Maintaining Sledgehammer Games' Studio Culture During Rapid Team Growth

My name is Alana Cole and I'm a producer at Sledgehammer Games in Melbourne, Australia. And I'm actually in Melbourne, Australia right now, which is not where I imagined I would be while giving the GDC presentation. Um it's been a strange year for all of us and I'm sure a lot of these presentations that we're listening to at GDC uh talking about that strange year. And this one is no different. Um so today I'm going to be talking to you about maintaining Sledgehammer Games' studio culture during some really rapid team growth that we've gone through. Um which happened to coincide with a global pandemic and working from home. So there was a lot of change going on in our studio all at once. Uh and we I think did a very good job of handling it and maintaining our studio culture throughout that process. So today I'm going to be going through some of the ways that we do that and

some of the lessons we've learned that you can apply to your own teams. But first a little bit about me. Um so like I said, I'm a producer at Sledgehammer Games. I'm a few other things as well. Um I'm also the founding director of Represent Me, which is a charity based on uh inclusive representation of people in games uh in the games industry as well. Uh I write books and papers about a whole range of topics um including inclusivity and diversity in games. It's me holding / biting on a book that uh came out last year that I was a a co-author for. Uh I'm also the mom of several beautiful rats. There are there's a photo of three of them there. Um rats are lovely. Uh in the past I've done a few other things as well. So um I've been studio support for an indie studio doing a whole bunch of different things. So anything from recruitment to HR um through to production.

I've also been a university lecture lecturer for um game design. So, I taught um introductory game design and also um introductory and intermediate narrative design during that. I actually have my doctorate in creative writing. So, writing is where I came from um and then I kind of transitioned into production just because of the level of organization I already had in my life um and experience I had managing teams through acting as a director um in my in my own business. So, I've kind of got a a diverse uh background. I think a lot of people in games do. But, I found that this has put me in really good stead when helping to lead a team cuz I have a lot of different hats I can wear and a lot of different skills I can I can use. Uh and you'll see different parts of this presentation where those come through. So, when I first joined uh Sledgehammer Games in Melbourne, um the Melbourne team itself was a team of seven people. I was the seventh person. Um and when I joined the team,

the studio that we were in um was basically a small corporate office. Um we couldn't really fit any more than 10 people in it comfortably, I think. It was really warm in the summer. Obviously, Australian summers are warm already. Um but, for the longest time we couldn't even work out how to open a window in that office and the air conditioner didn't cope with our servers and our equipment. Um so, so some choice photos from that studio you can see here on the left-hand side. Um so, we had Let Let me just quickly explain some of what's going on here. So, for starters, I was the first non-engineer to join. For some reason, the guys who were already in there, the engineers who were in there, um had a collection of plastic cutlery just sitting on top of their fridge. Um, cuz they would go across the road to the food court to get like Chinese food

or whatever and they would give them like plastic forks and stuff and they'd just come back and kind of put them on top of the fridge. Um, they also had this couch, this really lovely couch. I'm pretty sure they found it on the side of the road and then brought it into the studio. Um, one of the first things I did when I joined was get rid of this couch. Um, and those original guys still haven't forgiven me yet. Um, and then the last thing is this situation with the bin and the garbage bag. So, basically, like I said, the air conditioner was not really coping with all of our equipment in this office. Uh, and so the air conditioner that was in the server room would leak. Uh, and so they came up with this fantastic contraption where they taped the garbage bag to the wall where the drips would fall, uh, and then use that to kind of funnel the water into this bin so that it wouldn't go on the ground. Um, they also had like that yellow cable

you can see is a sensor, uh, that was connected to a Raspberry Pi so you could tell when the water was getting full. Um, you can see how close that is to our equipment. So, if that was to overflow, which it did do occasionally, it could cause problems. So, that was the before. That was when we were seven people. Um, so now we are at, uh, about 130 people, uh, and hiring more every week at the moment in Melbourne. Um, our overall team is at like 350 or something now across multiple locations. Um, but our Melbourne studio is going to be moving in to this beautiful studio you can see on the right hand side. Uh, it's in construction at the moment with the final fit out. The building's done, but the inside uh, fit out is still happening. And basically, as soon as uh, we are COVID safe to move back into studio, this is the beautiful place where we'll be we'll we'll be uh, occupying.

