Building a Strong Studio Culture Microtalks

[Music] my name is yesenia cisneros and i am the lead producer at brass line entertainment and thank you thank you and today i'm going to be talking to you about production and empathy and how it can help you build a strong studio culture but first let me figure out how this thing works because it's off allow me to reintroduce myself since most of y'all have never heard of me before up until today so i was born in queens new york my family is from ecuador and china which makes me ecuadorian-american with the splash of chinese and i've been in this industry for 13 years my my journey into the industry started back in 2009 as a xbox live enforcer and from there i went over into keyway working on titles as

batman arkham city fear three and mortal kombat at that time i really enjoyed working with people and problem solving and making sure that everyone's talking to each other working towards a common goal and so that is when i figured out i wanted to be a producer but what does a producer actually do so at that time when i started my career i really didn't know what a producer does since i really didn't know anyone that i can talk to in my circle um i was just starting now just moved to seattle after deciding to not be a doctor and move halfway across the country disappointing my my parents um and then i ended up learning a lot of what i did on the job over many years in the studio and so today i'm going to briefly chat with you about what a producer does before we get into further details and where my team members at all right i see them here so a lot of them don't know what i actually do for work so this is

mostly for them so they can start taking notes um there'll be a quiz at the end of this so a producer we wear a lot of many different hats we wear the role of being a cheerleader where we're constantly motivating the team making sure everyone is high spirits keeping a pulse on the team health because we are tracking the day-to-day with everyone we also do a lot of cat herding because surprisingly enough a lot of devs go work on features and then they go into their own little bubbles and silo themselves and don't actually talk to each other so kind of we have to bring them all together and make sure that they're talking to each other so we can actually do the job right and we're also constantly removing roadblocks from everyone in order to keep the train moving just so they don't they don't get blocked essentially i like to think of as producers as more of a support role boosting everyone's performance around us i also like to look at us as composers where we're taking all the features individually and bringing them together into one beautiful user experience for our players

so over the many years that i've been doing this everyone i've worked with has always rolled their eyes at producers they hate producers they haven't had good experiences with them and these are industry vets that have been in doing this for 18 to 20 plus years and not to toot my own horn but i told him gonna everywhere i've worked they've told me that i am the best producer they've worked with and the best production team they've they've ever worked with so kind of had me wondering what am i doing so much differently than other producers in this industry i was leading with empathy so what does that mean exactly for me it's it comes so natural and second nature for me that i had to really take a step back and think what does leading with empathy mean other than making sure the team feels valued and cared for it sounds pretty simple enough but a lot of people actually forget that in our industry especially when you're meeting tight deadlines and

trying to get across the finish line you're working possibly publishers or like anything else any other factors so these are kind of some principles that i put together myself because i was trying to figure out what am i doing differently and hopefully that'll help some of you today if you're either a producer or wanting to go into production or maybe you can say hey producer in your studio have you thought about doing this uh so first off show a genuine interest in their work devs love talking about their work and showing that you care about their craft plays attention to detail for them this not only helps you with learning on the job and learning all the technical jargon and how the gay game development cycle works which is how i learned is by asking a ton of questions but it also helps you as a producer to put together a road map and timeline when you're planning because now you know how the feature works from end to end what uh dependencies there are and it helps avoid setting any arbitrary dates

be human so this is also really simple yet people forget about this we as devs are not cogs in a machine we we don't just take a task in and output so we have to understand that these are real people with real emotions and struggles and sometimes life thing life stuff happens and everywhere i've worked in over various uh industries it's always been leave your stuff at home and only focus on work sometimes that's really difficult to do you can't just separate them they're kind of intertwined especially right now for most of us we work in a remote environment where our office is our personal home so what i mean by being human is make sure to put the people first before the work encourage them to take a mental health day encourage them to go outside for a walk i know i have to do that sometimes i also have to take mental health breaks when i just i'm

overwhelmed and then also we on my team specifically we have a lot of working parents we're very we're very cognizant of that and we make sure it's like yeah you need to go take a half day or you need to go take care of your family stuff go ahead and do it always put people before um before the work next thing is build a connection with your team don't make everything be about status updates with them don't constantly ask them what's the status on this did you update your jira or anything like that and if you you'll know that you're this producer if you start when you ping someone on slack or any other uh messaging app and the first thing they say is what do you need or what did i do so if you get those responses definitely you have to change and pivot to be have more non-work conversations i love roasting my team a lot i love making fun of them and having jokes and it's it's great and it just kind of helps build that rapport

and something that we did at brass line is we implemented coffee time on monday where we meet together as a team chat for 30 minutes about non-work stuff and this is how we just catch up on what we did over the weekend and something our lovely art producer did for us is also set up donut time which is a an app that gets integrated into slack where you can get randomly paired with another team member and this also allows for more of the human connection that especially that we're not getting right now and so this is how you build a connection with your team and it helps build that rapport which takes us into making it a safe environment now when i say make it a safe environment for everyone we all devs want to feel seen and heard and want to be treated with respect and so what i've done with everyone is i regardless if they're a qa tester or their director or whatever the vp i've always treated everyone with the same amount of respect and that has helped build a safe

environment for all um so it helps bring their authentic selves every day and then also they feel a little bit more comfortable talking to you about any other problems that may arise you want to continue to have that open line of communication with everyone and lastly be transparent with everyone no one likes top down management or i like to call pigeon management where you just kind of swoop in on everyone's idea and then swoop right off um so i like to be super transparent with my team even when there's deadlines or i have to pivot on any kind of planning that we originally thought of anything like that i always involve them in the process i explain to them what the situation is and we work on a solution together as when you're doing this all of these stuff essentially it all adds up together and they're intertwined because when the team feels like you have their back they will have your back there's so many there's been so many times where

