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In the office of no one: developing games on a remote site



Disclaimer We do not have “remote” employees - the team is all the same removed from each other. It’s just that someone works (now it’s more correct to say “worked”) in the office, while someone is at home or in coworking. Therefore, inside we prefer the term "distributed team."

The transition to a distributed team began a long time ago. At first it was scary, but in the end, the efficiency of all employees increased, even in the office. We decided to share experience and collect detailed material on internal processes.

We have many product development teams — there are 10 people, and 40-50 each — but there’s not a single one where all the guys would sit next to each other in the office. But there are teams that work completely from home. Due to recent events, everything went to the “home mode” in general, but the pandemic had practically no effect on the processes, because everything was arranged in advance.

Further, there are several large sections about the internal kitchen: onboarding, communications and teamwork, exchange of experience. And for a change we’ll dilute the text with photos of our “home offices”.

Onboarding




At a basic level, the processes are the same for everyone. It doesn’t matter where the employee works, the main thing is to provide him with everything necessary (first of all, technically), and correctly “immerse” him in the work: what information to tell at the beginning, who to acquaint with, what to give to read, what meetings to connect, what task put first and so on.

For onboarding quality and adaptation are responsible:

  1. Manager.
  2. Mentor for the adaptation period.
  3. HR specialist.

The tasks of the manager. The manager coordinates the work of a specialist with a mentor and team, is responsible for providing everything necessary so that after a month it is possible to analyze the first results.

The main tasks of the manager at this stage:

  • Create an adaptation plan.
  • Together with the mentor to choose tasks for the start.
  • Formulate expectations and set goals for the trial period.
  • Provide immersion in the team and processes.
  • Monitor the results and give a developing feedback with the mentor.

Tasks of the mentor. A mentor becomes a person who has direct experience in the tasks of a new specialist. The goal of mentoring at the start is a test period with good results. The mentor answers questions, accompanies in tasks, helps with difficulties. It is important that he does not do the work for a specialist.

Mentoring ends after passing the IP or earlier (if the beginner has successfully mastered and started to cope with the tasks without errors) - here everything is individual. One mentor can have 1-2 new specialists at the same time, so that there is enough time for them and for their tasks.

Tasks of an HR specialist.He is responsible for the onboarding process as a whole: from interactions with the human resources department and bookkeeping during registration to coordinating the first meetings with the manager and mentor.

Below under the spoiler is a more detailed description of the onboarding process. Detailed plans are developed individually by each department and project, taking into account the specifics and characteristics of the positions / roles.

How is the onboarding process
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Technical support




The process is defaulted - on the first day the employee must have all the necessary tools.

To do this, HR creates a special task for a new employee and appoints a person responsible for it from the IT department. In the head task “IT New employee Request - F.I.” manager / mentor approves the list of equipment and software, according to the internal standard.

At the IT department, the distribution of sub-managers to those responsible, the purchase and transfer of software on the day the employee leaves.

Default software: Slack, Chrome, Unity, Sourcetree, OVPN for laptops and working outside the office. The rest is highly dependent on the role of the employee and the department. Access is granted in the main services immediately after updating the information on the exit of the employee in the respective directories.

Remote communication and exchange of experience




When people do not sit next to you in the office and do not collide in the kitchen at dinner, the issue of organizing communications becomes even more important. The tools here are common for the whole company: Asana and Slack for text communication, and for video calls we use Google Meet and Zoom (if there are many participants or you need to record a report / round table).

Communications were divided into several main types: regular meetings, activities outside the work process and live meetings. Now in order.

Regular meetings.Videoconferencing, calling, calling - their effectiveness on a remote site must be constantly monitored. We have a lot of meetings scheduled, some are held every three weeks (the company’s lead), some once every several months (Q&A sessions for the company as a whole). For convenience, they brought all the regular meeting formats to Google Sheets. What is included in the example of a 1-on-1 manager with an employee:

  • Subject. 1 on 1 with an employee.
  • Frequency Once in two weeks.
  • Format. Arbitrary (for example, video calling).
  • The participants. Manager and employee.
  • Moderator Manager.
  • Agenda. Feedback exchange, discussion of current statuses of tasks, progress on the latest feedback, discussion of questions and problems.
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Retrospectives inside teams. Another example of regular meetings, I will describe separately. Many underestimate its effectiveness, but in reality there is little to compare with it.

Retrospective is a meeting in which a team finds and fixes problems in processes. It would seem that the manager can do this without separate calls. But just such a format allows involving all participants and avoiding the phenomenon of Not invented here (when people don’t feel any involvement in decision-making and subconsciously resist the things “lowered from above”).

It is based on the concept of the Deming cycle (PDCA - Plan-Do-Check-Act or Plan-Do-Check-Decide). Purpose: to get an action plan (tasks) that will fix problems and improve something. The retrospective itself is the Plan stage in the loop.

