Ask Me Anything: Working Together, Apart, In Dynamic Times. Q&A with Robin Hunicke

[Music] good afternoon folks my name is brian francis i'm a community manager for gdc i'm a contributing editor at gamma suture.com which is a website with a name if you need to refer to me in the third person i use the pronouns he him today i'm delighted to be joined by phenomena ceo robin hewnicky robin uh would you like to introduce yourself real quick hi i'm robin heneke i'm the ceo of phenomena we're a 22 person company downtown san francisco until we became completely remote so i'm here today to talk to people about what that means um i thought i'd give people a little bit of an introduction just describe kind of where we are um so that you know the kind of contacts that i'm in i've worked with teams as large as 180 and my current team is 22 people that's three functional teams so teams about five to seven typically um is where we start with uh with only on any game that we make inside of phenomena and uh we were already two days a week

remote when the pandemic hit and we went uh to full remote in advance of the pandemic so we've been fully remote for almost four and a half months now miss pronouncing a number of uh things that are my intro robin everybody does it but uh with with that in mind uh i would like to quickly give a call out for folks to start asking their questions for rahm for robin because we are here to talk about uh the art and business of working from home but uh while you put your questions in chat uh uh um i'm going to go ahead with kind of an explainer for our mindset about doing this um uh ama uh i'm gonna level with you we're here because is weird is weird we are not in moscone center my cat is right behind me and i'm using a light from my miniature painting kit to make sure i don't look like a goblin that i would be painting when a once in a century global pandemic hits your job and your life get up ended even if like me uh or robin's team

sometimes you're already working from home um this is true at game development studios all over the world uh and as a ceo phenomena um you've robin's been at the front line of wrangling the challenges that come with moving studio-based teams to remote work um like i said we're gonna take your questions uh and uh to help us get the right questions in we would like to ask you to please use the questions section and swap card to submit them and then go ahead and upvote the questions that you want to see asked because we will use that to help figure out what needs to be talked about i can only encourage you to please ask those questions please click liberally otherwise i will start asking robin about tins made using art from 1980s mexico uh anti-drug propaganda campaign or i will introduce you to my cat which i know people want and i know she wants that but we we're here to answer your

questions um shout out to victor rozelle rosales in chat uh saying hi from tokyo um we can go ahead and get started with uh the first question from our good friend jason de la rocca all right jason jason thanks for running gdc pitch um who doesn't want to know what your go-to go-to cocktail recipe is for this of course he does perfect start perfect no this is quarantine rules like so i actually i actually started making my own limoncello during the quarantine because i have a lemon tree behind my house in santa cruz and so i have a quarantini that is made out of limoncello that i made for my from my lemons um which is basically vodka and lemon peels that you soak for a really long time and then i love to do it with um the raw uh bitter cherry juice from whole foods a little bit of ice and a splash of campari with a slice of lime that's actually pretty great um uh for my part i'm just missing an old-fashioned but if you uh want more mixology lessons we

do have a mixologist i think tonight uh the one thing i truly miss yeah we we have you can learn how to make your own cocktails from home too for your home game development studios okay serious questions now michael steffen would like to know what are your favorite remote tools and how do you get your team to actually use them especially if you're a less formal indie team right so one of the things that we have found over the years with phenomena is that you can use literally anything as long as it tracks data and can be edited by multiple people right so you can do everything from just a google spreadsheet or when we were in person you know a wall with sticky notes all the way down to something really advanced like dev track or asana where you're building out a full waterfall and then trying to to follow everything um it's really actually up to the discretion of the producers on our teams so some of our teams use asana some of them use google uh google docs and spreadsheets for burn downs that they prefer to maintain on their own some people use mondays.com and i personally use a task tracker

myself in addition to whatever i use on the team called omnifocus and i started using that at the beginning of this last month because um i started to find that i was um getting a little bit scattered in terms of just trying to check in on slack and check in on all these other things and i needed a place myself where i could dump everything that was coming into my brain um i've been making games long enough now that um sometimes i forget stuff so i have to write it down um in terms of getting people to use it uh because phenomena was a two day week remote studio and we had no meeting tuesday thursdays we already had to be using this kind of software to coordinate action on the days when people are going to be cranking and working from home um and i think that the the most comfortable way to introduce um a piece of software whether it's a slack kind of channel or a hangout space um is to have a central place where you communicate with everyone and then do a reminder uh before you're