So, you can see there's like lovely plants and like, you know, no couch that you'd be scared to sit on. Um, it's a bit of an upgrade. And so, this is in the space of like 18 months that we've gone from this kind of very small corporate office to this amazing big studio. And, you know, we have gone more than 10 times the size in terms of the number of people in our studio as well. So, there's a lot of change and a lot of growth in a very short time. Uh, most of which we had to coordinate and organize while we were working from home. Um, so whilst the stories of that beautiful corporate office and some of its uh, strange um, idiosyncrasies will follow us as uh, urban kind of myths and lore that we'll tell to our our new employees as they join us. Hopefully, we won't end up with a strange pile of plastic cutlery on our new fridge. We have kind of

a lot of these in jokes, a lot of this lore that we chat about and talk about. Um, and for me, that's a massive part of our studio culture. So, our studio culture is what I I I think the best studio culture I've ever experienced in a workplace. And there's a bunch of reasons why that's the case, and it's a really conscious choice from studio leadership to get it to that state. And so, if you're looking to try and uh, either improve or kind of start a studio and and create a culture, there's some really key steps that you should follow, right? So, you need to start with your goal. You need to work out what it is that you actually want to achieve with the culture of your studio. Then you need to ask yourselves how you achieve that. So, you need actionable steps. You can't just say, "Oh, I want our studio culture to be fun or inclusive or relaxed or flexible." You need to actively think about what you're going to do to achieve that as step two.

Then you need to make a commitment to those actions. You need to commit as a team. You need to write it down. You need to explain and and transparently share with your team what you're trying to do. Make that commitment publicly and and like within your team um and and make it really clear that that is what you're trying to do. You need to learn from any mistakes you make uh because it won't be perfect. You won't just wake up one day and be like, "Ah, it's exactly what we asked for. It's exactly what we were planning." Um so, whenever mistakes are made, you need to listen, learn from those, and grow from that, and create new commitments as a result of that. Uh and lastly, you need to remember the job's never done. It's not like we have a fantastic studio culture at Sledgehammer and we've said, "Great. Let's just mark that off as done and put that over there and then get on with something else." Um the work that is involved in creating studio culture is really important and we have to kind of keep maintaining that.

Cool. So, there are kind of a bunch of different values that we use to um explain and explore our studio culture and and come up with the different kind of actions that we want to take as part of that. So, all of these are on our website. They're also given to all of our new employees as soon as they join the team. And they are designed to kind of guide us in the direction that we want to go. So, we want to cultivate greatness in our team. Uh so, make sure that they have an environment where they can all thrive and and do their very best. Uh we want to empower every single person on our team to be a game maker. So, no matter where they are, we want to empower them to have an input and have a say in what our game looks like. Uh, we want everybody to feel like they're empowered to innovate and change and do new and interesting things. We don't want to be following the the trends. We want to be making the trends. We want to give people the space to fail

and grow. So, this goes back to what I was saying before about if you make mistakes, making sure that you learn from them. Um, we want our team to know that making a mistake is not the end of the world. Everyone makes mistakes. Uh, and we want them to know that we encourage them to grow from that and and learn from those mistakes and never feel like they are, you know, in trouble for for doing something wrong. Uh, we want to make everyone feel like they're a builder, that they're creating something. Um, they're creating an amazing team. They're creating amazing games. Um, we're kind of working together to build something amazing together. Uh, we want to be open, honest, and transparent. And this one's really, really, really important to us. Um, obviously they all are, but this one is, you know, we we hear this kind of talked about in internal communication all the time. You know, we're always trying to tell the team what's going on even if we don't have the whole story yet, just to make sure people don't feel like we're hiding anything, that you know, a bunch

