Remember coffee with your squats – Building a company culture

[Music] [Music] however have any of you been to Bergen yes the city is surrounded by seven mountains like this usually we have rain so I've only included bragging photos when we have Sun so I used to work here in my hometown Bergen in a big corporation with thousands of employees and I really liked my job I had cool projects I had nice colleagues and I wasn't looking for a new job until I one day on LinkedIn I saw that there was an article about in the region game studio in Bergen looking for someone to fill an exciting role and despite being a gamer

I since I was a kid I had no idea that we had a gaming industry in Bergen Norway even so I started to research this company a bit and I read this story about some students at the University in Trondheim in Norway joining forces to make mobile games this they were working from the University as you can see here so when their first game wasn't a success they were hoping for they looked through the stories to see if there is some kind of gap some kind of game that's missing and they grew up together playing Mario Kart this is not them but I think this picture is brilliant because it shows that competitive feeling of these kids playing together and having fun and this was kind of an experience they couldn't find for a mobile game back in 2011 so they wanted to recreate this these feelings and this memorable moments they had as kids so they launched a game called fun run and

a few months after launch a trended worldwide on Twitter hashtag fun run and read so videos like this [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so this game spreaded at schools and we got to the number one position at in the US App Store and no new agent developer had had in any apps in that position before so moving from the school from their kitchen they rented a real office and started hiring people and from the beginning they were all discussing how they wanted to form the work environment and yeah they got a coffee maker I don't if you can see the picture I'll come

back to that and yeah the shoes I don't know if this is a Norwegian thing or Nordic thing I've seen it in some studios in Finland do you have a no-shoe policy at your office no yes we have someone yeah so after they completed their studies they moved back to the city of Bergen this is just taken from the other side and got an office space in the middle of the city center and from very early on the office became an important part of the culture where people met for of course to work but also in the evenings or bring in friends or family in the weekends so this is how it looked we have idea so everything I think is from is from there so milestones were reached and celebrated we have this milestone poster we just updated it because we almost reached all the milestones that were made early on so we

have course we need new girls to stretch for so we celebrate and behind these milestones there are some rewards usually related to something social like going to lay stag or going to escape rooms in London when we were at PGC and I hear a lot of people talking about celebrating the failure as well and that's something that we really do focus on because we of course we fail so this is how we do it we talk about what happened how we can avoid it from happening again then we learned from it and then we celebrate so this is the celebration of launching a game that wasn't good enough to be launched so we celebrated the team learned from the mistakes and made a new game called front rent - and kids played at schools tweeted about it went viral again on Twitter and then back into this a wonderful list here on the second

position this time it's still good so as you might have understood I got the job and from the moment I walked in the door and kicked off my shoes I could feel this positive and open casual environment that I've really felt like this is a place where I can drive be myself and I'm really I was really glad that I saw that article and got this job so on Fridays we have a weekly meeting and I got to join in on a few of those before I could start to the job and it was it's very short very efficient and I was working for a big corporation as a project manager with lots of hierarchy lots of documents lots of processes and this it was so refreshing to be part of meeting where everybody had prepared we fill out the minutes a meeting minute before the meeting everybody has prepared we take times and we take we we switch who is the moderator we always

end the meeting with something fun like a video or something else what surprised me in this meeting the most was the level of no participation and how people were so open and honest and in as part of the template that we use for this meetings is an evaluation of the week and everyone was just so honest somebody said yeah I've had a good week or I had an amazing week or I was also a bit boring because I had some boring tasks or I've been feeling tired I was be able to be so efficient I didn't get to do what I would planned for coming from this big I don't know if I should competitive but you know working as a consultant invoicing your hours to clients you don't want to really admit that you didn't do what you were supposed to that week or you couldn't focus so it was very very refreshing and we released a new game in last you know

2016 and back to celebrations we of course we always have non-alcoholic beverages as well for these celebrations but I only I get that question a lot so this is from last year when we celebrated reaching 100 million or all organic downloads for our games so since I started when we were eight two and a half year ago we have welcomed nine and new employees to the office and Erin you were talking a lot about recruitment and that's also something that we really focus on so we also have an extensive recruitment process and it's very important because it's so important for us to be able to communicate how this is and and culture is not constant but you know to have people considering coming to work for us to get a sense of how things are how we work together and what we believe in how we behave and that

that's been very important so we never rush this processes it's so important for us to find the right person to come and join us so the team grew the office that we had got too small too noisy we had everybody working in the same room we had the coffee maker in the same room there was no place where we can you know stand and chat around the coffee without disturbing everybody in the room so we needed to find a new office and learning from previous jobs I had I realized how important the office itself is as a part of the culture so we really wanted to stay in the city as this office has been a natural meeting point for so many we we actually we installed an alarm that was automatically set on it afternoons but we had to change it because there was usually people there in the evenings and it's not to work because we do not crunch we want people to to stop working when the day is over but it's just people meeting bringing

