Sky Betting & Gaming readies new Leeds office for remote working transition

Sky Betting and Gaming (SBG) will promote a ‘working from home’-style environment as development of its new 136,000 sq ft headquarters in Leeds nears completion. The move to the 4 Wellington Place office will significantly increase floor space and more than double its meeting rooms from 37 to 79. The opening will see SBG consolidate 1,400 staff members across two separate offices within the Wellington Place development into one single space. External works were completed in December, with internal building work scheduled to begin at the end of this month, with an eventual completion date in May. In comments reported by The Yorkshire Post, SBG brand, creative and sponsorship director Michael Afflick, who is overseeing the project, revealed that SBG would move to a hybrid-style working environment to allow for improved remote working conditions as the Covid-19 pandemic continues. Afflick confirmed the basis would be similar to that used by parent company Flutter Entertainment. As part of this model, employees will no longer have a fixed desk in the office, with six desks now being used for every 10 people working from the office. In addition, SBG will reportedly set up so-called ‘neighbourhoods’ for each operating department, which employees can also connect to while working from home. Four floors of the Wellington Place development will be devoted to the neighbourhood model, providing up to 266 physical desks and a combination of work benches, alongside sitting and standing desks. The floors will each house between eight and 18 meeting rooms, plus informal meeting spaces, quiet pods for individual working and a ‘zen zone’ recreational environment for socialising and gaming. “We’re trying to promote working from home when you want to and coming into the office when you need to, which we think will be about 40% of the time,” Afflick told The Yorkshire Post. “We’re preparing for a post-Covid world, so the desks won’t be two metres apart. “We want to make coming into work more appealing than it ever was before. We think that part-time office working, and more collaborative spaces, will set us up better for the future,” he added. To facilitate integration and efficiency, SBG is currently building a booking app for meeting rooms, parking spaces and bike spaces. It is also understood the firm is spending £1m on new video conferencing and audiovisual equipment to aid remote working. The new office will also feature a WeWork-style in-house café with a beer pump, an amphitheatre presentation area and in-house gym, as well as a production and editing suite and training and interview facilities. “We’re thinking about lighting, acoustics, different equipment, different set-ups, making sure we take every consideration into account,” Afflick added.