of conversations are happening behind closed doors. Uh, and we are an actions over words studio. Um, and this is particularly important for things like diversity and inclusivity. Uh, we don't just say the things. We don't just, you know, make our our profile picture rainbow colored during pride month. We do a lot of work to back that up, uh, both internally inside our studio and also externally, uh, with our community. So, these are the studio values that guide us. And then kind of what we've done from there figure out what that actually kind of means, right? So, it's not just about okay, great. You're a game maker. It's about actively seeking feedback on our games from everybody, no matter which department they're in. We explain this to ourselves and we explain this to to our team. Um we yeah, like I've like I kind of already said, we make sure we have a safe environment to make mistakes and we don't keep secrets. We make sure people know what we know and also know if we

can't tell them something yet and why. We try to be as honest about all of that as we can. But remember how I said we need to do more than just have a goal. We need to have the actions in place that we're going to take to reach that goal. So, these are some of the actions we take to achieve these handful of values that I've just kind of pulled out as as examples. So, for getting feedback from everybody, we do daily play tests with the entire team. Everyone's welcome. Everyone can give feedback. Everyone can play the game that we're working on throughout the year as well and and just kind of just say whatever, give our feedback to the right people anytime, but we have dedicated play test periods for that as well. We have feedback channels that people can use on Slack, via email. We make sure everyone knows the right people to talk to if they do have something they want to share. We kind of open as many feedback channels as we can. Um for fail and grow, we share stories about our mistakes. We don't hide them. We don't, you know, pretend that we're perfect. And that goes for leadership,

not just, you know, people who are on the team and making our game on the ground. Leadership talks about their mistakes as well. We talk about silly things that we've done and what we learned from it, um both in this studio and in previous studios throughout our careers. That's a really important part of making people feel like they're safe to make mistakes, that, you know, everyone's made mistakes and this is what we got out of it. We never call someone out for failing and learning. You know, if someone made a mistake and failed, we never, you know, call them out for it. We never embarrass them for it. We always make sure that people feel like they know they can grow and learn from that mistake, and we empower them to do that. We help them with what that looks like and and what those steps are. Uh and in terms of this open, honest, and transparent, um we have fortnightly Q&As with our studio leadership team. So, our studio head and our COO jump in a Slack channel. We have a form that we can use to send in um questions, and they will answer whatever questions our team has. Sometimes they're silly, sometimes they're serious. Um

it's usually somewhere in between, and we kind of have that forum as a regular opportunity for people to hear open, honest, and transparent feedback from studio leadership. And we also have like a lot of jokes and informal chats, and that comes back to what I said originally about our culture, that we have a really fun and and open culture at Sledgehammer. Um and these sorts of jokes and informal chats create this approachability with our leadership team. So, they aren't just kind of sitting over there in their ivory tower. When no one is kind of scared to talk to them, because they're really relaxed and fun and and silly. And that's a really important part of um how we kind of create this transparency and openness in our culture. Um so, like all of that is all well and good in terms of our plan, um but I also just had a chat with some people on our team about what they like about our studio culture. Um and this

can be a really good check-in for figuring out what it is you want to maintain in your studio. So, if you ask your team, "Hey, what do you like about our studio culture currently? What don't you like?" This can be a really good way of knowing what they value, and then kind of trying to figure out how you've cultivated that, and what you can keep doing to create a a positive culture for your team. Um so some of the call outs people had was they were inclusive, that no one has an ego, and I think um that was probably the one that was called out the most. Um no matter what level people are in the in the organization, no one's got an ego, everyone's happy to to have a chat. Everyone's willing to help, uh which is a really important one, particularly given how many new people we have joining us. Um it's really important that everyone is willing to help each other and and build this team up. That we all have passion for our work, that we all respect each other, and that no one takes themselves too seriously. Um and that goes back to this

