Workplace factors that encourage and discourage gambling amongst gaming venue employees: an employees' perspective

This paper reports on the second stage of a multi-stage qualitative study into gambling by gaming venue employees and aspects of working in gaming venues that are perceived to influence staff gambling. The paper draws on face-to-face interviews with 34 club, 14 hotel and 18 casino employees. From these data, the paper extracts over 50 reasons why working in a gaming venue can encourage staff gambling, and these are grouped into eight workplace factors – frequent interaction with gamblers, frequent exposure to gambling, influence of fellow employees, influence of management, workplace stress, working shift work, frequent exposure to gambling marketing and promotions, and ‘other’ workplace factors. However, dozens of reasons why working in a venue discourages staff gambling are also associated with these factors. The data also reveal numerous reasons why the venues’ responsible gambling training and their other responsible gambling measures may not deter staff from gambling or at least encourage them to gamble responsibly. As such, this is the first known comprehensive study worldwide to examine the relationship between working in a gambling environment and employee gambling. It builds on an earlier stage of data collection that gathered opinions on this issue from 32 gambling counsellors in Queensland Australia. Subsequent stages have sought opinions from venue managers, problem gamblers and peak industry bodies, and these results will be reported in additional papers to provide inclusive and stakeholder-based perspectives.