going to be using it so hey everybody we're going to be checking in in this space hey everybody i'm going to need you to check your mondays today i'm going to be working on it in an hour before this hour is up could you please check in and make sure that you've made your monday correct we also use um a piece of software called 15.5 now which uh was suggested to me uh by my friend chelsea who works at iron galaxy um and that's actually a really helpful tool uh you check in on your own kind of goals for the week and then there's actually some questions that you can answer that the team can create a conversation around like for example what are some roles that you wish we had at the company or what was the best thing that happened to you this week or whatever um so i think it's really about uh setting up a reminder and having that conversation ahead of time so that people get used to using it and then every week at the team meeting you can remind people oh hey your 15-5 is due today last week our you know our submission rate was 84 and our average was 3.5 out of 5. because we had kind of a bummer week in the news or whatever uh right on um chelsea belasco would

like to know uh how do you establish good boundaries from working from home real quick folks uh i did grab chelsea's question but i need to grab the rest of the questions from our chat section in order to manage the number of good questions you're asking please make sure to ask them there so yeah so chelsea's question was remind me again it was boundaries uh yeah how do you establish good boundaries for working from home right so one of the things that we're really talking about a lot lately is uh flexibility and that includes the flexibility to be able to shut your camera off so not everybody wants to be like showing everyone the world their home so some people use video backgrounds but some people just don't feel comfortable having 10 people staring at them for an hour at a time and if you're doing that kind of work all day especially if you're a producer it can be very helpful to for example take your one-on-ones from a phone where you don't have video and so really normalizing the idea that the video is a performance and that not everybody wants to perform all the time um the other thing that we've been really trying to do is to make people feel less compelled to attend meetings but to give them the opportunity to attend if they want

to so create a shared space um for project and schedule meetings of two to three people say in that space and then tell the rest of the team this is the block of meetings we're having this week if you want to just hang out and listen and not be present you can turn on your audio and not turn on your camera and you can be kind of in the room while the designers are talking about something or in the room so it allows you to have kind of a soft boundary which you used to have at your desk and you no longer have now when your tv is on and then or your your camera and then the other thing is just really um to make it okay to have no meeting days we just implemented a flex friday program uh at the beginning of august based on the 15 fives that we were getting thanks chelsea um i think that uh one of the things that's happening is people's allostatic load is really high right now uh would you be able to define allstate yes yeah actually um i have um i have a link for it which i could probably put in the chat um essentially um where is the chat here

there it is chat um i'll send it to you and then you can send it out um managing your allostatic load is about thinking about the amount of stress you have on a day-to-day basis and one of the things that's happening in this pandemic right now is that especially people that have a lot of people at home with them for example people that have kids have constant interruptions and stress related to homeschooling taking care of their families and stuff like this and so the normal load that someone's processing in their work day is is really high and then on top of that there's social stress and political stress and a lot of the stuff that we've seen since the protests have began so it's like really important to understand that everybody's kind of pegged which means that you need some time to relax and so flex fridays we've implemented which will be on fridays not only are there no meetings there are no one-on-ones there are no check-ins and if you want to take that day to crank and catch up on something because your load was too high on a different day during the week that's totally fine if you want to just take a long weekend no one's going to ask so we're going to

be measuring our throughput and see if everybody uh does what i expect which is better with a flexible friday three-day weekend and then who knows who might even move to a four-day weekend we'll see roger that um for the historical record i guess we should note that we were talking about referring to the um uh black lives matter protests uh when chelsea was referring to that if we just say the protests they won't know yeah the george floyd murder protests yes thank you thank you robert um uh um uh derek clark would like to ask um we are all having to adapt and do things differently what have you found that has stayed the same from on-site development through the transition to remote work so one of the things that we've been doing for a long time is we've been doing it all hands and because we had some remote workers in europe and stuff we actually ended up getting into the habit of doing a show-and-tell on fridays and that's been actually really fantastic uh lately we've been actually building something in roblox and so we've been playing it on friday afternoons after the all hands and that's been really great um there's just nothing better than playing your game together and so if you have a kind of game that you can play together