kind of joking and informal aspect of our culture as well. Um cuz as you can see, we take ourselves very seriously. We obviously um look very kind of formal and put together during every meeting that we do. Um I will explain the unicorns. So, the big thing I think is this kind of jokey and informal culture. It doesn't work for every studio ever, it doesn't work for every workplace, but it really works for us. And so that's the big thing, right? It's making sure that you work out what it is that your studio should have and what you want it to have, what your team wants it to have, and you create and cultivate a culture that works for them. Um and so one of the big things that we think about a lot when we talk about our studio culture is about the fact that we have multiple locations. So, even before work from home, we obviously were in Foster City and also in Melbourne. Foster City in the US, uh and Melbourne, Australia.

Um we're expanding and have additional locations happening as well. Um and then when work from home happened and and COVID happened, we ended up being, you know, one studio with 300 locations because we're all working from home. And so these are some of the tips that we have uh kind of figured out for creating a positive culture while working from multiple locations. And while you're working from home, while your team is split across various houses, this might be useful to you as well. So, the number one is that communication is key. Pretty much all of our issues can be solved with frequent communication between locations, between team members. The kind of biggest complaints and concerns I've had when I've run retrospectives with my teams is that people were finding out things too late or they weren't finding things out at all. And it's literally just because communication channels weren't, you know, open enough or people weren't sure who to share things with or people weren't sure which individuals were working on which parts of the game.

So, just creating communication channels, transparency on who is the right people to tell different bits of information, and just making sure that that is really open and and um that there's lots of opportunities to talk with each other. Not just about work, but also talk with each other about other things, you know. Um really important and useful information tends to come through informal chats. It's that stuff that you do in the studio where you, you know, get a coffee and stand in the kitchen and have a quick conversation. Um without finding opportunities to do that while working from home or working in multiple locations, you miss a whole bunch of like really important informal chats and and uh knowledge transfer. So, finding opportunities to do that as well. Being proactive. Um so, making sure you actively reach out to people and ask questions and solve problems, share what's going on with you. Um again, there's none of that kind of

informal observation that we can do when we're in studio. So, it's really important that you're reaching out when you have an issue, you're reaching out when there's something going on, or you're reaching out to ask if people have problems. Um cuz you can't just like see someone frustrated in the studio. You don't see people at all. Um, setting yourself up for success. So, um, making sure that you know when you're going to have access to other people. If there's multiple time zones involved, it's incredibly important to think about this because sometimes you don't have certain people accessible. They're asleep or they're, you know, off hours. And so, rather than creating a culture where, um, people feel like they need to be available all the time. Like, as if I need to be available at 4:00 a.m. because Foster City started work then. We're trying to create this culture where you set yourself up for success. So, people in Melbourne make sure that we have all the information that we need to finish our day before people start leaving work. Uh, and then Foster City

is in the same boat where they, you know, make sure that they have their tasks set up for tomorrow so they're not waiting around for half the day until Melbourne's come online. Um, and so this is about kind of having that communication when you can have it and then setting yourself up for independent work when you can't. And making sure that during that disconnected time is actually a positive because you aren't in a whole bunch of meetings. You can like have a solid block to get a whole bunch of work done. So, thinking about how you can use that time effectively. Uh, and also scheduling your phone notifications. Um, work-life balance is so important to our mental health and to avoiding burnout. So, make sure that your phone notifications aren't always on. While you're working from home, it is so, so easy to just start working 12-hour days because, you know, your office is right there next to your bed. Um, so making sure that you only have notifications for Slack or work email on during your working hours so that you're not tempted to just constantly be

working. Don't fall into the trap of responding to people from different time zones at a silly time. Um, and like at work as well, like at Sledgehammer, we have flexible working hours. So, even without time zones involved, you might find yourself you know, I work from 7:00 till 3:00 or 7:00 till 4:00 most days because I like to get up early and and connect more with the US. Um but then sometimes people will book meetings or or want to message me at like 4:00 or 5:00 or 6:00 in the in the afternoon because they work kind of a later start to a to a later end. And so, I need to be really careful not to accidentally extend my work day by still responding to those people as the day drags on. Um so, yeah, that's that's an important part of creating that work-life balance while in multiple locations. Adapting to change. Um so, some of the ways that we have found adapting to change um works quite well for our team and you can take these these tips on

