Public Gaming International November/December 2021

14 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 PGRI INTERVIEWS Paul Jason: Do employers need to apply new tools to effectively manage remote workers – like software to measure performance and productivity? Brian Rockey: Of course, project man- agement software that has been around for years and is always being improved upon is intended to serve much of that purpose. But, to your question, I think everyone is exploring ways to enhance the process of managing remote work as the work-style of the future will almost certainly include a larger component of remote work. The Nebraska Lottery is a division of the Department of Revenue which has been a proving-ground for managing remote work in Nebraska’s state government. You’ll recall that it happened almost overnight that everyone stopped coming to work. The first week of March of last year, everyone was in the office, in the field, or at PGRI’s Miami conference, and it was business as usual. By the end of the second week of March, everyone was in “shelter-at-home” mode. Quite the dramatic change that threatened to turn everything upside down. But immediately we began to apply project management metrics more rigorously than ever to clarify time spans, intermediate benchmarks, and MBO (management-by-objectives) markers. We now have a wealth of experience and data to inform the next steps towards professional- izing the management of remote work. At the peak of the response to the pandemic, most departments including the Lottery, were at about 70% of staff working remotely, out-of-the-office. The Tax Commissioner’s goal was that the de- partments get to about 50/50 in the office and out-of-the-office. Some state govern- ment agency offices, including the Lottery, are more fully reconstituted, with a larger percentage having returned to working in the office. Given fewer in-office workers, we have been able to effect a more socially- distanced work environment. And we developed what some call “hoteling” areas that have work-stations set up to serve multiple workers who spend some but not all their time in the office. And we have large counter-spaces with docking stations for anyone to set up quickly and easily. Many people think that video-confer- encing is no replacement for in-person meetings. B. Rockey: Of course, video-conferencing will never completely replace in-person meetings. Nobody wants that to happen. And nobody expects that it will ever happen. But perhaps more interesting than lamenting the constraints to travel and in-person meetings is to look at how resourceful everyone has become in our efforts to use the tools available to us to get the job done. Video-conferencing has proven to be a remarkably effective tool to enable personal, albeit remote, interaction and collaboration. So much so that in my opinion it will continue to be used as much going forward as it has been over the last 18 months. I don’t think we would have discovered the incredible utility of video-conferencing if the pandemic had not thrust us into an immersion learning process. Now that we have climbed that steep learning curve, we PGRI INTRODUCTION: Brian Rockey was appointed director on July 1, 2016. But he served in a wide variety of lottery industry positions in the years prior, including Marketing Manager with the Lottery, from startup in 1993 through 2011. He then worked for IGT, the primary contractor for the Nebraska Lottery before returning to the Nebraska Lottery and Charitable Gaming Division as its Director. Sales in FY2021 increased by double-digits over FY2020. Let’s talk about how the adversity of the last 18 months can be a catalyst for positive change and ongoing success for the benefit of good causes. LEARNING FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF THE LAST 18 MONTHS Brian Rockey, Director, Nebraska Lottery Continued on page 44