i have had to solve a hard problem and i go to my team like this is really shitty we need to figure this out and you know what more often than not they're like yep yes we got your back we're going to help you figure this out so in conclusion don't say separate the work from the person you want to make sure that you create a sense of belonging for everyone and even when hits the fan make sure it's even more crucial to follow that because you we all have deadlines and that's okay but when that happens take a deep breath pause figure out what you're going to how you're going to come across and fix a solution pause before you respond to someone because if you say something impulsively or act impulsively it could create more detriment to the overall goal and this is how you lead with empathy thank you so much [Applause] hi uh welcome to

gdc i hope you guys are having a great day my name is carl koh and today i'm going to talk to you about how behavior drives your culture um i've had uh the uh experience and privilege of working at a bunch of uh mission and values driven companies that are not showing up completely correctly on the slide but it's fine uh i'm sure you can all linked and stalk me if you wish um and uh through working at those studios i've developed a lot of opinions and had a lot of experience of how the words on the web page or on the wall map into what actually is experienced day-to-day in the culture um and i had the experience of being able to talk to a friend who was thinking of starting their own studio um and i drew this post-it note like literally this is a picture of the post-it note to start explaining like hey yeah it matters what you put on those places but what matters more is how you behave and how you think about your bit your behavior in the workplace um and i've given that that conversation or that soapbox talk as i like to call them a few times and it sort of morphed

into this gdc presentation um it starts with you are what you do your behavior is what's going to drive the culture around you at every studio and a lot of this is because human beings tend to be observational learners they mimic what they see they look at how you behave and they're going to try to emulate it because that's how humans start to understand the social norms around them when they read the definitions of the words or they read your mission or your value statements they're going to inform what the actual definitions you're using what the colloquial definitions you're using through watching your behavior and it's not just when you're at your best when you're in presentation mode during times of stress during times of crisis when you're at your worst when you're thinking about your runway and and acting out because you just got off the phone with your investor that behavior is what people are going to be ah these are the bounds of the social norms this is how i'm going to act um as an example i was at a studio that had candor as one of their uh values um

and they talked a lot about giving direct feedback and always uh being very transparent with the people that you interact with as a way to improve the culture we did uh stuff on in during onboarding with this um and i gave a presentation one day to one of the the ceos and what happened was that during that presentation the feedback was very positive overall went well about a week later through uh one-on-one with my manager i started to get a lot of feedback of hey you could have done this better this wasn't quite working your presentation skills here weren't great which was odd because that that manager hadn't been in that presentation and what ended up being the case was a lot of that feedback from that leader that's most senior leadership group was coming through second hand and it started with this this leader who did that not just with anyone who came to him but also all of his direct reports and in turn his direct reports saw that behavior and was like ah this is what we mean by feedback culture i will follow

the ensuite and they began to act in this and over time what was represented as candor as culture became more of a what is the narrative behind my back what are what is the feedback i'm going to get unexpectedly weeks after i give a presentation or have a big moment in the studio you'll notice in that example that it started with one person's behavior and then started to propagate and this is because you are what you tolerate as people learn and and uh start to behave within your studio they're going to not just have behaviors that they're mimicking from people that they see around them but also we all have habits and behaviors that we've learned from previous studios or even from school and though those habits are going to come in and are going to be default behaviors for people as they're learning the system if you let those behavior stand that starts to map out what are the boundaries of the social norms and will become your culture as well you have to be present and watching and intervene quickly when behaviors are outside of the boundaries of what you want within your culture and with with kindness with

with empathy as yesenia mentioned intervene and course correct that behavior so that it uh more closely matches the culture you want in your studio um this example has actually happened at multiple studios where you end up in multiple offices multiple locations or multiple teams and oftentimes studios will talk about wanting to have a one-team culture you don't want silos between the various game teams or the various locations at some studios i've had uh the the language uh begins to go into shorthand right it's very easy to say like oh the la team or oh the montreal team um or that you know game two team thinks this uh the other really common one is leadership thinks this or management thinks that um and when that language stands when we all fall into the behavior and it's okay to use that shorthand we start to develop silos because it's a very othering language it makes it this amorphous group and everyone thinks the same thing

what we've tried to do at phoenix labs where i'm at today is try to intervene when i when i hear that language where it goes like hey uh i'm pretty sure the city of montreal doesn't think that who who on that team is saying these things right like how can we get better better details there to intervene more quickly if there's an issue or who could you connect with specifically in that regard to build a better relationship um similarly for you know if we're talking about specific game teams or la but also you know i am uh you know honored to be considered a leader at the studio uh and i'll be like hey you know i didn't attend a leadership meeting where we all voted to agree on the same thing and speak with one voice so could you help me understand where this is coming from which leader did you hear that from so that we can better uh solve the issue and that has really helped uh keep us feeling more like one team with fewer walls between locations and between games you'll in that example that's a lot of me going and seeing that moment and going and spending one-on-one

time to fix it and this is the sad truth of this that wraps up this talk which is you are the work you put in right there isn't a really easy way to scale this i can't unfortunately i wish i could be like run these three meetings and have these five bullet points and you're good right um unfortunately it's about being present and being perceptive giving direct timely and specific feedback every time you notice a behavior that is off course from the culture you want being able to reinforce those pithy statements of your mission and your values with nuance and examples and really give those words more meaning through uh really specific examples of the behavior um and it doesn't scale it just requires effort and ideally every leader at your organization and i hope that you have cast that with a wide net of anyone at your studio can be a leader hopefully they're all putting this work in but you know the only only thing you can directly control is you and so my call to action to you is really

