👊🏼 🥊 🔲 Udalenka is cool. Maybe stay forever? 🏇🏿 🕵️ 🥟

In March 2020, many companies switched their employees to telecommuting, and Pixonic was no exception. According to the results of the first two months, we can conclude that moving from home to office did not turn into a drawdown in work, and all deadlines are observed correctly. This raises a reasonable question: will self-isolation ever end, but since everything is so good, maybe give up the office completely and continue working remotely? A trend towards such a transition already exists: for example, Twitter management allowed those who wish among their employees to stay on forever.

Until recently, the Pixonic doctrine was based on the fact that all full-time employees work in the office. We gathered the opinions of the heads of departments and the company about the idea of continuing the practice of remote work after the end of the pandemic, and here is what came of it.

George Egorov, CEO Pixonic

Udalenka has long been the standard for a number of companies. The reasons for this are different: someone wants to save on this, someone wants to expand the geography of the search for specialists. There are also such companies whose work processes were originally sharpened for udalenka. Once we also considered the format of a partial udalenka and tried to introduce it for some employees, but for the most part such experiments ended in nothing.

First of all, our failures with udalenka were associated with a lack of experience in building processes and a spontaneous approach to their development: relatively speaking, the train is approaching - we are laying rails.

Of course, the pandemic forced us to reconsider our attitude to this format of work.

The decision to transfer the entire office to a remote location was spontaneous for us, but it was given quite quickly and painlessly, without any serious problems. But here it’s worth noting that this is not an honest honest woman, and a consistent transfer from a regular office to a home office is in fact perceived as working in a “different office”, because the conditions remained the same for everyone, and the employees have already managed to unite during their work in one room.

From experience I can say that udalenka is well suited for professionals who need to work focused for a long time, with a minimum of distractions. Or those who are involved in routine work. Or those who just do not really like to be in the company of people.

The office is absolutely perfect for specialists who form and set tasks: leads, managers, top managers, communicators. All this can be done from afar, but indirect communication through instant messengers, calls and carrier pigeons is like using dial-up against fiber. I am convinced that personal communication is many times more productive both for the transmission of information and for its receipt. It is faster, clearer, more accurate. Well, and more fun, of course.

Previously, we only preached office work. When the pandemic is over, perhaps we will partially review our attitude towards distributed teams, but we definitely will not completely switch to this format. Still, there is something very cool and inspiring to say that enthusiastic people gather under one roof to make great games.

Tatyana Belousova, Head of HR Department

Every two weeks from the moment of transition to a remote site, we conducted surveys of employees within the company.

The first question was: "How are you feeling?" In the first week, 60% of employees replied that everything was in order, 20% said that they did not feel very comfortable. During the last survey, it turned out that those who had previously experienced stress due to changing conditions have calmed down, are used to and are now feeling better. Employees also said that there are nuances regarding comfort, which the company was ready to assist with the arrangement of home jobs and provide the necessary equipment.

According to the results of the same surveys, it turned out that in 57% of employees with the transition to a remote location, work efficiency did not change, in 30% it increased, and only in 13% it decreased. As a rule, the working capacity of employees with families decreased, since children and household chores adversely affect concentration. Someone, however, decreased motivation due to the lack of a single workflow.

To the last question - are they ready to continue to work remotely - 50% of employees answered positively.

The pluses are staying to work remotely — we quickly learned how to do it efficiently (even though remote workers at Pixonic were a rare exception). In the future, we can consider and take actions to transfer employees to remote work, if they have the desire. You can even combine work in the office and at home - to whom it is more convenient. As for the legal aspects, everything is correctly and correctly executed, so there are no risks, and there are no problems when going to the office. When switching to remote work, we simply issue an order to switch to remote work - this is the whole difference in the workflow.

Anton Grigoryev, Deputy Technical Director

Before proceeding to the analysis of how good the remote is for us, it is worth mentioning that we are talking specifically about our company: we understand that somewhere similar problems may not arise at all.

Of the obvious minuses of the udalenka - the difficulties of communication between people who are accustomed to resolve all issues in person. When communicating on the network, a lot is lost: facial expressions, gestures, intonations, eyes. It is not clear what a person means, one has to ask again, which is why communications are becoming more complicated. Often people do not write details or contexts, and a lot of time is spent figuring out details. Difficulties arise in discussing some complex ideas, since even screen sharing does not always provide the necessary experience. In the office you can always suspect a person to the monitor and immediately show everything or quickly sketch and explain on a piece of paper.

Difficulties arise with phoning: employees can be hard to hear either due to their own equipment (poor Internet, speaker wheezing), or because not everyone turns off the microphones, and the speaker’s voice is blocked by various extraneous sounds.

There are problems with self-management that are better controlled on the spot. One feels social deprivation, lacks easy cheat chats with colleagues.

