at BETER, where she oversees people strategy, organisational development and talent management. With expertise spanning international markets, workforce planning and HR transformation, she focuses on aligning people and leadership with wider business objectives to support sustainable growth.