Marina Sevastidou wasn’t a gamer when she joined Wargaming. She knew the basics, she says, but only the basics. But there she was, tasked to hire game designers, producers, technical artists, people whose entire professional language she didn’t speak. Instead of stepping back from the challenge, she went home and started learning. “You need to push through,” she says. “Don’t give up.” It is advice she now gives to others, but also the mindset that shaped her own career path.
That willingness to sit with discomfort and push through it runs through everything Marina Sevastidou talks about in this conversation, whether that is describing her own career or the question of what it actually takes to build a culture that works.
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Marina Sevastidou is a Senior HR Business Partner for Global Corporate Functions at Wargaming, where she works across talent development, leadership, performance management, and workforce planning. Being a big supporter of DEI initiatives and an Ambassador for Women in Games and Women in Tech, Marina is very active in helping women to grow and strengthen their presence in the tech/gaming industry.
“You have to create a win-win scenario for both,” she says, the business and the people inside it. “Business priorities may not always be in line with what people want. HR needs to be in a position to bring that balance.” That tension, she says, is what makes it challenging. It is also what makes it worth doing.
“In a multicultural environment like Wargaming, with teams distributed across countries, backgrounds, and very different ways of working, communication is an essential pillar for success,”
she says.
This needs to be done from the beginning, so people feel they can share what is on their mind without feeling judged. “This will essentially help to strengthen trust in the team,” she says, “and, therefore, strengthen the relationships.” From there, other things follow: new ideas, honest disagreement, and the willingness to learn from someone who thinks differently.
Her stance on remote work is cautious. It’s not that remote work is bad. It’s that something gets lost.
“You read the [physical] room, you cannot read the screen in the same way,”
she says.
When people are physically in the same space, you catch things, whether a silence, a posture, a look, a gesture, a sudden change in the air, that tell you something is going on before anyone says a word. A screen doesn’t give you that, which is why she believes in hybrid when it is possible, and in making the in-person time count when it happens.
When asked about how she approaches spotting burnout early, she shares that the signs are not always obvious. Most of the time, they are subtle, building up as time goes by. Someone goes a little quieter. Delivery drops slightly. They are present in the room but not quite there. “Maybe the person is going through something personal, and they are coming to work showing a happy face, and you have no idea,” she says. The answer is to establish the kind of relationship between a manager and their team where people feel supported enough to say something before it becomes a crisis. That’s why she advocates for managers to build genuine human connections rather than take on a surveillance approach.
How does AI fit into all of this? Marina believes AI should enable HR, not replace it. Operational tasks, analytics, policy queries, those are fine. But the judgment call about a specific person in a specific situation in a specific company?
“AI doesn’t know what’s going on in your company. The data gives you a foundation. What you do with it still requires a human in the room,”
she says.
Marina Sevastidou is the first guest on The Future Makers: HR Leaders. The full episode, including her take on the talent war in gaming, how data influences people’s decisions, and the cultural move away from directive leadership, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers: HR Leaders, hosted by Annetta Benzar, is a series of conversations with people leaders focused on hiring, workplace culture, leadership, workforce transformation, talent strategy, learning, performance and building the workplace of tomorrow.
A production of The Future Media.
