With COVID-19 forcing game studios to work from home, game developers have had to adapt to new ways of doing their daily work. My juniors at my game development graduate program are no exception. When the revelation that classes would continue online came in the middle of their 1st Playable/Vertical Slice sprint, they had to transfer all their communications, scrum boards, meetings, and more to an entirely virtual environment — and they had to do it fast.
As a mentor on their project, I have to say they’ve done a really impressive job of transitioning in a short amount of time. They’ve put some great processes into practice that I think all game developers (or even companies outside of the games industry) could learn from. Today, I want to share some of the processes I have observed on their team, as well as some processes that my team on Tex-Mechs utilized when we also had to work from home for a time (Some construction workers had accidentally drilled into a power line by our building, creating a fireball right outside our window and taking out the power for a few days. How’s that for a work story?).
By this, I mean any important records, graphs, drawings, etc. your team has on whiteboards, sticky notes, posters, and the like. You won’t be able to see this information if you’re not in the office, so if you’re about to enter a mass work-from-home situation, one of your first priorities should be to store this information somewhere digitally so everyone can still access it. You could take pictures of the information and send the pictures to the team.
If the information is something that will actively change, you could transfer it to shared documents on Google Suite, or to project management tools like Monday, JIRA, or Hansoft. These three tools in particular are all very good at task tracking and emulating Scrum and Kanban boards; my classmates transformed all of their Scrum sticky notes into items on Monday, and it’s been a highly effective way of showing task progress and who’s working on what. Of course, if you’re planning on using a new tool to store and manage information, be sure to teach it to your team, ideally before work-from-home begins so they can jump right into using it.
Inevitably, it’s harder to see what everyone is up to online. The fact that you can’t walk around the office and stop by everyone’s desk means you lose a lot of visibility on how much progress people have made on their work. You can make up for this by scheduling regular check-ins each day and asking everyone to provide a status update at that time. Both my peers and I have done this with our teams, setting aside time for a check-in about halfway through the work day. If the work someone is doing can be shown visually, I find it extra helpful to encourage people to send screenshots.
Don’t just check in on work, though. In a time like this, when the virus is causing a lot of uncertainty and hardship, it’s good to just check in on how people are faring as well. Ask how life is going outside of the job. Reach out to those who are struggling. We might not be able to see one another in-person right now, but we can still look out for each other.
On the subject of reaching out and staying connected, it may be helpful to set up a chatroom where people can chill as they work, or arrange a time for a virtual hangout. As Simon Sinek describes in his book Leaders Eat Last, having strong social bonds with our coworkers is vital to making a positive work environment and a healthy team culture. In lieu of the usual in-person workplace banter, my classmates have set up a “commons” Zoom call where anyone can hop in and out to video chat with their teammates. We’ve also been attempting to transition the Friday social events we usually have to an online setting, organizing game nights and tabletop RPG sessions we can play out over the web. We have dedicated Slack channels for conversation as well. Of course, one of those channels is for showing off the furry friends who are keeping us company while we’re stuck at home.
If you have a lot of regular meetings going on, consider putting together a list of all those meetings with the links to their calls and times they occur. Pin this list to a highly visible location. Doing this is incredibly helpful because now more than ever, people are getting bombarded with emails, messages, and video calls. If someone gets sent a link to a meeting, it can easily get lost underneath all the other communications coming in. Help make life easier for your team so they don’t have to search through their messages to find the link for that meeting happening in five minutes.