WW Mid-Year Review 2022 (1/4)

Part 1 : Work, Life, Growth

Back when I started my first job, I was given a small piece of advice on how to advance my career; “Just stay with this company for 2 years, then job hop for a pay raise“. I did leave that job after 2 years, but I did not get a pay raise.

Running a game studio, I often wonder how we could make a difference and retain our developers. A steady pay raise and growth are no-brainers, but as the saying goes; People don’t quit jobs. They quit their bosses.

Six months ago, Weyrdworks conducted an internal survey of our employee’s thoughts on the company. Last week, we followed up with a mid-year review. The results in this post are summaries of your average Weyrdworkers’ sentiments. We share these results here for two main reasons:

• Hold ourselves accountable for the well-being of our staff and to strive to do better

• To give future potential candidates some insights into the Weyrdworks culture

We sent a survey form out to our humbly small team of 8 artists and programmers. These questions covered matters regarding company culture, management, internal processes and more.

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how challenged are you on a daily basis at work?

The team has largely been able to cope with a variety of new challenges in the last 6 months. We’ve taken on work ranging from multiplayer Web3 games to large scale 3D environment product visualisers. So while it may at first seem that the work is stifling growth, the unique challenges we’ve recently undertaken would say otherwise. This is also backed by the answers given by our very own Weyrdworkers.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how challenged are you on a daily basis at work?

We admittedly failed to glean more a more elaborate explanations for this rating. The format of the survey is far from being faultless. It may be that this metric sits just nicely on the Flow curve, not being too hard or too easy, but challenging enough to be engaging.

2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your work-life balance?

Similarly, the score for work-life balance hasn’t changed much either. The reason for this remains mostly the same as before. A hybrid of office days and WFH remains the top contributor.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your work-life balance?

At Weyrdworks, majority of our developers joined the workforce during the pandemic. Some are young, passionate creators who’ve never had the chance to work in a game development studio. Having some face-time throughout the week helps build valuable camaraderie amongst teammates.

Commute times are also a problem. Public transports can consume up to 2-4 hours of travel time a day in total. Knowing that you don’t have to do the same thing again tomorrow morning upon arriving home is a blessing.

3. Do you think our organisation supports you in your professional development?

Perhaps the biggest improvement is the additional effort that’s been put in place to help our developers grow.

There was more guidance from senior staff and management in this period but not so much that it became hand-holding. Developers were still trusted to develop solutions of their own and our varied projects helped ensure that we were always growing by learning something new.

However, this does mean that we as a game company do take on non-game dev tasks and that does weigh down team morale a bit.

Do you think our organisation supports you in your professional development?

4. Name what you think are our company’s biggest strengths

In terms of our company’s strengths, our usual feedback has always been praise for my co-founder, JT’s art direction. The visual treats from our website or games are a common highlight in interviews with potential candidates too. Unfortunately asides from that, Weyrdworks still struggles externally to define itself uniquely from its competitors and other game companies.

5. Do you have the resources you need to be successful?

In summary, we have 4 positives and 4 that are unsure. It looks like we have work to do here. Moving forward we’ll need more senior guidance and external training / evaluation to bring up our younger members’ skillsets to the next level.

More On Culture Next

There’s a lot to take away from the surveys. In the next post, we’ll dive into some of our unique company culture that’s developed over the years and a few new practices we’ve been trying out that has had some surprising results.

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