WW Mid-Year Review 2022 (3/4)

Part 3 : Culture Feedback

This is part 3 of the Weyrdworks 2022 mid-year review where we dive a little deeper into the good, bad and ugly side of Weyrdworks’ culture. You can check out part 1 here and part 2 here for more context leading up to this topic. Nurturing the right culture in a game development company is important to making great games. Let’s look at some feedback from the team.

1. Describe our culture with one word

Polite - If anyone were to meet my co-founder JT, you would think he’s the nicest person in the world.

At Weyrdworks, the work is relatively slow-paced. As founders, having built games ourselves, we’re able to set and buffer realistic timelines for most of our client engagements.

However there is concern as to whether we are too chill. This leads me back to our first topic in part 1 of this series where we asked how challenged the team is at work. There’s not enough data to understand why that is so. The ongoing concern is that we aren’t pushing our developers enough to grow out of their comfort zone.

While we don’t want to change what’s not broken (on the surface), not changing things up now and then would mean that we may never discover our full potential. Sometimes much of the bottleneck is on leadership. We tend to take on certain tasks because we can be perfectionists at times or that circumstances demands it. Or that we are too nice to nudge our team during the weekends or the middle of the night. Delegation is an art we have yet to master.

2. Name 3 things you like most about working here

There’s not much to say here. These are all positives of what the team likes. I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Name 3 things you like most about working here

3. Name three things you don’t like (that drive you crazy)

Unlike the previous post, I’m unable to share the raw submissions as there are entries with personal feedbacks to other employees that would be inappropriate to share here.

Some negatives involve communication breakdown in the work process and general office etiquette.

4. On a scale of 1 to 10, how connected do you feel with your coworkers?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how connected do you feel with your coworkers?

Well if you spend enough time with people around you, friendships naturally develop. Alas, this is not at all a win as a measly 0.42 increment over 6 months is rather pitiful. There’s obviously a mismatch or clash in personalities that couldn’t be reconciled within this period. In the last few months, we’ve been a lot more careful in our hiring process. New potential candidates are required to interact with existing employees in the office prior to being hired. In a small company like Weyrdworks, it’s imperative that everyone can get along well and feel at home in the office.

As a direct reflection of the earlier metric, this is assumed to be 5.6 out of 8 colleagues. However, we did not make the distinction that bosses are not counted. It would still be nice to be thought of as a friend. Just saying.

5. How open are your peers to receive different opinions from their own? 

It’s good to know that despite the mediocre connection between colleagues, that professionalism and openness remain high. There’s definitely a lot more room for improvement. I do feel this rating should have been higher. At one point, we opted for our junior artist’s design direction over our Art Director’s which says a lot about how we keep our ego in check.

On Management Next

We’ve talked a bit about personal, organisational growth and culture so far. In part 4, I’ll reveal some insights and feedback on our management style at Weyrdworks. If you liked what you’ve read and are interested in how a small boutique indie game studio in Malaysia ticks, do consider signing up for our newsletter below to get notified on future updates.