and be on camera and comment on it it's just still so great to do a play test with the team um that's been fantastic and then the other thing is that we actually um we've tried to keep the kitchen hangouts normal so in the morning before people would come into work they'd get some coffee talk a little bit share snacks tips talk about movies and games they're playing stuff like that so we have a kitchen hangout space that we still use and that's actually been very helpful as well oh neat man i think we should steal my attention steal that one um uh a bunch of questions we have a good news we have a lot of questions from chat uh mixed news the upvoting is a bit uh there's a lot of questions and not much uploading so i'd like to encourage votes folks just pick the questions you like so that we can figure out what you need to know otherwise i have to pick and what i'm going to hit is sean mcpherson's question which is uh hi there i have heard that employees who are hired for a remote position can sometimes be disregarded or blamed for something simply because they aren't in the office now that we're all working remotely how could one avoid these situations and create a friendly and trusting relationship between team members thank you great question sean

yeah that is a great question um because we're relatively small and we work in small teams that kind of a situation doesn't typically happen at phenomena but i have seen it happen on larger teams and i guess if i was going to run my producer brain through that problem what i would say is that in general um the best thing to do on a team is to educate everyone about how not to start fires so if you have a problem with somebody if someone said something in a meeting or they didn't deliver on a task and you're feeling frustrated it's really really important to take the time out of your day to have that little difficult conversation it's a tiny one but it's important to do it up front because if you don't do it up front then it builds and it grows and it creates more tension and you tend to sort of see what you're upset about so you tend to gather a little evidence against that other person and pretty soon you're you're in a beef so i would say that the best way to make sure that that doesn't happen is to check for it so you know when you're doing one-on-ones with people to sort of check in and say hey have you uh anything anything come up this week that you need to discuss with anyone else any any any snags in your workflow anything i can help you with in terms of

making things go smoothly so if you're producing a group like that just make sure that you're encouraging those conversations and those one-on-ones it's really hard to encourage one-on-ones right now because people really are meeting out so the other thing to do is to keep your meeting load low so that casual conversations can occur um and people can chat with one another when they need to uh tony evans would like to know what are your strategies for preventing remote team members from burning out so this is actually something that we've been thinking about a lot and one of the reasons that we're doing the flex fridays i'm especially concerned with the election coming up and fall coming into play kids having to go back to school we have a lot of parents at phenomena who are really really on the fence about what to do moving forward even in different parts of the bay area there's different messaging depending on what age your child is and stuff so the reason that we started the flex fridays is really to encourage people to take that extra day um we generally schedule for four hours of concrete deliverable work a day because you have at least two hours of meetings plus you

have to have lunch and then used to have your commute but that commute time and that lunch time we're getting eaten up by many people's children and families and so still like four hour work week keeping a four hour work week really work day really solid would still be hard for some people so also being flexible about how much work you're scheduling someone for that really requires a focused head um engineers in particular can uh sometimes double down on engineering tasks because it feels like control and so monitoring your engineers and making sure that they're checking in with their families and not just burying their heads and their computers is also really important um uh camille mowinsky would like to ask uh how do you handle communication with part-time team members some of them might be working uh very irregular hours so this is actually a really good question for people that also have international teams um actually being able to respect people's time on and time off of something like a slack or email having a lot more conversations in organized fashion and not trying to ping

people all the time is really good um and scheduling a regular check-in at least every week is also very helpful so worst case scenario if you start the week with a check-in you'll be able to remember something that came up last week that you didn't get a chance to talk about because times didn't didn't uh coordinate um i think one of the hardest things to do is to be working with a team remotely um or a collaborator remotely who's in a very different time zone um and the standard practices are always about making sure that you understand what their on hours are their off hours are and making it a priority to be sensitive to those requests based on their calendaring uh next question comes from uh yes hey robin we worked together a long time ago at ea she's still there yeah um uh i have a couple of questions uh one how do you measure velocity and productivity hit created by uh work at home two it's getting very hard to keep people socializing with each other there are just a lot of things that naturally come up when people are in a