you have to put the time and you have to put the work in to shape the behavior that creates the culture of your studio and that's my talk thank you [Applause] hi i'm christopher mcchorge i'm the chief operating officer for wild blue studios we're an external art development partner and we're a little different than most of the other studios that you'll meet at gdc this week because we are a worker-owned cooperative that means a few things that i will talk about today specifically something we call horizontal horizontal structure and vertical deployment i'll be talking about how we use those two to empower our workers and create a positive company culture now i'm sure you've all heard of vertical and horizontal structures vertical being you know decisions made at the top handed down to execute you know top-down sort of structure horizontally you flatten that a little bit so some of those decisions are made more laterally a little more collaboratively

you still have this sort of person at the top or that sort of hierarchy of power at while blue we're fully horizontal we each own an equal part of the studio every time we hire another employee they become another owner that means that all of our employees then have an equal vote in decisions for things like electing the board that also means they have an equal vote and power to recall that board so there's a lot of accountability built into that structure you'll also notice back in this example both there's both in the vertical and the horizontal structure there's the person at the top holding the money bags in the horizontal structure because we're all equal owners we all share equally in the profit or we call it the patronage at the end of the year so that means at the end we see what our profit is at the end of the year we reinvest some of that back into the cooperative and then we take a certain percentage of that and that gets equally distributed across the studio now we still have vertical deployment

which is going to look a lot more familiar to everyone we still have an elective we have a board we have senior leadership we also have a hierarchy and compensation so right while we are sharing profit equally across the board we aren't compensated equally we still recognize differences in skill and experience and we compensate accordingly you know as you sort of move up this vertical deployment you have greater levels of accountability responsibility etc but we think there are a lot of benefits to this flat horizontal structure right so it helps to start to dismantle some of those hierarchies that you experience it makes our senior employees treat our more junior staff as equals as peers it really empowers a lot of our junior staff and makes sure that skill sets are allowed to shine regardless of title it also has a lot of our senior staff more invested in the growth and development of our junior employees because we

share a profit we the investment in that individual comes back and is an investment in the whole group so there's a lot of investment all around regardless of level of status where you fall on that than that vertical deployment so we found these two things together right this horizontal structure and this vertical deployment creates a big culture of trust and accountability the question then becomes how do you leverage that trust and accountability to make an even more inclusive and happy work environment we do that in three main ways that i'll talk about briefly today the first is education the second is asking and acting and the third is listen and implement i'll start with education so every tuesday we have an hour set aside where we do workshops educational workshops they cover a range of topics some craft based some not uh also recently the ceo of wild blue eli eli allen and myself ran all the

members of our studio through a value creation workshop we're really interested in creating a bigger picture of how we create value in the marketplace how we differentiate ourselves from competitors and how we convey that value to our clients some of you might be wondering what that has to do with our artists ability to create good art nothing right like the point wasn't to make our artists better at creating art it was to help them understand how the labor they're performing how the art that they're creating creates value how the processes that we use from tools and communication styles create some differentiation from our competitors and how we leverage that differentiation that value that they're creating and participating in and use that to create good client relationships we learned a lot in that workshop together including that some of our most junior members have really good business ideas and it really helped us refine some of our internal strategies and also

got a lot of eternal alignment and buy-in and why we do the things the way that we do and understand how we operate more broadly out of direct art-based tasks so creating big pictures for your your team members next ask and then act so we recently conducted a survey where we just asked our team members our employees what do you need sort of materially right these are some of the questions that were on our survey but also where do you want to go what are your goals how do you want to get there and i think in a lot of vertically structured studios or or workplaces you go and you sort of are given the menu of the benefits that are available to you or there's a pre-established ladder that you climb and expectations for sort of how you're going to get there but going to your team and asking them like what do you need and how can we help you meet those needs both materially but also you know professionally and then helping them build that menu with you you know if your studios predominantly artists or coders in their 20s or 30s

that menu is going to look different than if they're in their 40s and 50s and sort of meeting your team where they're at um is a good way uh to help build that positive culture so this was the asking here was our action so this year we reallocated our budget for marketing and web redevelopment and we put that towards greater 401k contributions and we are doing financial literacy training we hired a financial advisor who's coming in and during those tuesday educational workshops is running a series of three different workshops where we teach our employees on company time about uh budgeting about retirement planning about investing we also reassigned some project leadership tasks allowing some of our more junior members to take greater leadership roles so that they can expand and meet some of those career goals that they identified in those surveys we also scaled back a little bit some of those responsibilities for some of our more senior or mid-level artists who had been taking on more than was really appropriate for their particular title and didn't

really align with their career goals also you can't just ask what's wrong sometimes you have to listen and find solutions that your team doesn't even know are possible for you to provide one example is after the start of the pandemic we started noticing a lot of people were complaining about you know more wrist pain more back pain neck pain elbow pain and you know this isn't that surprising i'm sure we all spent a lot more time in front of the screen didn't have the same sort of breaks or movements that we did free pandemic so our solution proactively for this was to order a kit of different exercise equipment sent it to all of our studio members and we hired a chiropractor who on zoom taught us a different series of stretches and exercises that you can do to help with repetitive stress injuries now every day after our daily stand-up meeting we do 10 minutes of stretching camera's off but it's a time where we can all come together and invest in one another's health and really make sure that we're creating that culture of care in our company

now i've talked about you know listening and implementing you know acting i've talked about education but all this is really built on that foundation of that trust and accountability and i know the way that we have done that isn't necessarily scalable or replicable for all of you you can't go back and make all of your employees also owners but i ca you can go back and interrogate how your systems and structures of power um are built and whether or not there's accountability that can be provided to your workers and then you can you know retool that and create those opportunities to listen to act and to educate and always empower your workers thank you all right hi everyone my name is irene schultz

hadivocian um i'm the attorney of the group so naturally my slides are going to have more words on it but you're not expected to read any of them they're just for me to present um and for viewing um so i'm going to talk about bettering workplace culture in the gaming industry and i've used what's going to be the outdated version of the saying happy wife happy life to create a more 2021-2022 version of happy employee happy company productive business so why should you listen to what i have to say um so i'm a labor and employment attorney i literally advise on the issues that we're all talking about so um i advise companies anywhere from small gaming studios to large publishers about how to implement certain policies and practices or consulting with how to create different structures that really better

