Central to every studio’s identity is that really particular feeling you get as you stroll through the door– not only on your first day, but every single day you rock as much as work.
In these unsure times, where a Slack notification counts as a “great early morning” welcoming, how a studio sustains that sense of ‘company culture’ is more essential than ever.
For our individuals group at Mediatonic (which encompasses HR and individuals operations), that’s centred around supporting a feeling of inclusivity, enjoyable, and friendliness. And it’s reasonable to state that while we have actually constantly been keen to repeat on our approach, it’s been an extraordinary obstacle navigating the nuances of company culture in the ‘new normal’. One that’s filled with frequently altering recommendations and guidelines around lockdown restrictions, however essentially pulls our growing teams apart as we adapt to fully remote working.
Mediatonic’s Annie Clare
Knowing who we are
Like numerous studios, our culture is rooted in being together. We had regular monthly lunches, several hobby clubs and innumerate Slack channels covering whatever from heated anime critiques, to fantasy football and the finer points of coffee brewing.
Our Friday ‘Program and Tells’ organically segued into post-work social gatherings as a best weekend dispatch. Our beloved coffee makers became the meeting point to overtake our associates, to find out if Mediatonic FC had actually won their football match the night prior to (spoilers: most likely not!), or to laugh about the current obstacle course we were evaluating on Fall Men: Ultimate Knockout.
With the pandemic removing our central ‘center’, our individuals group had to confront a new concern: how do we take care of our people from another location?
Spring 2020: Concerns and recognition
When confronted with unpredictability, it is common for numerous to feel stressed and nervous and we wanted to let our individuals understand that it was fine to feel these things. Like lots of studios, we’ve got a situationally diverse team. Everyone has their own environment in your home, dealing with partners, kids, flatmates, parents, or alone– and with that, very different levels of access to traditional assistance networks.
When wanting to address this, we were keen to not treat our labor force as homogenous. Our beginning point was acknowledging that we’re all different and everybody’s sensations on what was going on, as they digested news of the early days of the pandemic, stood.
When aiming to resolve this, we were keen to not treat our labor force as homogenous
While we were still together in the studio, dealing with the looming uncertainty of the very first lockdown, the whole HR team took two days to focus solely on meeting with anyone who wished to talk through the challenges they might face working from home.
A core part of this was leveraging our ‘psychological health very first aiders’; team mates who had actually been trained to give very first action assistance to those who were struggling We felt it was vital to signpost paths to support as early as possible. It’s important to note that we also have a securing officer, whose role incorporates being an avenue for escalation if needed (with the consent of the group mate).
In April 2020, a couple of weeks after lockdown started, we began running Pulse Studies. These were developed to supply individuals team with standard knowledge about our team mates’ state of mind, while letting them know that we were here to listen. We started by asking employees to rank the exact same two declarations in each survey:
- ‘ Most of the time, I enjoy, enthusiastic and well’
- ‘ Currently, I have the ability to find a pleased balance between my work and my personal life’
Although the surveys were constantly anonymous, we did provide the alternative for respondents to note their discipline and task. This offered us enough information to broadly track groups who may require additional support, as well as assisting us see the variation of happiness levels gradually and address this from a business perspective.
Mediatonic’s London group
Summer Season 2020: Actions speaks louder than words
While spring represented a good start to remote communications and our mission to ensure people’s voices were heard, the truth was dawning that lockdown was here for the long term. We understood the requirement to turn our willingness to listen into something far more tangible.
We started with a new age of studies, this time concentrated on getting a fuller photo of the logistics, resources and levels of assistance our team mates had access to while working from home. Our studio population is relatively young and we learnt that numerous were in house shares, with no air conditioning, taking a look at the same four walls. Creativity, happiness, wellbeing and work/life balance are all extremely essential aspects to Mediatonic’s culture. We wished to help, but how?
We created a ‘convenience allowance’ scheme, giving each staff member ₤200 to invest in [making] their house area a more enjoyable location
Analyzing the survey results, we quickly found out that many coworkers had considerable gaps in their house set-ups. So we swiftly set up a brand-new financing treatment to ensure everyone had the ways to accept working from house, with the business reserving spending plan to facilitate requests for desks, chairs, monitors, keyboards, earphones and other parts.
Another key knowing from the studies was that the remote environment played an essential function in keeping happiness, beyond simply access to resources. To resolve this, we cooked up a ‘convenience allowance’ plan, giving each employee ₤200 to invest in whatever they felt would make their home space a more pleasurable location to be. I do believe the person who purchased 100 Pot Noodles shall live in Mediatonic infamy.
Autumn 2020: Earning trust
Throughout the autumn, we wanted to keep the wellbeing conversations going. We continued to conduct Pulse Surveys and held regular all-hands company-wide conferences, led by the executive team, that interact crucial updates across departments.
People come together in a live Slack channel to ask questions and give live feedback. A crucial objective was to assure team mates that although we’re apart, we are part of a cohesive working community, which suggests keeping our various groups’ and disciplines’ activities centrally visible.