casual setting accidental creativity is one for example do you have anything special to encourage non-agenda-driven conversations among the people you work with yeah so actually we have a policy um that actually comes from the google study about the aristotle project about how to have the world's best meetings and best teams i read that stuff pretty actively and the other thing that we do is we have um we've built the company philosophy around the idea of a deliberately developmental organization so i can actually send you um the original article we can put that out in the chat that i read about this particular um sort of idea it's from the harvard business review um and the idea is that you want people to be able to bring their full selves to work as you know especially when you work in a larger organization you can feel like you kind of have two versions of you there's the version of you that you bring to the office that's like doing everything perfectly and just okay or just fine and then there's the part of you like you get in your car and you're like oh you know like i'm going through a breakup or my kids

really struggling at school or my mom has cancer or whatever it is and so when we founded phenomena we wanted to use the deliberately developmental organizational strategies to create a safe space for people to really truly be themselves there's actually a book about it which i'll also share with you it's called an everyone place um or in everyone culture sorry becoming a deliberately development developmental organization and the idea is that what you want to do is um start your meetings with real talk about what's going on in your lives and not be embarrassed if you're having a bad day to say like hey everybody i'm really struggling so for example a few weeks ago my brother actually came down with kovid and i had a meeting that i had to attend and i started the meeting by saying listen i'm sorry i'm gonna turn my camera off because i'm not in a really great place my brother's not well i'm really worried about my brother and my family so i'm going to be quiet in this meeting if you really need something for me i'll be here but i'm just going to be taking some time to myself being able to say that kind of stuff really does help people feel comfortable sharing and socializing

outside of the of the sort of work scenario and if you do it a little bit every time you meet at the beginning and at the end then eventually it becomes part of the culture um i think the other thing is to really understand that like sometimes people just don't really feel social and that's okay like right now it's very hard we actually started the pandemic with like a costume theme for our friday all hands or people would wear hats and it was really fun for a while and then it got to the point where it just kind of felt like we were trying too hard to be okay with what is really actually turning into being like a very difficult and mismanaged situation on the federal level and so we stopped pretending we don't dress up for meetings anymore and occasionally we may but i think the idea is to not force it and to try and be really honest it does mean that the producers are going to do more emotional labor there is going to be more chit chat about difficult stuff which means your producers need more free time to kind of offload that stuff but they should be used to doing that work on their own anyway because that's the job

um uh wow i'm so sorry to hear that you're uh he's better actually he got better yeah and no one else is infected so it was a miracle yeah my nephew yeah okay um i was like this is might be about him right he's had um uh camille uh you're welcome i i really try to do my best for pronouncing focusing names which is why i felt bad about messing up robins earlier um more questions megan brin uh has a great one how do you create an environment where younger or newer folks feel more comfortable speaking up or pointing out issues especially now that you just can't chat and can't chat in person yeah so we're actually in the process of uh doing a real deep dive on this issue the way that we founded phenomena the reason that martin and i decided to use the deliberately developmental framework was because we wanted to hire young people with less experience and then develop them towards what's called their edge so the idea is that you're really confident about the things that you're good at but you're also confident about the things that you're not good at and you say like i'm not so good at listening or i'm not so good at turn

taking or i'm not so good at following up on requests whatever it is that you need to be working on and then you work with your producer and the people around you to make sure that you're making your edge better um so one of the best things that you can do to make young people feel safe and heard is to make everybody obviously in the process of learning there's no such thing as a person in a developmental organization who doesn't have an edge or who isn't learning or isn't improving because we all are always learning so i think that it's getting rid of the auteur culture or this idea that there's people that know how to do it and people that don't i mean especially now in this pandemic nobody knows what's happening and no nobody knows how to do it right this is like we're all learning together so really embracing that is important um i also think that um there are ways to set up conversations where people can feel safer talking to say a consultant so for example we have a community action program that we're putting together where we set aside ten thousand dollars to donate to local actions around black lives

matter and the george boy disaster and thinking about how to make policing uh and life more safe here for black people and the bay area however in order to adjudicate that conversation we probably need to bring in someone who's an expert and none of us are and so having the conversation with people about who could we bring in to educate ourselves we had a fantastic person come in uh just about six months before the pandemic to educate the whole team about uh trans language using people's uh correct pronouns how to recognize those pronouns and how to engage with the trans person in your community because we wanted our employees to feel safe and inclusive at the same time we wanted them to get some education because some of them hadn't necessarily grown up around trans people and needed some help and so i think it's often about um bringing in experts and having conversations as a group so that everyone at all levels of the organization and all all sort of philosophies and walks of life can develop a sense of affinity around a shared goal which is for us is making an inclusive org we