the workplace both in the legal concept and in the practical concept so this is what i do i also litigate uh issues that arise in the workplace so i'll be using some examples as we go through this to discuss you know how this place plays out in many different companies we've dealt with okay why is a positive workplace culture important well one you should want your employees to be happy right that end of itself should be enough but let's say it's not enough you're the executive of a company you're focused on your financials well let's talk about how having happy employees gets you to that end and not having employees actually disrupts that end of having the numbers you need for your business so one productivity um at the very end i will show you some data that shows when your employees are not happy your business is actually suffering quantitatively two it's a compliance issue

okay if if your workforce is unhappy for various reasons and let's say they're legal um it's actionable it's legally actionable it's a compliance issue i mean you all have seen the headlines right i mean at this point the us government and state state agencies are getting involved in litigating this dispute because they see a problem in the gaming industry and if anyone here thinks there's not a problem well i'm here to tell you as an attorney there is definitely a problem um three if you're a public company or if you're not you want to eventually sell your company it's an investor and shareholder issue if you want to eventually sell your company the first thing that's going to get looked at are you you know you're gonna have the due diligence done part of that due diligence is the employment practices right so they're gonna look into that and how much is what is wrong with the company is gonna affect that final number of what you're selling your business for number four shouldn't it doesn't need to be said at

this point it's a pr issue it's a pr nightmare potentially depending on how non-compliant the company is five it's an employee retention issue if your workers are so unhappy that you have a high turnover rate if you don't realize the amount of money you need to spend to retrain and rebring on and hire employees i mean that cost in and of itself is huge six talent acquisition issue if you have really great talent that you want to hire why would they come to a studio that has a reputation for being awful in its practices when they can go to another one that has a positive reputation right number seven uh unionization full disclosure i'm an employment employer-side attorney so unionization we don't like it right my job is to make sure my clients workplaces are not unionized it could be a positive thing but here's why i bring it up because it's a it's a huge cost for employers to run things through a union if you are doing things right you

shouldn't need a third party to engage with your employees having to go through a third party just raises business costs unionization is being talked a lot in the game about in the gaming community because clearly there are problems okay so we've heard from all of our speakers about you know you can have all the paper that you want but at the end of the day if you're not practicing in real life it means nothing so let's talk like let's think of this as a house and let's talk about the foundation because the paperwork is important but it doesn't uh trump the actual practice right so what are the type of things you should have in place to ensure you get to the next level of having the good house so the foundation policies anti-discrimination anti-bullying anti-harassment anti-retaliation consider having an open door policy examples of what's something um

every company should have an actual reporting procedure right reporting issues to your supervisors mana and managers highly recommend an anonymous hotline for companies that are able to implement it because sometimes the employee doesn't want like is afraid that no matter how good of a workplace uh that there is that them being identified as the complainant will result in certain things having an hr team if the company is again large enough for people to report to and and some very large companies have their own investigations team that reports can be sent directly to internal investigation team you have to have also an investigation procedure if you're a smaller company you refer that out externally for a third mutual third party if you're a large enough company you could potentially have your hr um or designated executive or designated investigation team run the actual investigation and actually run the

investigation not a fake one right there's there's real investigations and there's ones that are just for show diversity equity and inclusion i mean i can do a whole presentation on this um it is so important i'll get into some of the statistics at the end but what i'd recommend everyone here do is go look at the microsoft report on diversity equity inclusion the most recent one because if you want a good standard for the possibilities that exist in this workplace and how you can implement things to make sure you have a diverse workforce their report is pretty excellent um and um in in terms of the one thing i'll mention for example uh job descriptions who would have thought that job descriptions could change who's applying to your job that has been proven to be fact that if you put certain things in your job description you are not likely to get diverse candidates right like women for example so that could be a major player

okay this is the structure so you built the foundation you have all the necessary paperwork now the structure um do you actually have a pulse on your people do you know what your employees are feeling like so if you're a smaller company what you would do is check in with your people directly right every now and then whether it's every month quarter if your employees are generally happy and you know that you can do it less often or even then you can do it more often surveys for large companies i highly recommend anonymous anonymous surveys because they're very very helpful in telling you where problems might be and you might have a part of the company population that feels really great and a part that's not doing so well and you might want to look into why is that committees local regional national global a good example of this and the committees have to include people from various job titles right so you are actually getting

what the entire population is um feeling this is actually something i recommended for one of our international companies because we were here they were hearing different things from different countries in terms of how their employees were feeling and so they actually implemented a global committee with people from various different job titles and actually then got to know better what's going on across different titles and also across the whole universe so that actually worked out really well from them town halls this is especially good for um employees who want to hear from their executives right we've talked about you know be transparent well let your employees know what's going on no matter how big or small because the the when your employees feel like they're being communicated to as a last resort right you're just telling them what's happening rather than engaging with them and even listening to them about what's happening and taking their feedback and implementing it that makes them feel different versus oh and we're doing this

now and you just have to accept it dedicated chief people officer or you know having a great hr department can change a lot um and again the whole point of this is employees want to know at the end of the day that their voice matters all right and this i think this is the point of everyone here has talked about this right you can build this great foundation you can build this great structure but at the end of the day if your house just has the foundation in the walls and not the interior to make it feel homey and cozy you have nothing i had a big publisher contact us recently to set up all the you know better their structure and the first thing i said to them is we're happy to do that for you but the first thing i want you to do is go talk to your executives and ask them are they willing to do the things we will recommend because if they're not then i've just given you a whole bunch of paper right so every company if you want to do this hire you know whether it's a consultant or a law firm

