How to Build a Remote Team for Better Happiness

[Music] all right good afternoon everybody uh before I start um just a reminder to please mute your cell phones or anything else that will ring so my name's Ian I'm the CEO and co-founder of fox Club we're a uh distributed team completely remote and we make mobile slot games so we started the team about 3 years ago and and when we first started my co-founder and I happened to be remote he was living in Germany and I was living here in San Francisco and we did that because we both had lifestyle reasons for wanting to work from home and as we grew the team from there we like found out that there was no real reason to hire people where we were living because we didn't want to be working to an and going to an office to work we liked working from home and so we continued building the team out completely remotely so now we're at about 30 people and our team is spread out in 12 different countries encompassing a lot of different time

zones and along the way we've learned a lot about how to run a remote Team how to hire for a remote team um and there was really a critical point when we scaled past eight or 10 people to kind of the the 20s uh where a lot of things changed for us and so those are some of the main things I want to share before I start how many people here work remotely now cool and how many don't but want to work remotely all right so I I guess a lot of you guys already have experience with that so we'll talk about um maybe some of the things that have worked for us maybe things that apply to you guys and afterwards if anyone has like ideas or suggestions i' love to to hear them and chat some more after so I'm going to go through kind of three major things one is why is remote work attractive for for us as people who work why is it fun to work remotely I think that's going to be pretty obvious and we'll do that quickly the second main one is really around hiring and team um as a as a kind of business owner

or manager what does it mean to hire remotely and why is hiring a competitive Advantage for being a remote team and third is a lot of operational things that we found to be successful so how do we communicate and collaborate what tools are useful and so that the third section is a lot more tactical so just at a high level right like there's already 10% of the workforce overall that's fully remote 30% is partially remote this is going to be a continue to being a huge Trend uh we're big fans of Jacob Morgan and his overall thing about how work is changing and the central thesis here is that we have a generation of people who are have grown up with technology in their lives personally and we also have this tremendous Improvement in how communication collabor collaboration technology has gotten better and so when these two things come together there's going to be a push from the ground up of how work needs to change and how companies need to kind of interact with people differently and remote is a huge component of that so let's start with like why we want to work remote right

so for us a lot of it is about family my co-founder had a four-month old when we first started the company and he really wanted to spend more time with his daughter and he was able to actually be a pretty present parent he wasn't the primary caretaker right like but he was there a lot and he was also a great CTO and co-founder there were some sacrifices he couldn't play DotA anymore and he couldn't really sleep but he did manage to make both those things work there's Maybe a third of our team where family is the really big reason being able to spend time and work more flexibly um there's another third of our team who did this because we wanted to have a particular lifestyle I I was one of those so I wanted to travel and work and work from different places and I've really been able to enjoy doing that and go to different places stay there get an Airbnb for two or 3 weeks and work from somewhere new and I really travel for food so as long as I get to go out and eat and come back and do my work it didn't matter where I was working from our director of engineering really likes

EDM concerts so he'll go around to all these crazy locations get completely ridiculous for two or three days in the weekend and then somehow manage to get back and like focus and get the work done and as a team we rarely even notice it because as long as the people are being productive it doesn't matter um those two things I think really uh UND underscore like one of the big things that we to do as a remote team that we had to do differently which was measure people on output and not on hours when people talk to me about how do you run a remote remote team how do you manage people like you can't even see if they're working right it's like yeah that's true you can't see what anyone is doing and so the only thing you can do is look at what are you producing are you producing your fair share of the work is your results good is the quality good and it turns out if you try to measure People based on that it's actually not that hard we've been able to do that successfully across develop like Dev art design UI sound um and it works quite well and the third one is obviously if you just save on commute you get an extra two hour or two of their of your

day back every day right so it's great so we've we sort of stumbled Upon This by accident initially right because this was a very selfish motivation for us when we first started the company but now that we've done this and actually experienced what the growth looks like we think that this is a huge opportunity huge competitive advantage and the big one is actually not cost right we're going to talk about cost in a little bit but I think that the biggest Advantage we have is really around hiring and it's a it's more subtle so you kind of have three major ways you can hire right now right you can one either be in a tech Hub like San Francisco and you can compete with like the hundreds of really really well-funded companies but the advantage of being in a tech Hub like this is that you get worldclass talent in every discipline you have the best people at what they do in one place and if you can find like the attractive mission for them like the The Good the good uh goals for them to go after and you have the money you can get world class anything you want that's that's one path the other path is you find something that's