have eight minutes left in the conversation i'd like to involve invite everyone who's watching to submit some more questions please be sure to use the questions uh section when you do so and then so that folks can vote on can upvote the questions although you know we're going down the queue here if just because the question's getting less votes doesn't mean it's not going to get asked for instance oh god that sounds like a weird call-out anyway matt warner would like to know what's the best way to get in contact with developers and decision makers they're finding it hard to do through pax east and gdc which is just kind of like speaks to how um hey yeah we work for gdc we got disrupted real hard this year um even if it's if we're trying to stay on topic about working in your company you know a lot of work got done at these spaces in these events how do you view it as a team grappled with these events changing their venues so obviously you know i really miss being in events i'm missing friends like chelsea and having a beer and talking about what's been going on in the industry um but i think what we've been doing uh to create connections with other developers and to stay in touch with our friends is doing a lot of remote zooms you know

drink ups and meetups and actually movie nights is another one that's really great or gaming with each other if you're trying to break in it's actually it is really critical that um that you figure out a way to to create a conversation with developers and it is really hard i've actually been um talking a little bit with megan scavio she and i helped run an event called amplifying new voices and i've been thinking a little bit about some kind of event that we could start will run that would effectively um act in the same fashion as the gdc um conference associate kind of uh experience but it's very very difficult and actually i think that this is a question for the organizations that run events like pax and gdc um as the pax dev ambassador i'll bring it to the pacs staff because i know that pax will be online this year maybe there'll be some ways that we can do some amas with developers for fans um i'm going to tweak uh victor rosales rizzola's question here um uh their team uses slack and zoom and

they're feeling a loss of communication uh what are other companies doing to improve the lack of face-to-face communication even while balancing what you said a couple minutes ago about the option to go cameraless during meetings so one thing you can do is try to do more social events um that are opt in that are that are you know at times that people that have kids can participate and that don't require alcohol so you know there's just a lot of stuff that you have to work around given the given the way things are working right now um you know the other thing is to just do uh a phone call just a one-on-one phone call with another member of the team and check in um if you have been social distancing and are safe and don't have any symptoms you can also if you if you can travel to see another teammate so i have a couple of teammates that i'm in a pod with that i travel to see on a regular basis um and that's just basically to show up

see them be with them in a park um or a public space maybe we both bring a beer we have a beer we talk um but try to get a little bit of face time with people if you do happen to be developing in the same city you'd be surprised like it can look really fine on the camera and then actually when the person shuts off the camera they can feel incredibly isolated and alone and some people really need face time and seeing other people physically in order to feel connected i'm not that way um but but i i know people who are and it's actually a very difficult time so um i think actually if you can safely check in and do a distance hangout or a picnic sometimes that's also even just with one other person on your team that can be very helpful and then my favorite thing is to send chocolate or flowers someone from my team sent me chocolate yesterday and i was so happy with about four minutes 20 nice left on the clock um uh um we're going to try and get as many questions as we can so robin we may need to uh answers um uh a

dt uh bandalamudi uh would like to know uh could game development move to a remote model even after the pandemic ends uh completely remote absolutely although i really do miss the office we've actually decided to um to de-res and actually wait until the pandemic is over to figure out what in-person work would look like if we decided to do it again the other thing is is that with the constraints that we're seeing traveling and not driving your car all the time um you know being something that's uh sort of restricted is actually really good for the environment so i'm actually not so positive on the idea of us all having to start flying all over the world again in order to do our business um it's kind of a it's it's a it's a toss-up for me yeah um sean mcpherson asks uh you mentioned uh including in keeping the office kitchen around because of the social importance of it are there other activities that are great and effective this time for uh team building building morale and lifting spirits yeah so you can have office olympics um that's something that um our office coordinator jamie put together uh she'll just organize different uh types of

