Esports Job Spotlight: Agent

HR (human resources) traditionally deals with health and safety, workplace policies, employment law, payrolls and holidays, as well as the hiring process and staff departures.

“This is what I’d call HR administration,” says Excel Esports chief people officer Joel Holmes-Darby. “And that is still really vital, it’s still a core function but there’s an old-school thought that this is all HR is. It’s why we call it ‘people management’, because it involves having strategic conversations about your people.

“Yes we may provide products and services, but our biggest asset is our people, whether it’s the players or the people behind the scenes. And that’s our biggest cost base too. It’s about developing and growing people, and making sure they’re focused on the right priorities.”

Joel says that modern HR is more strategic than traditional HR/administration.

“Good strategic HR management is about looking at an organisation and whether it has the right resources, at the right capacity, doing the right jobs. That also incorporates recruitment, learning development strategies and it also includes performance management,” he says.

Joel adds that you can have talented people, but they need to be motivated too. So how can you improve that motivation? How can you continually develop your talent?

“Employee wellbeing is super vital here. Looking after the health and wellbeing of your employees is, for me, a moral obligation of a modern-day organisation, it shouldn’t be optional for companies to do,” Joel explains.

“There is the business angle that if you’re looking after your employees really well, they’re going to be more motivated, but for me that’s a side benefit. The core benefit is satisfying the responsibility organisations have to ensure the people working for them are happy and healthy and motivated, as best you can. Obviously you can’t influence what’s going on outside of the workplace, but you have total influence over the workplace environment. And people spend a third of their lives in the workplace, so it’s a big responsibility.”

Joel continues: “Culture management is important too. And goals come from performance management. We as an organisation set a strategy, which gets broken down into tactical plans to cover different time periods. Within these, there will be team objectives. So our commercial team will have objectives, our esports team will have objectives, then that filters down into individual people.

“It’s about how we ensure that each individual person knows what their personal objectives are, not just for the sake of setting objectives, but for them to have personal purpose: how they tie into the team objectives, how that ties into the tactical plan and how that feeds into the overall strategy.”