The differences between a regular working meeting and a retrospective are informality. The more trusting the atmosphere, the more profit everyone will receive. There are special exercises to talk participants, find problems and solutions. You can peek, for example, in the book "Quick Start in Retrospective" by Alexei Krivitsky.

There is no strict schedule of retrospectives, we are attached to some milestones - the release of a new project or the end of another sprint. Everything is online, but as a board with stickers we use Miro .

A few recommendations for retrospective:

  1. Do not at this moment do the tasks, get distracted by the tracker or messenger. This is difficult to do when everyone is sitting at home at their computers, but possible.
  2. No strangers. Only colleagues who work together.
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And most importantly, for this to work: the plan and the promises made in retrospect must be fulfilled. If, time after time, you gather, communicate, write down tasks, but nothing changes, the credibility of retro will disappear, and people will cease to talk about problems at all. Therefore, make sure that the plan is understandable to everyone, it has those responsible and it is being implemented.

Activities outside the workflow. For example, “technical Friday” or “training day” once every two weeks. These days we do not work on projects, but hold round tables, reports, workshops and a retrospective of the released products (product-oeners tell what results the products showed on the market and not only).

We also leave free time for independent work - we have an internal training system, and mentors post applied lessons / tasks that will help to pump skills. During working hours, it is not always possible to allocate time, but in those. Friday please. All this takes place online, we use Zoom, because it knows how to save a record.

For example, they recently did a step-by-step lesson on creating the effect of a shot from a cannon.


Intermediate screenshot of the

Team Meet Live lesson . Everything is simple here. We try to gather every team in one of the offices every 6-7 months - to work and chat live.

Education and development




We came to a fairly simple internal system of employee development. Its main components:

  1. Analysis of the results of work + competency map.
  2. Development through feedback.
  3. Mentoring and regular meetings with a mentor.

Team meetings are held every month. The manager prepares an analysis of the results of each specialist, collects the opinions of colleagues and draws conclusions. At the meeting, we talk about the successes of each employee, look at progress, results and give feedback.

A competency map is a portrait of an ideal specialist, taking into account the context and requirements of the project. For example, we try to download artists-generalists (universal specialists who, in addition to 2D, can do something else - FX or animation). The map is made in the form of Google Sheets, where the skill level of a specialist in each field is noted - basic skills (basics of 3D, UI / UX, FX, etc.) and soft skills (responsibility, sociability, initiative, mentoring).

In the feedback for the employee, we mark the growth areas and give relevant tasks for this.

Job analysis. How it goes and what it consists of:

  1. Monthly analysis. This is an interim check to see the progress, make adjustments to the work, give feedback and so on.
  2. Quarterly analysis. Collection of extended feedback.

The manager gives feedback on the status with the employee 1 on 1. The leader and / or development mentor also do this, but usually directly in the process of work and in the area in which the employee works.

Important: the employee’s feedback is issued in the form in which the assessment team has corrected it (without cutting corners, mitigating any points). Additionally, everything is fixed in text form so that you can return to it.

The process of giving feedback in the office or remotely is no different. Create a favorable atmosphere, listen and analyze what and how a person says. Behind the answer “all is well”, discontent may be hidden, or the employee is simply shy. And at the end of the meeting, ask the employee feedback if these meetings are useful to him.

If several specialists have a problem zone, we do “training” or courses on the necessary topic (reports and workshops). For each such mini-course, there is a chat in which the mentors throw a lesson, and the rest pass, share and receive feedback.

In general, all departments work on the principle of mini-teams. We try to connect guys from related departments in some teams - this helps to share expertise, apply solutions that have already been tested and not reinvent the wheel.

Round tables and presentations within departments also work well. Subsequently, anyone can see and learn from the experience.

Development on a remote site - are there any differences




There are no cardinal differences. All that we do - we could do in the office. Just at a distance, some points need to be paid more attention. First of all, to communications, transparency of decision-making (including product) and the quality of project documentation.

At the same time, the advantages of remote work are much greater. We are not limited to individual regions when searching for specialists, and the processes are not tied to specific offices and are arranged so that a new employee can connect to them at any time. For example, we record the results of any calls or face-to-face meetings in Asana or Google Docs - if you are connected to the task even after six months, you will still see the entire history of messages with follow-up meetings.

There is a lot of written communication in the work of a distributed team, so you need to learn how to clearly articulate your thoughts, without spam, and monitor what you write and how.

As practice shows, people have different interpretations of the emotional nature of messages. Some may even be offended because they saw a complaint or discontent that did not exist. In the office, this is not so true.

The work of managers on a remote site initially depends on how the work was structured before the appearance of a distributed team. If we did not have regular activities initially, the planning and monitoring of production was carried out randomly, and instead of documentation there was a collection of legends and epics, then, of course, everything would have changed a lot. Just because all the processes would break down to work remotely.

If the processes are pre-configured, you only need to move online and help the team adapt to work from home.

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