not at Hub City but still has a great source of talent usually for that route you want to find a really strong feeder right so there's a lot of stories of like like Montreal has tremendous technical Talent right like lots of great depth so we see a lot of great Dev shops in Montreal there are places with really great art schools and art pipelines a lot of the times in a place that's not one of the hubs you can find great talent in one or two disciplines but it's hard to find a world class talent and everything so obviously where's where's my story going if if you go globally right you can actually find and cherry pick the best of the of the talent from everywhere um we believe we've been doing that and we've actually been really surprised and impressed at the quality of the people that we've gotten in really random places around the world that we never expected um I worked at Zinga before and so kind of I I calibrate a lot of our um art talent and Engineering Talent against that and when I look at kind of the the skill skill level comparisons we have really really worldclass talented people and we've been able to find them for very attractive race right because they live

in places that are often not Tech hubs and don't have the cost of living adjustments um and they're really happy because we have a long-term engagement with them where they really like the work the lifestyle we have and are like motivated to stay for longer so that's kind of the hiring bit um we also think of hiring as like a long-term a long-term sales thing so the advantages that we offer in terms of Lifestyle work life balance communication being measured on impact right these are all kind of the benefits that we have and it's part of how like the it needs to be sold throughout the entire hiring process so we've adjusted how we hire in order to suit that so what we do is with every discipline we give them a quick test like a one to two day test and the the goal of the test is twofold one is can you do the work right that's the obvious part the other one is can you do the work in our environment so we try to mimic our actual operating environment as much as possible during this two-day test we set them up with the same tools we communicate with them the same way that we if they were fully

with us um we we give them feedback the same way and then we just look at the outcomes and it tells us can you can you work in a way that's unsupervised can you do it in a time frame that's reasonable are you able to communicate clearly and it lets them know is this kind of the flexibility I want are they actually giving me the experience that I want in terms of like work life in terms of having ownership over my work and is something I can do and it's definitely helped us both like attract people who go through the test with us and say oh this is actually really good I'm really excited it's also just find people who are like well this really isn't the kind of company I want to work for where like we're kind of completely remote all the time so I'm going to run through quickly uh kind of the main ways that we hire artists and devs and run through the test real quick so for us because we develop in unity we found that the unity forum and the Reddit um particularly subreddits for like Game Dev and unity Dev are really good and then what we do is we give them like two sets of a set of assets and so this is two examples of a successful candidate and a not s successful candidate um and we give them the same assets we give them the same

spec that we would on the team and we just look at the results so this one was basically here are some assets that are really simple can you make can you make a slot machine that like spins sorry I'm trying to play this so this is one where they it's not not super fancy but spins like a slot machine um and then this one doesn't look so much like a slot machine right same level of feedback same level of like instructions um so that was Dev on Art the kind of traditional places that you find online contract art seem to work pretty well and we basically start people on this test and then get them like one project and then get bring them on fully and we communicate that kind of upfront with people in terms of like here's what the expectations are um similarly we tell them this is the target style that we we're looking for and then here are the two folios of two

people so one is this is the portfolio beforehand and here's another one and I'm not n director so like these two both look pretty reasonable but neither of them is a style that we're really looking for um but when we took both people through the process and we go black white sketches first which is how we normally do it and then gave them some feedback sorry the the right one is a little bit hard to see but it's it's like a a pretty reasonable line drawing and then we go through to color like by the time we get to this and there's two rounds of feedback kind of the difference in style is pretty clear this is a lot more of what we're looking for on the left and this is kind of not really a good slots art um and again the overall thing here is get people to see how you actually work as much as possible and get them in on your process so just to summarize in terms of what we're looking for in terms of hiring like the advantages or the core things that we're looking for one is communicating your culture upfront and how you work um the second one is actually this might be part of just uh because we're a small growing company we've had a really hard time hiring people and then training them on it we've really found more success finding

