Hey y’all! I organized and led a series of leadership roundtables through Game Dev MTL, and wanted to share the notes here that were shared with the rest of the roundtable (with their permission).

This is part of a series of posts from the various roundtables, and the information on these sticky notes of course are missing the context of the in-person conversation. But I think they can still be very helpful!

Roundtable 1/3: Designing & Maintaining Company Culture
Roundtable 2/3: Feedback, Reviews & 1 on 1s
Roundtable 3/3: Hiring and Onboarding

Defining Culture

The roundtable was introduced and someone brought up the idea that we should probably define culture before we start talking about our biggest successes and biggest mistakes in desigining and maintaining a company culture.

Folks put forward some different ideas that came up when we talk about what culture is and means:

Some folks brought up other, less straightforward ideas around defining culture:

Successes & Mistakes

Then, everyone talked about their greatest success in this regard, and their biggest mistake followed by what they learned from that.

Some of the things people pointed to as biggest successes were either process-related, culture design related, or positive effects of what they felt was a good company culture:

Some of the biggest mistakes people made and the lessons they learned are below. For almost all of the lessons, most of the room nodded their heads in agreement:

Open Discussion

We then moved to open discussion and bounced around a variety of topics. I jotted down some notes during the roundtable and added some more context to them while creating these notes.

• Trust is huge for culture. I’ll borrow from Carolina Mastretta from Original Fire Games: “Trust is an emergent part of culture in a team, an ebb and flow that shifts as teams and individual members tackle new challenges, work with new people and face changes, wins and failures. With principles & practices, it can be built, sustained and nourished!” (check out her micro-talk from GDC 2023 if you have access to the Vault)
• It’s important to recognize that folks who are not from the same country, background, level of professional experience or language may have very different base cultural assumptions around communication or professional conduct. These implicit, undefined norms will always exist but it’s important to take care to be aware of them and make them explicit.
  • Consider the language you use, inclusive language includes awareness of people who are speaking in their second language, from different cultures, etc.
  • Consider how much of your culture is assumed (which falls prey to these issues of cultural norm) versus how much of the culture is explicitly defined.
• Meeting culture is a thing! Different companies have different ways of handling agendas, pre-sent materials, open discussion, going off-topic in meetings, timeboxing meetings, etc. This can be exacerbated when working across cultures and native languages.
• Different countries, industries, and locations (i.e. the Montreal office and the Shanghai office) often have different company culture expectations.
• If a company actually lives according to its values, then it should be able to check its major and minor decisions against those agreed upon values. For example, whether or not to accept working on a particular project might be informed by the team’s values.
• It’s important to keep team values on the forefront. Most folks agreed that most values and mission documents are created and then stored somewhere, without employees looking at them or even knowing that they are explicitly. People have different strategies for awareness around these values, for example one person said they would randomly throw out a cultural value in morning standup and this got conversation started, sometimes around that value. This got people thinking and talking about company values in a more free-flowing way.
• Culture is important for retention and attracting talent, as a way of differentiating your team from other teams / organizations. This is especially important given that many of us compete with companies like Epic who can pay massive salaries compared to most smaller or mid-sized studios.
• Rules around communication are part of company culture.
• Sometimes someone on the team can start to stray far from the culture / rules of the studio, and this often results in the person leaving or needing to be let go.
• While a team’s culture will change with every new addition to the team, it’s also important not to let a new person bulldoze the culture and bend it to their will. There’s a give and take element where the new addition needs to be willing to learn and adapt, but also needs the space to be themselves and bring their experience in to help shape the team culture.
• There needs to be a balance of how broad values are versus how directly actionable they are. Broad values can be vague and easy to either forget about or misinterpret, but values that are too specific might be restrictive or easy to dismiss as being not applicable to the current situation.
• Sub-teams within a larger organization will interpret values / culture differently, hence why the balance of broad vs specific needs to be kept in mind.
• People sometimes will stay in a company without fitting the culture because the other things make it worthwhile, for example pay, a 4-day work week, etc. This is known as the “golden cage” problem. This can be extremely detrimental to company culture because people are checked out but still influencing the culture without buying into or believing in it.
• The new generation (Gen Z ish) has different values, and this can be a sore spot for managing culture. We talked a bit about the positive and negative aspects of this culture “clash”, and what we (most of the folks in the workshop were 30+) can learn from the younger generation.
• Where does “hard work” fit into culture? It feels sometimes like this can’t be spoken about in a workplace culture because it goes directly against “people first” approaches. This is difficult to manage!
  • Creating estimates together and tracking sprints closely helps with the “hard work” being rewarded, one person said in response
• Transparency has impact on culture—financial transparency, the HR process, comapny goals, etc. The default assumption is often that more transparent is better, but some folks mentioned how employees asked for transparency but then weren’t prepared to deal with the feelings that came up when they received that information. This isn’t to say not to be transparent with any of the things above, simply that there is an effect of being either more or less transparent that needs to be considered.

Further Thinking Required

A lot of questions came up during the roundtable, and we could have talked for another 5 hours. So I’ll leave you with some questions to reflect on:

• If values are not sufficient to define the whole company culture, then what else is required?
• How does your company culture show up in your day-to-day work? Meetings, reviews, town hall meetings, communication between team members, etc.
• How do you integrate young people / the new generation into your culture, or how is your culture changing to incorporate the younger generation and their value set?
• How much do you transform employees to fit your culture? What is too much (restricting their ability to positively affect your culture) and what is too little (letting them keep the exact same culture from their last workplace and transforming your culture)?
• When do you start talking about company culture to new employees?

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Hope this was useful to you, I definitely learned a lot from the sessions!

❤
Rich