board. Being flexible. Being flexible is really valuable anyway, um because even when there's not whole studio change, there's often individual change. People's lives are moving around and changing all the time. And so, creating flexibility so people know that they have space for those changes is really really important to making them feel valued um and like really important parts of the team. So, allow people to make space in their lives. Um flexible hours are really important, I think. Um they are a really easy way to fully empower your team to get their work done when they can and when makes sense to them without feeling like they can't, you know, take their kid to school. Right? So, we make sure that we have the opportunity for our team members to do whatever it is they need to do. Go to appointments. Yeah, do like have commitments with their children whether it be, you know, parent-teacher interviews or whatever. Um have, you know, an electrician come

by without it being a big deal, like creating space for people to have their life around their work. And that also comes back to what I was saying before about flexible working hours. So, like when you start, when you finish, um provided you can kind of meet all of your expectations for attending meetings and and speaking with people and kind of have that core set of hours in the middle of the day, starting a bit earlier or starting a bit later and ending later or whatever it is that works for our individuals, we pretty much support anything that we can we can manage to. So, I highly recommend that. We have only positives to say about it in terms of productivity. Getting people to sit down between 9:00 to 5:00 and and be in their chair for that whole time doesn't, you know, doesn't work for us and doesn't work for a lot of people. Um encourage and model self-care. Um self-care is really, really important. Um self-care is anything from, you know, going for a walk halfway through the day

because you really need to get away from your screen to having a mental health day off um because your mental health is is having a hard time. Um and it can also be difficult decisions. It can be, you know, any number of of life-related decisions that you need to do to better yourself and and look after yourself. And leadership should not only be encouraging their team to look after themselves in these ways, they need to model that behavior as well. So, telling people that they can take a mental health day doesn't do as much as actively taking a mental health day and telling people you've done that. So, leadership should be paving the way for that and making that explicit. Making sure that you're modeling work-life balance as well. Telling people, "Hey, don't work overtime. Don't, you know, don't burn yourself out." While you're also working overtime and burning yourself out, it's noticed, it's obvious, and it's silly. Um so, you need to kind of model the behavior that you want to see in your team. Um, so I have a condition called

fibromyalgia. If you aren't familiar with it, there's a whole bunch of different symptoms to related to it. Basically, it's a nervous system condition. But one thing that I tend to find is that I get pretty bad fatigue on days where my fiber is flaring up. Um, and so I'll model taking afternoon naps. I will actively say in we have like a Slack channel for when you're not going to be at the computer for a while. I'll ping in there and say, "Hey, going to be out for an hour taking an afternoon nap." And people respond really positively to that. No one is thinking, "Oh, what a lazy person." You know, they know I'm going to come back. They know I'm going to get my job done. But they also know I'm looking after myself and it encourages them to look after themselves, too. And overall, it just creates a happier and healthier team. Um, make sure you don't undervalue your studio support. Um, during periods of change, especially, studio support is vitally important. Producers are the ones that make sure that everyone stays on track, that everyone has a person they can quickly

talk to if they need something, if they're overworked and not able to get through as much. Um, HR is obviously vitally important for everyone's well-being, making sure they're okay. Operations has been invaluable while we've been working from home. Um, they've been organizing care packages for people, making sure that people feel kind of commended and supported when they achieve things, um, organizing overtime meals or things like that if if people need it. Making sure that, you know, the the work that people do isn't going unnoticed. Um, cuz obviously if people are in studio and a couple of periods of of overtime happen, you can literally see it. You can see them in the studio. Um, so operations has been really good at making sure that none of that just slips under the radar while we're at home. IT technicians, gosh, if anybody uh pays attention to how kind of work from home happens when a studio suddenly has to move all of their stuff from the studio to people's houses. IT technicians are like vitally important