yeah do it but you have to be willing to go from a to z not just have the paperwork okay productivity data i mean the data is astounding right so in a poll of a thousand us employees 64 percent of workers said the employee experience impacts their ability to serve customers in a gallup poll 80 percent are not engaged or not actively or actively disengaged at work the lack of engagement costs the global economy 8.1 trillion i mean that's crazy nearly 10 percent of gdp in lost productivity each year another important one on note a poll recently done by some universities really showing how lack of diversity affects companies a one percent increase in racial diversity um similarity between upper and lower management increases firm productivity by between 729 dollars to 1 590 per

employee per year lastly i'll leave you with some demographic data that's honestly a little bit depressing um and one of them includes the gdc report from this year if you haven't read it i encourage you to look at it uh so that one said 73 identified as male in the video game industry right activision blizzard after their accusations released a report saying 24 of their total workforce is women whereas in the corporate world it's 47 right why the disparity there's the data shows that there's something wrong um and then another survey indicated that there's you know people 74 of people feel that there's not equal treatment or opportunity in the gaming industry and that statistic has worsened over time so i i know i'm ending with the depressing part but that is all a call to action to all of you because each of you has a role in

this to change it right and you you got to lay the foundation you have to have the structure but you got to put the interior in there and be willing to put it to work thank you oh because we were so wonderful you have to fill out your evaluations so um should i read the whole thing again do you guys know where they are okay you'll find them okay thank you yes yes we're gonna do a hello we're we're happy to take q a just if you line up behind the mics we'll switch back and forth uh hi i've been to two different companies that have had well i guess technically three companies who have had like town hall uh meetings townhouse style meetings and i found them generally to be kind of disappointing can you give some examples of what you you

uh see to be effective or like well structured um what the what the must-haves are for a good town hall style meeting uh that's a good question so uh i would say the bad ones are where people are talking at you right and the good ones are where there's a conversation um if a company is big enough to have the tech to be able to do it you could have people simultaneously pulling via their phones or some other tech right live as it's happening so the feedback is coming in but you could also just have it be a conversation right like let people speak to a certain extent you might not be able to get to everyone but a good town hall is not just communicating information but taking feedback so if you're doing a town hall where you're just communicating information as an employer that's not a town hall that's just a meeting right so um a very high level that's the

most i think important thing i would also add that uh what i've seen most in town halls is that when they scale they can often scale poorly and so often what you'll run into is as town hall scale the authenticity of both questions and answers drop um what i would suggest there is one just be aware of that problem and be thinking about it two a lot of it is on the folks who you send out to do the leadership side of the town hall reinforce the authenticity of answers don't pre-prepare answers um don't treat it as a cordy fingers rude q a but instead really try to bring their whole selves and be present and listening to the questions and don't try to change the questions and the questions they want to answer and then third just be ready to split up town halls when the scale gets too big and be really transparent about why you're doing that don't don't hide town halls or make it feel like people can't see all of the downhills happen but from an interaction standpoint scale it uh wider so that it feels more

authentic cool hi um so uh this one is mostly sort of directed to christopher thank you for your presentation you mentioned trust and accountability as a big part of what you do in your studio to make the horizontal structure work i come from like mutual aid organizing and other sorts of non-work organizing work where a lot of things are horizontal and trusted accountability is something i feel like i've struggled even when there's no money involved no employment involved nothing of that sort i was wondering if you had any stories of successes in someone being accountable for something that they have done uh yeah first i'll say i think it's almost harder when it's when there's not um money and it's all volunteer base because it's easier to sort of opt out of those engagements than it is if it's your job um but an example of

success of holding someone accountable um let's see trying to think of one that i can share um yeah i i'll say that we had uh uh let's say a new client uh project that we were starting and there were some sort of communication pitfalls along the way some things were sort of dropped and at the end of the day we had to you know gather around the wagons and like hold people accountable and point out like where we had sort of evaluate where we had um you know fallen a little short and building up that especially a new relationship i think new relationships always require more energy um as you're building that and i think one of the things that we do is you know always approach that accountability not as like a trial right but as an opportunity to do better the next time so it wasn't

like yelling you did this it was like hey here are some problems where we think this went wrong here's how we can do better the next time and you know you always give that person you got to give that next time though right but it also helped us even retool the way that we approach current client relationships and so we became like an educational moment not just in how we onboard new clients but making sure that we give even better experiences to our existing ones and it's because we're able to have those open conversations and hold one another accountable but that accountability doesn't look like punishment and i think that that's really important hi um my question is about the vertical horizontal system especially when a team is growing or trying to scale up um what kind of issues would you foresee like needing to tackle or like how would you prepare yourself and your team uh to face any like issues that do arise if like the team is growing really fast

while trying to maintain that sort of structure and trust and accountability yeah i think that's a great question we last last year hired four new people so we went from a team of six to a team of ten um as kind of core core members um and you know when you have suddenly forty percent of your studio is new and doesn't know what the culture is or what it looks like or a lot of the sort of casual conversations you've been having with each other suddenly you need to like teach other people those conversations so i think good documentation helps here to be able to point them to that but this gets to i think everything a kind of common thread that we've been saying throughout today is that documentation is great but it's more about what you do like carl was saying or how you demonstrate empathy like you said it was saying or you know building that foundation but actually filling it with things like irene was saying so you know all those things are important to have in place but as you scale especially making sure that you have systems in place that allow you to onboard those new team members and know that onboarding takes time um and giving

making sure that you're building in particularly if you have process or pipeline things and deadlines that you know you're going to need time to build culture just as much as you need time to build assets uh first i really just wanted to thank all of you for sharing your experience and your perspective on this really important topic um sorry get a i i just think it's really important for us to have this conversation so that we can all work together to build an industry we're all super proud of so thanks um second of all i was curious if you all had any more thoughts about or suggestions about how to build a strong culture with a distributed team right where everyone's not all in the same room thanks i'm glad you asked so i'll talk a little bit about brass line entertainment um i feel like we have a really strong studio

