In CMI’s Everyone Economy report, Mauro Orru, the managing director of gaming investment group, Neon Eight Technologies, speaks in-depth about his organisation’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. To build a team of more than 300 people spread across offices from the UK and Romania to Dubai, India, and China, the company worked to attract, retain, and develop some of the best talent from across the world, regardless of their background.
Was that hard work of building a truly global and inclusive team worth it? Orru explains that the firm’s efforts have resulted in a host of concrete business advantages.
More diversity, more ideas
First, Orru points to the product ideas and market entry strategies the company would never have been aware of if it didn’t employ people from such a wide array of backgrounds. One of Neon’s most successful businesses to date is focused on analysing and selling cricket data, but Orru himself was originally unfamiliar with the sport.
“I personally didn't understand cricket until I started making money out of it. I'm from Italy originally and there’'’s no cricket there. It's just not played as a sport,” he explains. The idea for the business came from being alert to the interests and concerns of those from very different backgrounds. Orru's commitment to listening to diverse voices continues to provide Neon with profitable business ideas.
A game rich in data
Leaders who are committed to listening to diverse voices will put themselves in a position to identify new market opportunities, like Neon Eight has done with cricket
“We developed a virtual gaming product about 18 months ago. The recruitment of people in India and Australia actually drove us to be interested in modelling kabaddi, which is another sport that's very popular in certain countries, but again, I had no idea that that existed to be honest,” Orru confesses. “If we hadn’t had that intelligence first-hand from people located in those countries, we wouldn't have developed that product.”
If we hadn’t had that intelligence first-hand from people located in those countries, we wouldn’t have developed that product
Mauro Orru, the managing director of gaming investment group Neon Eight Technologies
Good management ideas can come from anywhere
Neon doesn’t just benefit from product ideas from employees in diverse locations. It also benefits from an exchange of management best practice between its offices around the world. A programme of short-term transfers between the company’s many offices allows good ideas in one country to more easily spread to staff in another.
“We've got a programme where we allow people at a certain level to travel to any of our other offices and spend three months at a time,” Orru explains. “We like to do that so they learn what the culture is like in those places and then bring it back home. They say to people, ‘Oh, in the London office, they did it like that’ or, ‘Oh, in the China office, they did it like that.’ We feel that stuff like that is actually very important,” Orru says.
Longer hours, less risk, lower costs
As well as building a hugely diverse tech business, Mauro Orru is a trustee of two animal charities: Romanian Rescue Appeal and Stray2Me Rescue
The geographic diversity of Neon’s workforce helps the company succeed in another way, according to Orru – thanks to its worldwide spread, the business can seamlessly serve customers around the clock atst a competitive cost.
“We are famous in the industry for being the best quality and the widest-spread provider of cricket data. Which again is a consequence of such a diverse workforce that can work 24/7. Because our operations are spread across the globe, this allows for everybody to be working during sociable hours but still being able to cover a much wider spread of the daytime,” he notes.
Having staff in different time zones keeps Neon Eight crunching numbers round the clock. But it also allows the firm to weather disruptions in any one location. “We feel from a disaster recovery and business continuity perspective, it has provided us with a lot more solutions,” Orru adds.
More from CMI
And it has provided these benefits while reducing staff costs for the company. With salaries much lower in some locations than others, the firm is able to find high-quality talent at less cost by being willing to look in less expected corners of the world. “There's a lot of work that goes into it. You’ve got tota to invest in your HR resources. But the payback is you pay so much less for your talent. You retain them easier. You're developing a skill set in that country that is very much on demand,” he concludes.
Orru and his team have put tremendous effort into developing a fast-paced, open-minded company culture that is welcoming to talent from around the world. But he is convinced that building an inclusive global culture was well worth the effort, bringing the company more ideas and coverage at lower risk and lower cost.