people with the core skills that we want and kind of training them on the remote piece so like a lot of training seems to be difficult um the third one is time zone so I said up front that we have people across a lot of time zones already uh we found that with artists with people who are able to work relatively individually uh being in different time zones and working in different time zones not so much of a problem for everyone else developers designers UI where you need a lot of collaboration our our rule is you can work from anywhere you want but you got to be working primarily core hours Pacific time so we've set Pacific time as our core hours and so you can travel anywhere around the world you want as long as you're working core hours there and if you have stuff that come up during the day whatever you need to go take care of doctors kids that's fine but we know when most the team is going to be on and available and like ready to work together cool so that was kind of all the hiring stuff next we have a whole bunch around operational and tactical things

so the one of the things that we saw in terms of like when we talk to people is we coordinate around slack in almost everything and we're able to work pretty effectively online with everything but there was a whole bunch of work that went into getting to that and so when we talk to people now about like does does this work does remote work we tell them it does but like when people try to do it and they do incrementally or they try it without having all the fixes in place it seems like it's it's just impossible so there was a lot of work that goes into a finding out what the differences are between collocated work which people are used to and switching to remote so let's start with slack right everyone everyone hears you slack okay yeah Slack's huge right Slack's awesome um when when we moved everything onto slack one of the big things that we realized was we have to have like a ton of channels we have gotten super super ridiculously like

aggressive with making new channels and the way we use channels is each conversation thread each thing that used to be an email is actually a separate Channel and we so we basically have like hundreds of channels the way we manage it is this St section in the top right your favorites those are only channels that you would initiate conversations into so for me I have all of our production channels start all of our design channels start sign off um kind of like uh like planning those are all like my start channels because those are things I start conversations in there are like hundreds of other channels Dev are lots of execution channels that I'm in but I'm not starred and so those are kind of all down here and I don't look at those like if someone needs me in one of those channels they know to ping me with a with an at ping and so I can basically go through most of my day and not read any of this and that's how you can keep a lot of channels and have kind of message and thought segregation without being completely overwhelmed with the different things

uh the other thing that we find really useful is muting most of the channels that you're not in so that you can be in channels you can actually respond to things but you don't get constantly pain um we've we've worked with a lot of other partners who also use slack and found a lot of different feedback that they've had where like you know I can't do any get anything done because I'm on slack everything is on slack and we believe that everything needs to be on slack but you don't need to be reading everything otherwise you're just getting the same problem as you had with email with just content overwhelming and then once everything is on slack right like I I don't I'm not going to go into all the details of all the Integrations but obviously you can integrate all your servers all your notifications all your kind of like Dev related things in a slack once we have that then we try to bring as much of the art and creative side into it as possible so Jing is a tool that we found really useful and the main advantage here is that it pastes as a link so you can take a screenshot you can do some like quick editing on it to to tell people what you're looking at and then you can share it as a link um sharing it as a link over an like a embedded attachment or an uploaded file is really

useful because if you bring this from slack into like another chat with someone else or you bring it into like Trello or Google Docs um you don't have to like find the asset paste it around uh SoundCloud for audio stuff so the slack doesn't have like they're they they're constantly building out their Integrations right but SoundCloud is one of their better Integrations where if you have an audio file you upload into SoundCloud it plays in line in slack so the more you can get people to sit inside of this for all of their work and the more SC you can make it the more like consistent it'll be so that's kind of like tactical slack tools the other thing that like there's like three other main things that we found that are different between collocated teams and remote teams and we've kind of like segregated those three problems into different solutions so when we when we approach the problem of like how do we figure out how to have communications that replace imperson communication how do we have like casual conversations where two people are talking about a problem and because they happen to being in an office there's a

third person that sits near them right that is part of the conversation or listens in and decides they want to be part of it how do we replicate that how do we replicate casual conversations so we tried a whole bunch of real-time chat systems and end up on TeamSpeak as this as our solution and we have a pretty customized setup where every single person is full admin and so every single person can move every other person in between channels and the reason here is that we want to have as low friction as possible between two people talking to each other and how we set it up is we have a green Channel where this basically means I'm working but I'm available for conversations we have a yellow Channel which is I'm working but like I don't really want to talk to you for casual things and this is the equivalent of like I have my headphones on I have the little like barrier up and I'm like over my computer right and then we have red which is just like I am not here don't talk to me um on top of those three things we have a whole bunch of public channels and every channel is like a like a conference room and so we have the main one that people hang out in like a main Dev Channel and a Main Art Channel and