tests and and games that we can play against each other the last one i believe was a typing test to see who can type the fastest most accurately um and a lot of these are just run in the slack channel that are in at the company the other thing that i saw recently was someone had a ship party and they actually shipped meals and tequila mix and all this crazy stuff to their people so that they could have a big party together double fine also did a really great uh personalized tequila bottle for their 20th anniversary which was fantastic so sending people things in their homes and then getting on camera together is actually kind of fun i even attended a magic show like that with a pitchford so that was pretty great um maggie larouche would like to know uh working remote seems to have increased the amount of meetings across the board what are the best practices that were introduced to reduce them so your team can focus and deliver on their 20 hour a week goals yeah so actually the no meeting days are really really essential having very short meetings is also essential having an agenda ahead of the meeting obviously really helpful um if you want to have time in a meeting to brainstorm time boxing that time and then google actually has a short meetings option in its menu if you're

using google calendar you can click the short meetings and it'll end your meetings five or ten minutes earlier so that you don't end up in a back-to-back meeting cycle with no bathroom breaks which is a really really bad place to be oh shoot that's how i got on this call um uh um okay a couple minutes left uh we're gonna ask a couple more questions before we do when you're done here please click on the session evaluation it's gonna pop up either in this session you can click on it again to see it or it'll come up through your notifications uh if you give feedback on the session you know whether it's good or bad we'll be able to improve these sessions in the future uh we never did amas before this is new we like it we did like a couple but now we're doing a lot um this question i'm going to try and get at least one other question besides this one in but uh anisha deshmani would like to know um would love any ideas on onboarding teammates who are new to a project or company it's so much harder to do when there aren't people around to absorb information from yeah so we have a wiki that we've been building out jamie's been helping with that as well and i think that i'm building an internal wiki that shows what it's like um to be part of the team and then

keeping that conversation really going is important because it gives someone something to latch on to having someone that they can follow through a day so be on a bunch of different calls with the producer as they manage different parts of the of the project is also helpful um and then finally inviting them to present or give conversation um in a more relaxed forum so we have um tech talks that we do people volunteer to do tech talks we also have culture talks that sometimes happen over lunch hour people talk about the food from their cultures where they grew up and stuff so just creating events where they can contribute something personal is very helpful um in the long run um my favorite thing to make people feel involved is what we call the thumbs up award we give it away every friday if you get the thumbs up your job the next week is to give it to someone who did something that made you feel great it can be anything it doesn't have to be a specifically to the development but as the thumbs up goes around it actually helps you see who is doing nice things for other people and that helps people feel encouraged to do nice things and it gets people involved in the cycle of of being a friend at the office which is important

we are running a slightly bit out of time um but i'm going to get one more question robin real quick if they have more questions from you where should they ask them go ahead and ask me on twitter i'll do i'll go ahead and answer your dms or your your tweets as much as i can i'll start with right now and um and uh what's your twitter handle again it's just my last name at h-u-n-i-c-k-e okay i have a question that i've been thinking about actually since the um uh ukrainian protests that led to uh the ouster of the president over there in like 2015 or so um what are your thoughts about uh what happens when a team member is suddenly in an area um that's seeing something like the george floyd protests or the uprising and they either want to participate they're struggling whether um the the struggle to go out over covid um like if the person is in a physical part of the world that is suddenly um in a kind of upheaval um whether it affects them whether they want to participate and be a good citizen what are your thoughts about accommodating that even though they're trying to like uh you know work earn money from you for instance oh

absolutely like everyone at phenomena the the minute that the protests uh became apparently necessary and we needed to actually start really really pushing on this issue uh here in the bay area um everybody at the at the office on at the friday meetup i just sort of said hey listen if you're gonna be participating in protests just stay safe please let us know where you are if you need a buddy if you have any questions people are going to be posting in the channel we created a channel specifically related to black lives matter and some of the protests that were happening in oakland in particular martin my co-founder lives just next to city hall and i live just next to city hall in san francisco so you know i mean i think it does affect you and the idea with being able to be honest about who you are at work is that this never comes up as a surprise at phenomena when bad happens we could talk about it and it's very important for everyone to recognize that bad is going to be happening for a while so we need to be okay with being less productive and more caring towards one another if we don't do that we'll never get through anything so it's essential that's the right message to end this cut this uh this ama session on i think uh robin thank you so much for joining us everyone in chat

yeah thank you so much for asking questions um stick around we have more amas going on tomorrow we have more great sessions tonight um and i hope you all have a safe and lovely wednesday wednesday right i don't bye everyone