Guest post written by Patrick Naud, head of studio at Square Enix Montréal.
It was inevitable.
For weeks, I had been watching the COVID-19 pandemic make its way through Asia and Europe. Now, it had landed on our shores. It was time to pack up our workstations and send everyone home.
Faced with the potential impact on our people, products, milestones and forecasts, having to close our downtown Montreal mobile games development studio could have been crushing.
But it wasn’t.
I knew that our team would pull through and see us through.
People before products
When one of your core beliefs is “People Before Products”, you don’t think twice before making a call for the health and safety of your employees and their families.
I chose to see the situation as just one more challenge to overcome. And what is the role of a manager if not to take a deep breath, keep calm, and find solutions when faced with the unexpected?
I never envisioned delaying action or postponing launches; we would adapt to uncertainty and learn to be even more flexible and agile than we already were.
By day four, 96 per cent of the workforce was set up to work from home. By week 3, our productivity was back to pre-work from home level.
I might not have toasted the New Year with such enthusiasm last December had I known what lay ahead, but 2020 has been a humbling and learning experience.
Here are the leadership tactics that have seen me through 2020.