people can just like move themselves into the channel and start talking and so now you don't have to be uh like asking someone can I call you on Skype can we talk you just go in and start talking if it's a long conversation then whoever is involved go into a separate room so they don't disturb everyone else just like you would in a real office um and if it's something where I just have a question then anyone who's around could answer my question the conference rooms also behave in normal conference rooms in the sense that people can see who else is talking so if I see our design and our UI person having conversation I can be like oh that's probably something I'm interested in I can just drop myself in there and so this is kind of our like really aggressive push towards open transparent conversations everywhere just like on slack where all of our channels are public every conversation is default public every conversation in here is default public we do have three private rooms that you're not supposed to invite yourself yourself into and those are for really feedback like personal stuff right like one-on ones and like performance stuff but everything else that we do is it's an

opt it's like a everyone is like default allowed into the conversation so that was the kind of open Office how do we mimic the open Office the second piece that we thought was really important to have a mimic or have like an analogy for was the water cooler or the hallway conversation so this is something where it's more about like team building or it's about having different disciplines know what each other are doing and the reason that like uh the reason that teams like like to be collocated is that you get more dispersal ideas and more casual things so we this is one of the problems that we really had difficulty with when we scaled from the 8 to the 10 people range when we were at eight everyone was talking to just about everyone else and as we added each extra person we started kind of dividing into smaller teams and we we end up with like teams of like four or five and so people started feeling really siloed and that was kind of a a big issue for us so our solution to this is actually it's not organic right the rest of our our Solutions have been technological and Organic Solutions

this one was just process so we basically said we are going to write down every decision in every public Channel and that's what led to all of our slack channels being public so we said we still want people working in the groups with the people they mostly need to talk to but after every conversation you need to tell everyone else here's what we talked about and here's what we decided and that needs to be in a publicly available channel so someone else could either just come by and see it or you can ping somebody and they can see the history of the conversation um the second one was we made all the channels public right um the third one was we basically created like very formal daily and weekly updates for everyone so we created a weekly update where we had every every like discipline talk about what they got done like what they are about to do I'm I'm sure most companies have something like that within all hands but we basically forced it to be a bit more formal and a bit more robust than normal because that's the kind of contextual information that normally you would expect people to just

organically get but when you don't see each other that's that's not something that happens by itself uh in terms of daily we extend like we use kind of a scrum where people have a stand up and talk about what they do but we extend that into text as well so everyone talks about here's what I'm doing and here's what like uh I'm doing like for the rest of the week and we share that across the whole team uh we also use something called call outs where you basically share things that are really cool that someone else did and that's a specifically a low volume channel so like it's not a whole lot of content each week but it's shared across the whole team so like lots of formal like tricks to get people to see what the rest of the organization is doing and the third one is like just like in imperson communication right face Toof face so what I've been talking about is mostly text and voice which is like 90% of what we're doing but there is obviously still a place for the imperson stuff and the two biggest things is one like creative conversations where you need the gestures the facial expressions the full

range of communication like like motions and emotion to communicate so for that we still use Skype and for feedback sessions right like where it's like kind of personal gets intense um helps a lot to be able to make eye contact even if it's through like a video screen we also try to have as many inperson meetings as possible when we can can get people together uh it's it's hard when there's no like Center for for us to be like this is the convenient place everyone can get to but we'll have smaller meetups for people that are like kind of all in Europe or all in North America um we had a session where a couple of us work from France for a couple of weeks that was really fun got to get do the lifestyle thing and got to actually meet and bond um we recently had our producer who's out in England come over here and meet with the art director for a week and that was really good for just like spending time together so those things are still important we still need that in order to like build the relationships and build kind of interpersonal trust um but it's kind of like an addition to everything else