culture and it's something really precious to me um because as we continue to grow our team that's something that we constantly look at in terms of like who we bring in and so some things that we do as i mentioned we do uh scheduled coffee time where 30 minutes every monday we talk to each other we also have these this thing because i like naming conventions but i have this thing that's called film fridays fun fridays and i also have feeling fridays so i kind of like put these in place to kind of help build that connection with everyone and so we every friday we'll watch a movie together on you know over zoom or we'll play a game together or we'll actually talk i call it feeling surprised because this is where it allows us to have more transparent and more honest conversations with each other based on like hey i read this article can we all talk about it as a group and i think another thing that makes our culture our studio so strong is the fact that we're so diverse and we can have more honest

conversations a lot faster than any other studio i've worked at where there is no ego and there's no like hard feelings no one's no one's feelings getting hurt and so because we make it a safe environment we're all able to talk to each other so i think like pretty much it goes the way i bring uh build that culture is that having that empathy and production built adds on to that essentially so it's like making sure you're talking to your team members making sure that you're interacting with them that's not always work getting to know your team members you know and checking in on them is so it's such a big deal um just because it's like man i really wish other people gave a about me when i first started 13 years ago and that's like such a big thing now because that's what makes my team happy it's that they feel seen that they feel heard and they're involved in the process and i'm very transparent with them so that's what i do at least for my side i don't know if anyone else has something else to add

yeah so while blue's always been a fully remote team there are ten of us but we operate out of seven different states uh so you know we discord is sort of our home base right or slack sometimes um but we i think part of that is creating spaces where you're doing like non-production things so some of those like we have our education tuesdays uh every wednesday we do a twitch stream together or we just offer free portfolio reviews for anyone who wants to swing by uh we do things like that that just sort of help us be part of a broader community but also build community together i think it's also really important to like plan fun because you don't have those moments when you come together like at the water cooler or the lunch table or the you know so i've done things like ask everyone to send me their favorite pump up song i've made a spotify playlist send it out to everybody everyone listens to the playlist and tries to guess who's who and then we send like a coffee to whoever i really found familiar coffee or if you're familiar with it or not but it's like a they do like game gaming art uh support

the board game community and so if we just send a bag of that to whoever like gets the most right and we'll do i'll come up with like different sort of things like that all the time we just always send out coffee you know to so like just ways to kind of create fun and have people engage but also like learn more about one another so it's sort of like a fact-finding mission about one another so you learn a little about what people's music tastes are or what your favorite halloween movie is or but then like that kind of guessing and having to ask and like evaluate um that has nothing to do with production and everything to do with like building those relationships um lots of things but i think the most important thing right now or one of the most important thing is inclusion um making sure you have a diverse and inclusive workforce it's a clearly a huge problem in the industry and oftentimes you hear oh well they're not enough female engineers or like game developers well then solve the problem right a good example is usc for example i think in their recent class had more female game developers than male

um and they've been really pushing for that so there's one way of doing it but if you if you make an effort to do it i guarantee you can have an inclusive workforce yeah the the only thing i'd add um in addition to sort of the recommendations uh that have come up which um you know i think come back to we take for granted very often the social norms and and the easy ways we have of doing things in person because we're so used to it it's all habitual um and so making sure that you really think about and be present for what are you lacking in distributed environments and you have to put the work into making those moments happen whether it's you know calling attention time for uh outside of work conversations building and stretching time that kind of stuff finding those social moments where people can find belonging find connection is super important the other piece that i would do that i see a lot of companies and a lot of individuals miss is that really making

it everyone's problem really bringing everyone into the fold of that that challenge everyone owns a piece of that right like how i show up to work in an office is uh i contribute to everyone else's happiness around me and it should be no different in a distributed environment um and so don't try to solve it just at a leadership layer or just had a production layer right really bring that problem to every member of your team and be like hey how can we make this better how can we better capture presence how can we better capture belonging right like what what are we missing what what gaps do you see and and bring everyone into into solving the problem i also really like to roast my team and stand up that is all [Music] everyone appreciates a good result uh i think we're on that side yeah i'm i'm wondering what your thoughts are around some of the um like more systemic uh pernicious or like leadership issues around culture where folks who may not have positions

of power um what what sorts of things would you recommend or suggest um to folks who really feel powerless to to influence uh positive workplace culture uh i mean that is uh the hard answer that i would give you is you have a lot of power right if you feel powerless yet you do have a lot of power you you should use your voice and you should use your actions and you should try to safeguard your behavior and i know that i recognize that uh in late stage capitalism which we can all enjoy it doesn't always feel like that and there are real consequences to those actions um but at the end of the day i think we find ourselves in a time where the voice of every worker is more listened to than ever before um and you have a lot of power and if you find yourself in a leadership position or transitioning into a leadership position really holding that accountability on

yourself to act in the way that we we all aspire to have the great game industry that we can all uh be super proud of and holding that near and dear to your heart and holding your fellow leaders accountable right but if you feel powerless i as someone who does a lot of recruiting in their life i can tell you that the job market will reward you deeply for using your voice and using your action to find a better studio and that is the most powerful way you can give a message to the leaders of your studio that it's not acceptable anymore awesome hi um so i was wondering how you deal with the risks of changing um kind of culture building tactics or techniques too quickly or too often so the context here is to create that safety that culture of safety people don't want the rug constantly pulled from under them and i wonder yeah how you approach that idea if you see something going wrong how long do you kind of slowly change it

