Being in New Zealand, our Covid-19 response had us go into full-scale lockdown for two months early this year. We then reached zero community spread and have now returned mostly to life-as-usual (for now).
For our team, we usually work 90 per cent in the office. Covid-19 for us meant two months of working completely remotely, with a staggered return (about 50/50 in-office vs. remote) and now we are back to most people being in the office most of the time.
So, my answer is based on what I’ve seen for our team as we’ve gone through these stages, the impacts on production, and is all directly relevant to our team size and project development stages. What are the differences with being remote? I’ll comment on two angles – staff wellbeing and production.
Wellbeing: I think two key challenges from a well-being perspective are social connectivity and lack of work/life separation. We put a lot of strategies in place during lockdown to try and counter the lack of social connectivity and the inherent “work is home is work is home” feeling that can come from working full-time at home.
We implemented strategies like encouraging our staff to walk to and from work, heavier than usual use of Slack, frequent Zoom calls and coffee breaks, well-being chats which I scheduled as an open space for anyone struggling, zoom drinks, etcetera. All of these strategies helped, and some of them we’ve actually continued now we’re back in the office.
It was really interesting coming out of lockdown, everyone felt like they were working pretty well at home. Most people were reluctant to return to the office but once people started to come back, the overwhelming response was how much better everyone felt being back.
Everyone’s expectations of returning to the office were very different from reality, which I found really interesting. And the response, once people were back in the office, was that it was better from both a personal wellbeing perspective and a productivity perspective.
Production: I think problem-solving in groups of anything more than two people is significantly harder when working remote. For us, this meant that our projects that were most impacted by working remotely were those in stages of development where we were doing a lot of problem-solving.
So, our live games teams operated pretty smoothly, as did our publishing team, but our games that were in pre-production and advanced development were negatively impacted in terms of our ability to problem-solve efficiently.
I’ll also comment on the hybrid side of things: we have found that having the majority of staff in the office and working remotely works, though, for us the latter has not been as good. The option of having half and half doesn’t work for us, though. It’s much easier to have most people working the same way. When half of the people are doing one thing, and another half is doing another it doubles the communication workload and things get missed.
What we’ve moved to now is the majority of the staff in the office, with work-from-home Thursdays and the option for people to work from home on other days as needed, but most people are in the office most of the time.