and then finally we have like the Whiteboard a lot of teams use the Whiteboard as a single common visual reference for what is our priority what are we working on what is our goals and this kind of goes in line with like communicating context gets harder online so for us it's a combination of Trello and the meetings that I talked about where we formally step through everything um Trello is really nice because we have every single person's tasks on there and we also have our road map on there so it's another opportunity for people to like EES drop on what everyone else is doing and see the context of what our over plan overall plan is um three three more tactical little things here one is we have the scrum channel right I talked about that where in addition to your to our verbal update we have a very short daily scrum update um that's also nice for people who work on the different time zones especially artists who aren't working at the same time so that there's kind of a history and more a public accountability of here's what I said I would do here's

what I've done here's what I'm going to do uh we have an AFK channel so that people can feel good about coming and leaving this is one of those places where whoever the leadership of the team is really needs to set an example like if you're leaving and you're doing something personal you need to demonstrate that it's okay to go out and do something personal in the middle of the day as long as you're being transparent about it as long as you still get your work done um and it's also one of the ways to model the fact that like we believe in the culture and we're not just saying like oh you have flexibility we're doing it and saying that it's okay okay um and then priorities and production update is what we talked about already um and I talked about the time zone it we found that it's best just to pick a single one that people work from so that was a lot of operational stuff like tactical execution how do we get stuff done uh the kind of final bit is really culture and culture I mean every team has to build culture regardless of if you're remote or collocated but we have to work a little bit harder on a remote team to build culture so the kind of inperson gathering that I talked about

is a big part of it um one thing that we found really useful is having a game night so we actually try to say like after our All Hands we try to say okay all right let's not work for an hour play a game play any game like just do it with someone else um and we'll pay for whatever the games are uh people seem like yeah like it seems like it's it's a good way to bond we've had like d and sessions we've had Minecraft we've had Heroes of the Storm obviously um another one that was kind of a surprise to me but really shouldn't have been is that we had a photo sharing Channel and that was like wildly popular it's probably the best bonding like method that we've had people really just like sharing and it's if you just copy Facebook but make it kind of in your team um it it really fills the Gap where like we want to have our personal lives mixed with kind of our work and we like the people that we work with and kind of Facebook really isn't like targeted enough to share some of the more like crazy things that you're doing or shared interests so that was uh kind of a big useful one

and then finally be clear about the rules so uh this one is kind of what I talked about with the AFK Channel where kind of the leadership needs to model the behavior that you think is good we want to we want to have like a culture right which includes all these unspoken things all these things under the surface but we can't just allow all of that to develop on its own because people are generally going to be hesitant about like they don't want to feel like they're taking advantage of the system they don't want to feel like they're letting the rest of their team down so having even a small set of rules that are like explicit like these things are okay these things you should do and saying it allows the rest of the unspoken things to develop more organically cool so it looks like that's pretty much it uh I have five minutes left if anyone wants to ask any questions thank you yeah I just wanted to great talk by the way thank you I'm super interested in this um could you just be a little bit more

specific about you said you formalize the weekly updates um could you I wasn't clear on what form those actually took sure so we start with having the like our producer or Dev producer talk about what everything what uh what specific tasks got done we talk about the road map for the next like month formally so like here the releases are coming out here's exactly what's going into it um we call out the people that did the work so like it can be pretty tedious right where we go through what each person did for each release um but the point is to like let the devs know here's what the artists are doing to contribute to the release let the artist know here's what the devs are doing to like make the art that you made really go into it and so we actually go through like a pretty like thorough thing of here's what everyone did to do everything and on a normal team I think that it feels like a waste of time um but we found that like even if it takes an extra half hour hour that that's like that level of detail on each release what we have done and then what we are about to do and who's doing what on each release is really useful um yeah oh no it's it's on a weekly call

yeah and we also record it for the people that aren't on at the same time so we just have a recording and people can listen to it afterwards as a podcast hi thank you for your talk um I have a pretty large remote team with varying degrees of techsavvy and sometimes I feel a little bit of resistance to change when I try to incorporate a new tool I know you mentioned quite a lot of tools uh do you have any tips for sort of getting your team ready to adapt to those changes or how big is team uh they about 10 okay so um yeah it was it was a pain like we switched like the voice chat thing I said where we use TeamSpeak I literally switched chat systems on my team four times and we actually went to team speak went to Discord and went back to TeamSpeak and they were not happy about that um I think some of it is just like with when you want to make this work you just need to push it through so is your team sorry is your team partially remote and partially collocated or is it all yes there three of us in the office and then there's like six others so that's one of the main like it's a really big problem actually I think um when we when

