In a Q&A with NEXT.io, Anastasiia Pavlusiva, Chief Human Resources Officer at BETER, discusses the role of company culture in business performance, from everyday decision-making and team collaboration to delivering results.
She also shares how BETER adapted its approach to decision-making as the company grew to more than 600 employees, giving teams greater ownership and reducing unnecessary escalations.
NEXT: CEOs and business owners think in terms of revenue, margin and market share. Where does culture sit in that equation?
Anastasiia Pavlusiva: While I wouldn’t put culture alongside financial metrics, I would put it one level below them, 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. When that link weakens, launches are delayed, opportunities are missed, management overhead grows and, ultimately, commercial performance suffers.
Every day, hundreds of decisions are made: how quickly we respond to a client, whether a problem is escalated or solved locally, whether teams collaborate or protect their own interests, whether someone takes responsibility or waits for approval, and so on.
The sum of all those behaviours is culture. 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.
NEXT: Why is this particularly important in iGaming and technology?
AP: Because in iGaming, speed is part of the product.
Technology changes quickly. Competitors move fast and client expectations rise accordingly. A wrong decision is expensive, but a good decision made too late can easily cost just as much.
To use BETER as an example, we bring together technology, sports and esports content, trading and operations across several countries. This is obviously complex internally, but for the client, it must work seamlessly as one system.
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.
At our scale, with more than 740,000 events each year, strong technology and products aren’t enough. We also need clear ownership, fast decisions and teams that can act without waiting for senior leaders at every step of the process.
McKinsey research found that 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 we address this issue is our monthly CEO-led town hall, where leaders and specialists from across the company share updates directly with the whole organisation. This keeps people informed, makes ownership visible and connects their work to business results.
That is where culture stops being an HR topic and instead becomes an important part of how the business operates and scales.
NEXT: Where does culture start affecting business performance?
AP: In very practical places.
Culture 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.
It 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.
Those behaviours are culture in action, and they directly affect how well and how quickly the business executes.
NEXT: So does this mean giving people more autonomy?
AP: It does to a point, but autonomy only works when the culture supports it. Delegating tasks isn’t 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.
Of course, a strong culture doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone agrees. 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. 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.
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.
NEXT: That assumes people want the ownership. Do they?
AP: I’d say that generally they do, but it’s not always for the same reasons. People 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. 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.
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.
NEXT: Can you give an example of what this looks like in practice?
AP: Absolutely. We saw this at BETER as the company continued to expand. Today, we have over 600 employees, and as we grew, we saw that 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 us down.
We responded by moving decision-making closer to the teams, making ownership clearer, and giving leaders more room to act. We also paid more attention to what motivates different people and how roles could better match their strengths and ambitions.
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.
NEXT: How can leaders tell when culture is starting to become a constraint on growth?
AP: Essentially, they need to watch how work moves, not just what people say. 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’re raised openly.
None of these issues will necessarily appear in a culture survey, but they will show themselves in terms of your daily execution.
For leadership teams, that’s an important shift in perspective. Culture shouldn’t only be measured through engagement or retention. It should also be assessed through the way work moves throughout the organisation.
NEXT: What is the one thing you would want CEOs and leadership teams to understand about culture?
AP: Culture isn’t separate from the business. It’s 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.
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
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.
That is why culture isn’t an HR initiative. It’s operating infrastructure.