for that process. Um the amount of hardware and technology that we've had to kind of move around and and, you know, plug in and figure out how it runs and have tutorials for how to set it up on your home network. Um they have been so important for that. Uh and recruitment as well. Like like I've said, you know, we've expanded we hired over 100 people in the last year. The only way that we can do that is recruitment and and our actual dedicated recruiters. Um obviously a lot of people um a lot of studios don't have all of these different individual roles, but you have people who are serving these roles. So, make sure you don't undervalue them um particularly during periods of change, during work from home, during COVID. Um these people are incredibly important to making sure the studio runs and works and are just as valuable as any person who is like hands-on touching the code in the game. Uh I think sometimes different studios can forget that. They forget that, you know, these people are developers just like

anybody else. This is important development work. Uh and the last tip I have for adapting to change is to make time for fun. So, it's really hard to create time to have social interaction when you're all kind of stressed about some sort of change. Um studio-wide jokes and fun can ease that stress so easily. Uh so, I've got a couple of things on the side here that you might have been looking at throughout this slide thinking, "Dear God, is she going to explain those?" The first one, um so, this is a weird little uh thing that started happening during our studio meetings when we first went to working from home because of COVID. Um so, this is our lovely uh our lovely employee Adam. Um for some reason he when he started talking during studio meetings, we all started complimenting him on how great his microphone setup was. Made him sound like, you know, kind of this radio announcer kind of chill jazz kind

of um announcer voice, I don't know. You start to kind of lose your mind a little bit when you've been working from home for a while. Um, and so because his microphone setup was so nice and his voice was was sounding so good, he decided to start reading poetry at the end of our studio meetings. Um, and then he would like take requests, so we would send in our poems that we wanted to have read. Um, and our uh studio art manager, Nathan, made this beautiful banner that went on the slide, so it actually became a segment during these these studio meetings. And like I said, you know, we're expanding this whole time, so we have new people joining and this is just part of the studio meeting for them, you know, they get to this slide and it's suddenly poetry time and they're like, "Okay, I guess this happens." Um, and it really I think creates an environment, it shows them who we are and what we value and it's apparently poetry at the end of our studio meetings. It's having a laugh,

it's being a bit silly. Uh, and so then this this other photo is our studio GM, uh that's Greg. That's Greg holding a photo of himself who is holding a photo of himself. Um, I really wish I could explain this one, but parts of it aren't really clear even to me and I've been here for the whole process. Um, but at one point, one of our principal engineers, Andrew, decided it would be a cool idea to pay an artist to Photoshop Greg and then put that Photoshop onto a tea towel and then send that tea towel to every single person in the studio. I still have mine. Um and then Greg kind of had a photo of him holding up the tea towel that went around because it was his face, so he was holding up a photo of his own face. Um and then we had this other Photoshop made that also got sent around in some care

packages. It said, you know, I'll be seeing you at happy hour, encouraging people to come to one of our social uh Zoom happy hours. Uh and so then there was a Photoshop made of that holding the tea towel because I don't know, memes kind of have a life of their own. When you start to explain them, they don't make any sense. Anyway, this is him holding the meme of the meme holding the tea towel. It's make room for fun is is the main thing. So we try to create uh a lot of kind of space for our team growth. So uh we had This was our team kind of before we went to work from home. Uh it's fairly early on. There's like eight of us uh out for lunch. I've forgotten what that's like. Uh and then we also have kind of a a team photo that we took of all of us hanging out on a on a Zoom call. Um we create kind of all sorts of forums for casual conversations, for chats, for