I was at Zinga I actually worked on a partially collocated partially remote team and we had a huge problem where the collocated people didn't feel the same pain that the remote people did and for us because everyone's feeling the same pain even though it was painful doing the different transitions um people understood like this is a problem that we need to solve even though this is like a very painful process we need to go through it together um so I don't have specific firsthand advice on how to do this but I would say that the more you can get the collocated team to feel the pain that the remote team is having I think that'll be a good way to get everyone on the same on the same page and they'll be more open to experimenting for a solution thank you hi I was wondering how you prevent work anytime from being work all the time like how do you give people reasonable expectations about this is what we expect from you and if it's got you working more than the standard well I'm going to say 40 and we all know that's a lie but like the standard 60 hours a week like tell me that that's a like how do you manage that kind of scheduling absolutely and I think that's

one of the things where I say it's important for the leadership to set the rules and follow the rules so we have the scrum in and scrum out chat and so when we come in we say like I'm starting work now right like I I'm starting work late today because I had to do something or like no I'm starting on time today and then when we leave we say I'm I'm out for the day so especially for me and my co-founder we really try to like to model that right like if I'm if I'm starting work late I'm just like I'm starting work late today if I leave and like I'm going to go play Frisbee for 4 hours like that's what I say and so I think that like a lot of that just comes from like what the leadership does and how they demonstrate this um we we do actually work a lot right like one of the problems with slack is that you can be working everywhere I was texting my team on slack right before this talk um I think that to some extent it's okay if it's healthy and the main thing is to respect the core hours so because we set everyone to Pacific time hours we expect people to be around and it's okay if you have a reason for not being there but that's really when we expect you to work and if you're like kind of uh past that that and like we we don't expect people

to be responsive at that time and it's really coming from like how you model the behavior okay thank you hello uh I work on Call of Duty so for us like security and preventing everything from leaking is really important and when it comes to working remote I find that having like all the VPN and all this stuff in to protect my data really a problem is it something that you care about doing when you're working remote or do you like play a of nobody's going to do that I think I think we probably play a bit faster and looser with data security than you guys do um we make mobile slots games and there's like a million mobile slot games on the market um we we do we we are fairly careful with our art in the sense that we have like we we're able to do the stuff like removing it from Dropbox but like if somebody really wants to mess with your content like anyone doesn't matter if they're remote or collocated I feel like if someone is maliciously trying to do something or trying to steal something I don't think it's actually that easy to stop regardless what we do so we've pretty much just based this on like if if we

give you access to it then we trust you to not screw with it great thank you yeah hi great talk thanks you said you have approximately 30 people in the in the team in total so how many developers and how many game artists and do you split them to the teams when they work on their different products maybe sure so we um we have like five or six devs um like a dozen dozen artists and designers and then we have like kind of me design couple UI sound like some miscellaneous people uh so the the core development team is like six um we work on we work we we do only slot stuff so everything is on a single core engine so we have like one GitHub repo that most of our our code is in uh we have a dozen different games though so in terms of art we actually have a lot of different art pipelines that are happening at the same time so we work we manage our art pipeline pretty separately from the dev pipeline was that was that to answer your question

thanks all right maybe last one hey I wanted to know uh kind of how you get leadership involved in these communication pieces because I think one of the problems that we most frequently have is that we need feedback from you know Business Leaders or you know different members of some of our other distributed teams that don't typically get in on the day-to-day work that's done by the teams getting our teams to communicate is easy getting our leaders to communicate with the teams or even with each other is very difficult any advice uh what type of communication are you referring to specifically so you know if we need to have business deals being made I work for PlayStation so so you know we have different you know potentially new you know game discussions that happen to come out or you know platform decisions things like that yeah so uh it's hard like I I because I do most of our um or organizing the the weekly meetings I feel an obligation each week to say stuff about what's going on but definitely a lot of the other like leaders in the different disciplines get la La about it so what I do is I just call them out I'm like you need to say

something about this next week right or like be ready for me to like ask you and like tell everyone else what's going on because I know there's something big I think that just whoever is running it needs to be able to call out people for like I think there's something interesting going on in your department say something about it cool thank you all right thanks everyone