versus being like hey i'm not doing that anymore here's what we're doing now so your question is if something's going wrong like how do we go about changing it instead of like whether we do it fast or we do it slowly kind of like yeah and i guess just mitigating the risk of if you change things too much too often people will start to feel unstable um so i can speak on the from the production side of things just because we do this a lot um we're constantly having to pivot especially not just with the project itself but also in process as well as i mentioned earlier like everywhere i worked at there's no process that fits every studio even within the studio each team they all have the different processes so like what i do with my production team and my art producers here so i'm calling her out as well she's amazing at her job so just giving kudos to her but something that we really do is we really listen to the team on the production side of like okay what's not working we have retrospectives after each sprint um and we don't have it just to have

retrospectives we actually do stuff about it because our team actually gives us feedback of like what didn't work and what did work and so usually what i do is take that feedback and i i do it incremental changes especially term in process because when i'm doing for example if i'm in pre-production versus actual production i change the formality of things so i i do it very incremental of like okay i'm going to change this one little thing and then okay see how that works and then we're going to change it again so and one concrete example i can give is um we're all remote and we our team size has grown um and as our team has grown our sprint uh plan and our planning days have gone really long and so i can see as we were doing it everyone's eyes was glossing over i'm like okay we need to change this and everyone's feedback is like it's getting too long we have too many people so instead of changing everything all at once i was

like okay first off let's just do this one little thing and see how it goes let's break it up into segments and give everyone breaks and be like an hour 30-minute breaks in between like planning sessions versus like review sessions and retrospectives and etc and so i did that and so now i'm kind of testing the reason why i bring it up is because i'm still testing the waters and so far the my the schedule change that i did with the team was working really well and so now i'm going to evaluate and like okay what other changes do we need to do so i i recommend going incremental and kind of like testing see how it goes out and then do it because if you do too many changes in my experience everyone's like oh my god that's too much and then they're overwhelmed and then they like shut down and you don't want that i also think be transparent with your people and if you need to go through some trial and error to get to the optimal result and if your employees know that out front right we're going to try this maybe it's awful and it doesn't work for our our team it might work for some other company okay that didn't work but let's try and

again don't do it too quickly right because people need to take a breath before you you go to the next one if you implement it without talking to them then most likely they're going to be unhappy or again people don't like things happening to them they want to be involved right when they're involved and they feel like they're part of the process even if maybe it's changing quickly you'll probably have a better result than if you're changing it and everyone's just sitting back trying to hang on for you know their life yeah cool thank you ask for criticism too right like if you're going to implement a new process tell them what that new process is and find out who your biggest critic is and get their like worst complaints about it and try to actively solve those before you roll out full implementation we did this recently where we completely changed how we handle our review process and even the platform that it takes place in and our art director straight up told us he hated and didn't want to do it right and we're like tell me why break that down like unpack that hatred for me a little bit so i can understand it and then like i can work to solve

that and make you not hate it and if you still hate it at the end of the day we can go back to the way things were before but we have to do something that's different and like let's try this together rather than like this is sort of that like don't hand down that decision and like stamp it as the way it's going to be because you'll have just me much more resistance that way yeah the the the main thing i would add to that is i think it's um when you're being transparent being transparent about the why and why you're making that decision as much as possible bring people into the problem in that way right um and two um gauge how reactive you're being um and the best way i found for me to deal with that is to do as much scenario planning up front of like hey how will i know it's going bad or how will i know i'm in in scenario a or b and what would i do if i was there um and that also helps you potentially bring more people into the problem of like making it more transparent about why reactions are happening and if you find yourself in a place where you've

changed a couple times and you haven't fight the route right answer exposing the next set of scenarios can help people understand like ah there's a plan we're not just being reactive um and i find that that idea that like hey it's not just reacting to to the moment but being thoughtful about the whole situation and then being brought into the problem can help increase the amount of change that people can onboard at a time um but you you always have to like temperature check that with with the humans involved and you know the only thing i would say in your specific wording of your question is um if it's a severe problem don't wait like it's better to deal with the problems of fast change management than than really severe problems um and just always gauge that thank you very much cool you guys are rock stars thank you this is awesome um uh the previous answers that maybe are going into what i'm going to ask but what if your team over the course of

quarantine and just remote work transitioning to this new hybrid work style has your have have you been able to catch your maybe bad habits or culture or like culture transitioning and adjusting in a way you'd that's not good for the workplace how do you snip it or how do you like adjust it and push it to start kind of adjusting towards your goals of your studios i think from my perspective uh it's really about being very i feel like i'm repeating myself but it's about being really direct timely and specific in the feedback and in the moment and catching it and investing that time right don't wait for it to fester don't spend too much time in analysis paralysis of how you'll fix it but instead be like hey this is what i'm seeing i feel like this is going off course let's have a conversation about it but i'd really like to to readjust us to this this or this right um and it kind of depends on the severity of the issue and and what

you're seeing and is it small behaviors is it big behaviors um you know to the example i gave in the talk of like if it's othering language right like just being able to call it out and put a spotlight at it in a nice way right like not in a way that is accusatory or make someone feel defensive but just be like hey we're using shorthand and that probably doesn't work for us so let's be more specific so we can actually action on whatever you're seeing um moments like that can really do it but a lot of it is you you just have to jump in there and and start addressing it as soon as you see it and as specifically as possible cool thank you very much yeah yo hello i want to say thank you for your presentation i really like to say this point about not necessarily having to leave your life at home and you can bring it to work with a community um my question comes from gameheads where we teach students how to build video games 15 to 25 ages we have students who are virtual and hybrid in person we have introverts who act like extroverts and extroverts who act like introverts our question is how do you

cater activities town hall meetings you know social gatherings so that everybody's engaged and included so your question is how do you interact and engage with everyone when they have all these different kind of backgrounds and how they interact and like making sure everyone feels included yeah different personalities and energies young and yeah oh man i so i can only speak to a little bit about this um because i feel like on the on our studio the production team handles this very well um it's a challenge definitely for sure because there's a lot of times where we're having like originally here's an example so originally when i did coffee time it was 30 minutes all of us in one room together in zoom where we talked to each other and we realized the extroverted hello the loud person that constantly likes to talk we were taking over the room and the call and so we had to figure out okay how do we bring in more conversations into the fold and so i kind of like was watching and