Another aspect with which difficulties arise is the equipment of the workplace. In a good way, for work you need a separate room with limited access to other residents of the house or apartment. But not everyone has the opportunity to isolate themselves from their home - for example, if five people live in a two-room apartment, it can be difficult to drive everyone out of the room for the whole day. At first, my “workplace” was a sofa in the kitchen. In the case of the kitchen, what is particularly a public place is a hindrance: everyone is struggling to eat, drink some water, and, provided there are children, the latter are always eager to play with them or help them do something. Well and yes: in the office you will no longer be able to work as a seal on the couch.

No access to office equipment. In particular, which is especially critical for developers and QA, there is no access to test devices. If earlier, each developer for work was supposed to give out one smartphone for iOS and Android, and if one of them was not available, on occasion you could take it from a common pool, now you have to add more devices for constant use. Often for specific tasks / bugs, you have to organize the delivery of the device from one employee (who has one) to another (who needs it). Obviously, this can greatly slow down the workflow.

The concept of working and free time is eroded - because if the situation does not change, it seems that you can sit on tasks longer. At first, for a long time I couldn’t “leave work” on time: I started working at 10-11, and sometimes at 9 in the morning, and ended up closer to 11-12 at night. And so the whole first month. Then, at the very least, I managed to debug my schedule, and processing decreased.

Plus, one useful feature specifically of our office has disappeared: the food itself does not come, you have to cook your own meals, and the time spent on cooking is decent. In the office, there was no such problem in principle: I just came to the kitchen and ate (provided that not all the food was taken apart). Sometimes delivery saves, but rarely.

It is worth mentioning that some of these minuses can go away with experience, but for now - we have what we have.

The udalenki sorted out the minuses, we’ll talk about the pros.

There are fewer distracting irritants in the remote place, it is easier to control the mode of operation if you still live alone or there is the opportunity to organize a separate office. Otherwise, see above.

You can listen to music without headphones. You can open and close the window without question at any time. You can walk in your underpants, not to shave and not to get a haircut. None of your actions in the real world irritate or resent colleagues.

Remote work format accustoms to regular text reports. The number of uncontrolled discussions in the corridors is reduced, more information is recorded in writing, diverges on command and remains in history. However, whether this is attributed to the pros or cons depends on the particular team.

Do not waste time on the road to work. I live in the suburbs, I personally went back and forth from door to door for three hours a day. I pass on the words of my colleague: “ I noticed that when we switched to the remote place, after some time there was a feeling of the need to go somewhere in the morning and in the evening. It’s not about saving time, but more about removing one daily commitment . ”

Get enough sleep. And, since there is no need to rush anywhere, in the evening you can stay “at work” and go to bed later, delaying watching your favorite series, reading a book or going through a game. Another comment from colleagues: " Almost a nervous tick passed, bags under the eyes disappeared ."

And finally: "The project preseases have become cool, just look, this is a miracle ."

Indeed, if earlier we just gathered in the conference room to listen about the results of the work, now, sometimes, we are recording a video - and here it is already possible to more thoroughly approach the creative side of the issue.

Responding to whether we need an udalenka on an ongoing basis: I am sure that there are those who work remotely well, it’s very inconvenient. This is primarily employees who have a poorly equipped place to work at home and families with children. And also those who need communication and direct contact with colleagues. They will be happy to return to the office and will remember the udalenka as a nightmare.

But there are those who find it more comfortable working from home, and in this case, you can leave them such an opportunity in the future. If tasks are performed, why not? Of course, in this case it makes sense to leave the whole team either in the office or on the remote. Or, as an option, the leads are in the office and the team is at home.

There is an idea to allocate one day a week, in which you can work remotely. Once upon a time at one of the projects this was.

There is no question of the complete liquidation of the office, but it still makes no sense to completely deprive people of the opportunity to work from home.

Boris Tonkonogov, Head of PM Department

If we consider the issue from the position of company employees, globally there are four approaches to working in the office or remotely:

All employees work remotely. There is no other option.
All employees work in the office. There is no other option - maybe, with rare exceptions. For example, you work in the office, but no one will mind if you work remotely a day a month (the current official Pixonic format).
Some employees work from the office, some remotely. This issue is resolved uniquely for each employee: either by the employer (for example, developers - everything is in the office, artists - everything is remotely), or by the employee at the time of getting a job (as it would be more convenient for you).
Part time employees can work from home, the rest - in the office. This can be determined by both the employee and the company.

Each of these options has pros and cons for both employees and the company.

Financial side

An employee who works continuously in a remote format does not require payment from the employer for his workplace in the office. Accordingly, if all employees work remotely, the office generally loses relevance. And renting a convenient office, especially in a good area of Moscow, costs a lot to the employer. Thus, a completely remote work format saves studios on lease.

HR issue

The remote work format simplifies the hiring of employees in any part of the country and the world: there is no need to transport people from other cities or open many offices. Due to this, the studio can afford to hire people from the regions for higher salaries than local companies can offer. This greatly expands the potential circle of interesting candidates, simplifies and speeds up their search.

