Jason: Will keep this free-flowing and free-format – interrupt us and tell us we’re crazy.
So, before anyone interrupts me .. why do we need to worry about having high morale?
Mike/Catherine – Happy people make better products. (A show of hands in audience – all agree)
Mike M – Everyone knows the games industry is about passion for making games – this is what gets the team through the hard slog. The people will make the game better because they CARE about it.
Tony Van – create a situation where a bunch of people try and impress each other – trying to do better
Jason – is there a risk that this can be unhealthy?
Tony – Yes, when it is competitive. If teams are battling against it can be detrimental.
Audience: Along the lines of competition – how do you compensate people? do you encourage/discourage people to share compensation info
John – I would not encourage teams to share info on compensation. Competition can be healthy in short bursts – say in a 2-4 week sprint
Catherine – Yes, we do this.
Tony – It works best when everyone succeeds.
Jason – Morale is an intangible idea – in the military how much empashis on morale – John?
John – there’s a ton! One thing from my 20 years in the army – morale brings people together – when you do tough things to accomplish something – when a tight group achieves something unique they obtain a tag, we don’t do that in games but perhaps we should.
We shouldn’t ever lose our focus on creativity – there has to be some tension to achieve but not so high that it’s unachieveable.
Mike: I worked at Origin – one of the founders crunch mode! We had a club – the 100 club – people who were able to achieve 100 hours in a pay period – the club then became more exclusive – 100 hours worked in a week! We learned how far you can push creative people – we pushed them so far they destroyed the work they were doing.
Audience: Cohesion is a good thing – but if a team is spread out over a wider area, locally – how do you keep that team focused
Mike: Nothing beats face to face contact. With teams spread out in different locations one client has video conferencing – it doesn’t have to be complicated but it brings people together.
Tony: Team meetings – get people together.
Catherine: When you do have meetings ensure that everyone is there.
John: If you can’t get all your people in the same room – get them as close to each other as possible. When I was at IBM we had daily conference calls – at 7am and 7pm every day. Everyone got to speak – that’s what it took to make that project work.
Audience: If you have long hours do things like bringing dinner in for the team help?
tony – In crunch or in general? At Ubisoft we have a day that we take the team/department to do something fun .. going to a movie; playing ping pong – do stuff regularly not just in cruchn.
John – during crunch get people out of the office – get them rested – the last thing I want to do during crunch is hang out with the people I’m having to work with. Go do paintball.
Catherine: we reward people with extra personal time. And giving praise.
Mike: To keep morale up, take extra special care to remove roadbloacks – if their monitor is too small get a bigger one – don’t stress over the little stuff and be reasonable about why they’re crunching. Be specific about what you are going to achieve during crunch.
John: If people are taking time to make jokes, tape up people’s doors then you know morale is good.
Mike: When morale is low – then I think their emotional book is low. They’ll make complaints about some relatively minor stuff.
Jason: Are there more rigorous ways to measure morale?
Audience: At EA we do regular online surveys from the team that reflect the morale of the team. Questions like ‘how effective is the management?’ with ratings from 1-5.
Jason: What happens with that data?
Audience: We act on the information to make improvements
Tony: We do it on an annual basis at Ubisoft. HR then address the top issues.
Audience: How do you draw the line with cruch?
Mike: I focus my team on team-oriented goals. I often have to pull them back and ask them not to work 15 hour days. My first day at Origin stated mandatory 84 hour weeks!
Catherine: We recently transitioned one of our QA to projet manager. He was struggling to get some of his staff to put in the effort. He was getting nervous
Tony: More people and more time does not equal faster delivery. You can habe tremendous chaos by throwing more people on. Eveyone that works on the project has to buy into it
John: Defining goals reduced crunch. Be specific up front with clear objectives written dow.
Catherine: Set up the expectations – say to the team that there may be crunch in a couple of weeks.
Tony: Are you setting realistic goals?
John: If things are crazy for one week, easier for the second, then crazy every second week then you to plan better.
Mike: If you’re my publisher you’ll never see this .. for the developers, you’ll see an admission .. for things we have forgotten! We don’t know what they are at the beginning but they will appear .. eveyone schedules the project to the hilt .. put in some time reserve to allow for crunch
Tony: I say what if…..? What if the main guy breaks his leg? Plan for the what if..
Catherine: It can be healthy to feel pressure. Building a sense of collaboratio n and accomplishment gives you and the team something to celebrate. You might need to plan more recovery time between projects or milestones. At GameLab we’ll give people time to work on new game ideas, fun days out.
Audience: I discover that when you know your team, you have some people that complain all the time .. and there are some people that when they are down there are serious problems. You have to know your people.
Tony: People don’t just fall apart – there are always reasons. They feel they’re out of the loop, not getting the praise – this stuff is so easy to address.
Audience: Set a theme for the sprint and that works really well. What I found is being really discplined, isolate the team to do a sprint but I don’t like back to back sprints. Sprint for 2 weeks and then 1 week off.
Catherine: We found that when we swapped to Agile the team can forget the product backlog.
Jason: Let’s talk about motivation. There are two kinds of rewards – extrinsic and intrinsic. Thoughts?
Mike: I know what not to do! I hope this practice is being extinguished in the world – don’t give employee of the month/year awards! They are political and stupid. At Origin, everyone who got one of those awards wasn’t there a year later.
John: For me personally, the way I get motivated I enjoy control over a situation. If someone gives me a project and responsiblitiy I feel empowered and motivated. Empower your people – they’ll learn and be motivated.
Catherine: We don’t have enough buffer to give over-time pay but we do want ot acknowledge that people need to be rewarded so we give more personal time. They have to request the time bt it seems to be working.
Audience: I work for a publisher and have rejected a milestone. This has killed the morale of the developer, what can I do to help them?
Mike: If you rejected the whole thing then it’s over! Rejection of a task must be followed with an explanation of why and how it can be fixed. Give them a path to success – don’t reject it and expect them to keep on working.
Catherine: We had a milestone rejection and it really hurt. But the publisher kept the door open, we did a redesign and have ended up with a better product. Talk to the publisher/developer as soon as possible – warn them ahead of time there could be a problem.
Tony: I agree – I always tell my producers to go back to the team asap.
Audience: Granting personal time off – that does cost money.
Audience: For anyone who lives in Canada, we’re based in Winnipeg so we need as many motivational tools as possible.
Jason: Go talk to Ray or Greg!
Audience: I know of a website owner who sets public humiliation as motivational tools – dressing up as a dancing tomato in Times Square .. do you think that works?
Catherine: We haven’t tried that.
Audience: We’re talking a lot about feedback. The guys this moring (Bioware) spoke about how important it is to take personal time to talk to the team.
Jason: This morning it was very powerful to hear about how Greg and Ray went about really worrying about company culture and morale.. eveyone has a leadership role to play, what have you seen in studios …?
John: Everything I’ve seen has been pretty much ad hoc.
Mike: I worked in a lot of different studios.Leadership was non-existant in some and deliberate in others. Origin was a successful studio but morale was not high. Given the chance I would always go for the deliberate path to creating good morale.
Catherine: What we all share at Gamelab is a desire to improve – to pull out leadership qualities.
Tony: Leadership is a state of mind. People at all levels, caring about making things better. Morale is people saying ‘we have goals we want to make and we feel good about ourselves when we make them.’