their friends being in the city and just dropping by the office that was such an important focus area for us to be able to still offer that so we managed to get the rest of the floor you know with the balconies there that's our office we got a rest of the floor double the size of our office and moved into a new part so this is our team today 17 people and every day when I walk to work through the city this is during Christmas with all the beautiful lights there I can say from the bottom of my heart that I really look forward to going to the office every single day it doesn't matter if it's Monday or Friday I still that feeling that sense that I got from going to the interview there is still feeling that I felt that I I have now in my job and yeah we got a few more shoe racks still no shoes at the office and

we have flexible working hours but we do have some core hours from 855 in the morning because our team's highly depend on each other and at some point we want everybody to be there so this is something that started in the beginning when some of the employees were always early and some always late waiting for they were waiting for the one who was so always late so they might have made a rule and there is a there is a some paper on the side of the wall there so the rule is be present at 8:55 so if you're five minutes late you owe one beer to the beer fridge this is the beer punishment list if you are 10 minutes late two beers and fifty minutes or more tree bears so there is beer in the beer fridge and every month we have something I think is Norwegian it's called blending spills

it's the you know meeting for beer when we have our salary I don't know if you do that but it's I know it's sometimes we see lists of things that are not translatable from Norwegian and the learning spills is one of them so at nine o'clock we do our morning check-in so then we want everybody to be there and the rule of being there at 8:55 and especially since we double the size of the office and we have more space we don't see each other that much anymore I really like this starting in the day like this getting to look my colleagues in the eye see if anybody has some cool socks they didn't know in this picture though and just trying to get a sense of how people are today and what we're gonna do today and it's a it's a very good start of the of the morning so walking around the office this is a typical situation here we have some of my colleagues working on

a concept for a new game in another room some people are talking helping each other yeah testing games and we have we have some pictures on the world from former employees as well I see Aurora coming in back there do you remember them and I also know that when my kids when the school is closed I can bring my kids to work at least the oldest one and he will build Legos and he doesn't want to leave after a full day at work so that's also important you know to be able to to have that kind of flexibility so this is a wall where we have pictures of things we have experienced together or our memorable moments and this is important when we have guests or interviews when we were recruiting we spend a lot of time working through the office showing them these pictures show J I had a conversation with one of our employees

saying that you actually spent 10 minutes with me before we started the interview just working around the off so I could really sense how it would be to work here and sharing these pictures also for new employees it's it's good to be able to to see what happened before so for example going to GDC or singing karaoke at the office playing horrible games always a very good icebreaker or playing other games not that horrible or if there is a sunny day we go out for ice cream and yes of course we have all these beautiful mountains so we haven't done it too many times but we have been to them and this is during Christmas we

made a gingerbread decorations and going to parties we of course we have these moments as well on the world so to kick off the year we had a kickoff where we made cars fueled by a balloons turn out to be very fun [Music] the car I built moved like three centimeters and of course this is most for bragging but it also something that we experienced we played fun run to with the queen of Norway in Finland and the king of Norway and the president of Finland so of course most for bragging but also something that it's unexpected it's something that we were proud of and bring it with us kitchen it's where we all eat lunch together and the lunch during lunch it's also a perfect time to get a ticket to the wine lottery so if you share

something do a little talk you get a ticket and it goes to the jar of dirty sharing and this is me winning from sharing something I learned at the pgc Helsinki we do retrospectives of the company so things that are part of the culture is also something that we evaluate and coffee breaks is important I think I have to get to the coffee you know so one of the rules is remember coffee with your squats and it started with somebody saying that we should have some exercise as we are drinking a lot of coffee so the rule was 5 squats for a cup of coffee increased to 7 9 10 squats 12 squats and 20 squats and when we moved the office we moved the kitchen so it wasn't that obvious if you did stop doing your squat so we had some posters up and we even have a slack channel for coffee so we have advanced a little

always have coffee we still do the squats and you know this topic of culture is something that's so so important as we also heard from from Erin and it's a complex matter and it doesn't you know we have we are working on defining some values putting some words to it but putting these words up on the wall it's not what's gonna make your culture because we live the culture every day and it will innit it evolves so I hope I manage to give you a sense of what we are doing to work with culture it's complex matter it involves a lot more than coffee but this coffee breaks it's proved to be a good thing for a company people work better together if you talk together have breaks together so remember copy with your squats thank you do I have time for questions

and not many but yeah I can give few minutes for questions okay any questions come on people and they were eight people and now there's 17 like what was that transition like and is there any tips to companies that are scaling that same way yeah we've learned we've learned a lot of things scaling like that for what one of the things we did was we changed the office language so we started speaking English because we started hiring people that didn't speak Norwegian that wasn't a big issue actually and I feel so weird because there are so many region Syria it feels so weird to speak Norwegian we

have learned that it's very important to have these meetups in the office so when we moved from the smaller office and have so much more space so everybody seated in different offices it's even more important to have these you know casual meetings so we have this thing at Thursday we call it the thing at 2:00 at Thursday's where we all meet for 30 minutes of just casual having coffee having some sweets as you saw in the pictures [Music] [Music]