One of our most popular all-hands consisted of our studio manager live-streaming from our brand-new (however regretfully vacant) London offices. As colleagues exchanged nostalgia in the Zoom chat about workplace life, this was a terrific method of reminding associates that remote working wasn’t permanently. It made it more concrete that we did belong to collect when things were safe and that we ‘d be together again some day.
Mediatonic’s new (but unfortunately vacant) London offices
We likewise reached out to our studio management teams to ensure they were holding sporadic check-ins with employee, simply to informally see how people were getting on and identifying opportunities for assistance. Showing through actions that our policies “strolled the walk” in terms of offering assistance (economically and otherwise) had a substantial impact on survey feedback. Trust started to construct that the people group could deliver, rather than simply listen– which in turn inspired far more important, comprehensive feedback.
For instance, we significantly saw that group mates yearned for gatherings, reminiscent of the pre-pandemic standard. Our team responded by organising whatever from weekly playlists, remote coffee breaks and quizzes to one-off night social events. However, we soon saw that social participation was in fact waning. People were ‘electronic ‘d out’. The computer/Zoom/Google Hangout fatigue was real.
So we stopped briefly, re-assed and once again … returned to listening. The dreaded phrase ‘organised enjoyable’ kept cropping up. We belatedly understood that when it concerned social events, we ‘d fallen into the trap of dealing with everyone as ‘one’, when the truth was that all of us have various interests.
People were ‘electronic ‘d out’. The computer/Zoom/Google Hangout tiredness was genuine
A check out Slack was a plain tip for us, as employee neighborhood groups varying from pets to book clubs, photography to makeup, stared back at us. Rather than merely enforce ‘fun’ from the centre, we instead decided to try and empower our internal communities to take occasions to the next level more autonomously.
We shifted to the role of a facilitator instead of organiser, taking steps to empower existing internal communities to host their own events, consisting of motion picture rental nights, where colleagues might see movies together and go over.
And, of course, what is the something that draws a lot of people together? Games! We extensively shared our Mediatonic Discord channel to get individuals involved in playing together, producing a master sheet of video gaming platform usernames so individuals could collaborate pick-up video games throughout all sorts of titles. We provided guidance and a structure, however went back to enable our teams to participate as and when they felt comfy.
Winter 2020/2021
This now brings us to today. Almost a year in lockdown and a year apart. We understand that the winter season lull from January to March can be tough at the very best of times, let alone now as we face another full lockdown.
Our main top priority was ensuring that paths to support were clear and varied. We’ve begun hosting bi-weekly meditation sessions and started distributing information on actionable actions to take when you’re feeling down, asking our group mates to share their individual coping pointers and methods, to keep wellbeing front of mind. Additionally, we registered for Slack-enabled treatment app ‘Spill’, giving group mates immediate access to a qualified therapist as and when they needed it.
The short to our supervisors continues to be to provide versatility and compassion, not one-size-fits all options
Through upgraded Pulse Study feedback, we took this time to take a longer term look at our existing Knowing and Advancement plan. Without any commutes and restricted social engagements, we understood many of our team had a bit more time on their hands, integrated with a thirst for knowing.
We decided to implement a new training programme that enables our group to access an online portal filled with valuable information covering video gaming, management to psychological health and health and wellbeing. To support this, everybody was provided a ₤300 personal budget to invest in online training, webinars, online conferences, books and podcast knowing chances. This feeds into a company-wide designated ‘Personal Advancement Time’ that happens every other Wednesday afternoon, developed to normalise taking time for learning brand-new skills, far from staff’s typical work.
The rollout of these schemes were carefully notified by our crucial learnings from the remote working experience; the brief to our people supervisors continues to be to supply versatility and empathy, not policy or one-size-fits all services to intricate issues.
Although a few of our individuals have some more time on their hands due to lockdown, we likewise have staff members who have children at home, caring obligations and might be feeling drawn in several instructions. One way of actioning these learnings was our choice to recommunicate our existing Health Assured services, particularly to lockdown hires who were in some cases unaware of our support choices. This offers employee with access to 24/ 7 assistance for themselves, their partners and any dependents aged in between 16-24, covering parenting, relationships, health, monetary and legal support.
We changed our internal communications to try and demonstrate that we were aware and strove to deal with each individual to find a schedule (or do not have thereof!) that worked for them. From a wider business culture point of view, we wished to be clear that our company believe everybody is doing their finest under trying circumstances and for that reason, wished to show a desire to be malleable.
This year has actually definitely been difficult, but one our individuals team have learnt a terrible lot from. Ironically, it’s wound up bringing a lot of us closer together, with the lack of the workplace requiring us to drill much deeper into what the essence of our business culture actually was (and indeed, could be).
We will continue to confirm that this is rough terrain, actively listen to each other and aim to make each individual feel supported. I do think that working ‘together apart’ has altered our focus as an individuals group for the much better, and I can’t wait to see how we grow and develop our method when we finally return to our studios!
Annie Clare is head of studio operations at Tonic Games Group. She at first signed up with Mediatonic in January 2020 as head of studio environments, originating from three years at PlayStation as studio planner. She previously worked at the similarity Nordeus and Mind Candy.
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