listening to people and getting their feedback in their retrospectives and then i kind of i pivoted where it's like okay we're going to spend now we're spending 15 minutes of it all of us kind of catching up together and then the next 15 minutes is actually i'd randomly assign everyone breakout rooms so this way it makes it a little bit more intimate groups and the people who want to talk have a chance to speak so they don't feel like they're getting overpowered by people like me um essentially i totally am calling myself out here um and so it's really trying to find out what what the problem is and like what are people's it's really about listening to your team it's like okay what are what do they need what are the problem and asking the why like okay why do you feel this way because once you find out why you can kind of figure out okay how do i fix this and so i work really really closely with my production team and figuring out what do we need to adjust and pivot on and how can we accommodate everyone else while giving yeah unfortunately we're i know we're not going to be able to fix everyone and

make everyone happy i wish i could but at least as long as i'm like 90 95 there i'm i'm doing great all is well in my world for your specific situation i would also um encourage almost teaching a session on facilitation exercises and facilitation skills right and in that way you can help bring many of those students into the problem um of like hey this is facilitation is a skill being able to pay attention to zoom being able to do active listening as a skill um and so one you know putting a spotlight on that but then also giving some folks at least the bare bones basics of that can then help for everyone to be more of an active facilitator during those uh conversations um i also find that it's about having a variety of activities not a one-size-fits-all right like you're never going to be able to create a single zoom meeting that solves for all the extroverts and all the introverts and all the people who are star wars versus star trek nerds or you know whatever combination you want to throw

in there um and so things that we found is where you have zoom meetings that will tend to be taken up by people who are more reactive active speakers right like if you have the ability to do stuff where people can prepare their thoughts ahead of time like during retros we set up a mirror board where people can start putting their thoughts ahead of time it allows people who are slower processors to put that stuff ahead of time and then also having room where teams will often do just like hey we're going to go hang out in discord and that that change in vibe of an active meeting where you almost feel performative in in a zoom versus just chilling in discord while we all work allows different voices to come to the fore um and you sort of have to do a little bit of all of it and you have to know who the facilitators within your group are to make sure that they're watching for it as well but the more facilitators you can have the the more successful you'll be i gotta run everyone because i have a flight to catch but if you need to reach out to me feel free um

you guys are assuming you're hanging on yeah we'll take this one last question thank you thank you thank you okay i got it hi yes uh first off i want to thank you guys great talk and especially thank you for talking all about like transparency i feel like i'm so annoyed at like just not even just in the games industry but just in general life about everyone like dancing around subjects and just like not talking about what they feel like me and my friends were talking earl the other day like one of them said something and it said the other one they actually had a conversation about it was totally resolved and it was very refreshing but the question i want to ask is you guys talked a lot about like like uh those like town halls and getting feedback and kind of like uh like gauging how things are going from your teams and stuff like that and i've been in situations a lot where i go to my team and i'm like hey

how's everything going what are things that people are like doing things and like it seems like things are going wrong but then just no one says anything so how do you kind of like draw people to actually talk about things that they're worried about oh my gosh yeah that it's a very big topic um the the piece that i would say to sort of approach it is a lot of that comes down to um people are going to speak up in places that they feel safe and that they have a lot of trust and belonging and so if you find that folks in group settings are not doing that then there's probably work to be done in building the overall trust within the group there's that that is in and of itself probably three gdc talks but you know really starting with understanding hey how can we build trust and belonging within this group and that's going to start at smaller scales right like you're not going to be able to pull everyone into a single room and do some trust falls and it'll be all good but um you know just slowly working on that

problem and that kind of starts with you yourself making sure that you have the trust of the people in the room and so even if you can't get feedback in a group setting can you get it in individual setting um and if you're still having to pull really hard or not getting what or are you over here um people uh complain about things outside of your line of sight it's like okay how can i build up my trust build up my credibility with this group make them feel um safe and part of the crowd because once they once they feel trusted and belonging to the group they'll be much more open and candid with that stuff um and that's that's a very long journey but it's a worthwhile one and and there's a lot of techniques out there yeah i totally agree with you it's all about setting those belonging cues with your team making them feel safe because that's at the core value everyone wants to feel safe and if they don't feel safe they're not willing to talk to you or speak up and so kind of that's what my talk was mostly about is just building that environment where people

can talk to you and they enjoy working with you and they'll tell you about stuff and i'm because of that i've had those situations where i my team members tell me everything even if it's not in a large setting they'll talk feel safe enough to talk to me individually about issues and it's a lot of especially for us on the production side it's a lot of like observing and noticing and we have like our ears to the ground at all time like we know what's happening at all moments and so just being observant as well too like listening checking in on your team as i mentioned really helps with that as well too because then you'll know like something's off let me go check in on this person i'd say it's also this is sort of really it's easier to sort of build trust than it is to repair trust and so if you're operating in a system where the trust has already been violated and people don't feel like there is that uh you know accountability or that they'll be heard or they don't feel like there's that relationship already there that's a lot different

more difficult environment to go into um than if you're sort of starting fresh but uh you know if that is the case for your environment then you still have to start somewhere in that sort of reparative uh journey uh but it as they were both saying it it takes time and it takes even longer if if that's already been violated so luckily it's not there yet and this is totally not a sponsored uh advertising for this but i recommend this book called the culture code where us at brass line we read it and we talk about it and it's great and it talks about setting those belonging cues with your team members to make sure that they feel valued and heard so it's called culture code you can get it on amazon this is not a sponsored message or at your local bookstore awesome thank you very much cool thank you thank you so much

everyone thanks for coming [Music] you