On the other hand, it is worthwhile to understand that a wider circle of frames interesting for a particular vacancy will lead to a significantly larger number of responses. This, in turn, will increase the burden on recruiting departments. It will be necessary to study, analyze and interview more candidates than when you are limited to searching for personnel only in your city. You can leave the recruiting capacity at the same level, but then the advantages of the remote in this issue will be relevant only when hiring specialists of the rarest specialties (graphic programmers, technical artists and so on). For all other areas, the advantage will be lost. The personnel market will become wider, but the personnel department will simply not be able to handle this increased flow, or it will do it poorly.

Social motivation

It is always good when the team of employees is a friendly team that always supports each other and works harmoniously, not only thanks to well-established work processes, but also just to make it “cool” out of internal motivation. And this motivation is largely taken from a good relationship with colleagues or superiors. The corny "he is a cool dude, so I will try to do well the task that he asked for" is actually a very strong motivation to work better.

Positive relations between studio employees have a very strong impact on the overall productivity of teams. And to build such an atmosphere is much easier when the team sees each other every day in the office, drinks coffee together, has lunch together, relaxes at the workplace or outside on Friday evenings and sits in a conference room at general presentations with one crowd. No phoning, remote video communication presentations, and “congresses” of remote teams once every six months or a year will not replace the motivation from the collective office movement.

We cannot help but recall that employees with introverted thinking predominate in game development, and it would seem that they don’t really need all this, but even they are infected with positive energy and motivation from more extrovert colleagues - those same “lighters” of the studio, around whom it’s always funny fun and mover.

Note: On the example of Pixonic studio, we can assume that the apparent absence of a drop in employee engagement after switching to a remote site refutes what was written in this paragraph. But you need to understand that most of the company’s employees worked for six months, a year or two or more in an office environment and know each other perfectly well. The team has already rallied. For employees who came after switching to udalenka or directly in front of it, it is clearly noticeable that getting involved and charging with motivation is much more difficult for them, their activity in chats and threads on “non-working” issues is lower. A long udalenka (six months or more) will gradually reduce social motivation even for those who have worked in the studio office for many years.

Work processes

Organization of work inside the studio is a priority for managers of various levels. In the case of an IT company, it cannot be said unequivocally that organizing work in a remote format is fundamentally more complicated than office work. There are nuances, there are differences. There are a lot of them, but in general, both of them are quite feasible at a good level.

When working in an office, it’s easier to organize communications between people, departments and projects. At the same time, this easy communication leads to distractions for many employees: more often the focus is lost when answering the questions of colleagues and superiors who approached you, other tasks cannot be postponed for 10-30 minutes, ending the current one as it would be possible ( and adequately perceived) on the remote.

In other words, both the remote work format and the office format have advantages and disadvantages in terms of building workflows and processes. For some employees (due to their nature and / or specialization), the remote format will definitely be more convenient, for others - vice versa. A good manager will always cope with the organization of both, and will be able to tighten work processes so that overall productivity does not suffer. Unless, of course, to devote time to tuning these processes.

The most inconvenient in terms of organization for the manager is likely to be the option in which each employee at any time determines whether he works from home or from the office. But this is far from such an impossible task.

What version of the final implementation of the approach do I see?

I consider the office primarily a tool of the company in which the company invests in order to increase its attractiveness in the eyes of employees and increase their involvement in the work process. And this tool is important and worthy of investing. In this regard, in the decision on the format of work, I urge you to build on the preferences of employees, while remaining within the reasonable framework.

All people are different. If you decide to switch to some new format of work, it will never be superfluous to conduct a well-organized survey showing the mood of the studio regarding a remote or office format of work. But, whatever the results of the survey, most likely, unanimity can not be expected. In any case, the employees will find it more convenient for them to choose when to come to the office and when not to.

Each employee can leave a decision in what format he will work:

The employee has a personal workplace in the office. This requires him to visit the office for at least four full days a week.
The employee works completely remotely. In this case, he does not need a place in the office.
The employee works in a floating mode with a calendar of visits, which he himself conducts for a week in advance at least and notifies the authorities about it.

Thus, employees receive the right to choose the format most convenient for them, but there are limitations in each of the proposed options. And yet, this will make office visits controlled and predictable at any given time.

So what is the bottom line?

Deleted? Not an udalenka? Free office visit? Work from home on allotted days?

Our company has no plans to leave the office for good. An office is atmospheric and comfortable; it has always been an integral attribute of our work process. Moreover, there are people whose personal presence in it is vital for quick communication.

Nevertheless, the pandemic conditions showed us that our employees can continue to work outside the office, without losing productivity. We know that some of them would be glad to return to the usual way of life in the office, but there are also those who liked remote work.

Perhaps, to deprive the choice of where it would be more convenient for the employee to work does not make sense if he is responsible for his duties and is always in touch during business hours. Therefore, when the time comes, we can review our principles and think about how to combine working conditions so that all teams are comfortable. In the meantime, we collect all possible opinions about for whom and in what format it is better to leave the udalenka.

And what about the plans for breaking out of your isolation?

Udalenka is cool. Maybe stay forever?