learning, for creating, you know, relationships with people. Some of these spaces that we create to learn uh kind of formal listen and learning sessions we have, so we'll actually have a scheduled session where people can come and learn and and have like a lecture-style chat. Um and then we also have a whole bunch of Slack channels where you're welcome to ask questions and learn with each other. We also have lots of opportunities for casual conversations. So sometimes that's hangouts. It's like the happy hour I just mentioned. Um sometimes it's studio channels like ones for hobbies and pets and memes. Um the meme channel is noisy and full of nonsense. Um, you know, in our hobbies channel, we have someone who is incredibly good at archery and shares photos of how many, you know, bull's eyes he got this day when he went out to to do archery. So, we have like a whole whole range of things. Um, we assign people buddies formally. So, we don't just solely rely on forming organic friendships. This is especially

important now that we're working from home, but it was really important even when we were in the studio. Making sure somebody is there that you can call on and and talk to and know will be able to introduce you to someone or knows who to talk to about such and such. Um, having that kind of formalized channel is super important. And letting people in on the jokes so is so important. So, I'm I'm talking about how, you know, we have all these lovely casual conversations, these casual chats and and jokes. Um, but when new people are joining and the team is growing, it's really important that you let them in on that. So, uh, for instance, we had a period of time during one of our studio meetings where we mentioned that lovely bucket garbage bag air conditioner situation. Uh, and we took time out of that meeting to actively explain to anybody who wanted to stick around and find out what that story was. And so, we let people in on that law. So, it's the same thing with the unicorns, right? You've seen the unicorn

in the bottom corner of my slides. You've seen the unicorn hats. Uh, there's even a unicorn hat hiding in that, uh, in that Zoom photo up up there on the side. Again, like I wish I could explain. With a lot of these jokes, they start with I'm not really sure. But, um, when work from home started, we started sending each other weird gifts. And often, they wouldn't get signatures on them. They would just arrive and you'd be like, "Okay, cool. A weird gift from work. I'm not sure who did this." Um and one of the the main ones we thoroughly enjoyed doing was the unicorn hat. Um and so a unicorn hat would appear in someone's mail, and then they would have photos of it in, you know, our next Zoom meeting. They would be wearing it or something. Um I got a unicorn onesie. It's lovely. I still have it. It's in my It's in my wardrobe. Um and it kind of escalated to the point where we sent unicorn hats to the COO and studio head in Foster City

because this was mostly a Melbourne thing where we were just sending each other unicorns. Um and so we kind of got them in on it, and they wore theirs at a studio meeting. So that was one of the photos you saw earlier. Uh it got to the point where we even had um This is our unicorn shirt hat uh hat shirt, rather. Uh so, you know, it kind of became part of the law. But obviously every new person who joins sees all these unicorns, and it's like, "I don't understand what's happening." Um and even though it doesn't really make that much sense uh even when you know the story, it's super important that we're like, "Oh, okay. Let me tell you the story." So it all started with this unicorn hat. I don't know. Um and it makes them feel like they're part of the culture, they're part of the stories. Um they're not joining some sort of strange cult uh and they don't know kind of what it is that's going on. So bring people in, let them laugh with you. So that's it, right? Like I've I've gone through a whole bunch of different tips that work for us. Um they're pretty

general because they are, you know, things that we've applied and things that we've used. Um I'm not saying that you need to go out and get everybody a unicorn hat in your studio, but finding those similar sorts of channels, the ways to create informal conversation, the ways to create approachability, um figuring out what it is your team values, and then actively thinking about the actions you can take to achieve that. That's the main takeaway here for me. Um so I'm here I'm in chat. I'm able to answer any questions through um that you have as a result of all of the things that we've talked about. Um just as a reminder I've got the key topics we covered up on the screen. So if there's anything in these areas that you want to chat about feel free to message in the chat. I'm here to help. Um and I'm also here on you know social media Twitter. You can see my Twitter handle down in the bottom corner as well. So if there's any other questions that you would like to ask anything that you want to come and chat to me about that's the best way to find me.

Um but otherwise I hope you had a lovely time hearing about our studio culture and learning kind of from our lessons and things that we've experienced throughout this. Um both kind of the the rapid change of hiring a bunch of people and the rapid change of working from home all of a sudden because of a global pandemic. Um and I hope that there's something in that that you can take back to your own teams as well. Thanks.