In the global conversation about working from home vs working in an office, it seems like most of the hot takes are devoted to picking a side and defending that viewpoint to the death. At Snowprint, consensus and collaboration are very important to us…so to no one’s surprise, our view is a little more nuanced.
Speaking of no surprises, we, like every other technology company, were well equipped to pivot to remote working. The flexibility to work from home was always important to us, in order to help everyone do what they need to do, so for our teams it wasn’t a strange concept. There was no learning curve for us when it came to using Slack, Google Meet, shared drives, and the rest of the tools. We were also unusually well suited to handling technical problems and troubleshooting, because if there’s anyone that understands how fragile and weird software can be, it’s a pack of game developers!
For new colleagues, onboarding was a challenge. When everyone you work with is two inches tall on a laptop screen, knowing who to ask for what can be bewildering at first. There’s just no context for anything! Everyone on the team is eager to help out, though, and it helped tremendously that communicating our shared values — our ethos — was a priority even before the pandemic.
An unexpected benefit was the way that remote work has allowed our two studios to feel like one. Half of Snowprint is based in Stockholm and the rest of us are in Berlin. Now that everyone is inside the computer, collaboration and coordination are much more natural. One caveat about that, though — see next.
It’s safe to say that most of us don’t want to be fully remote forever, or even for much longer. Being a team wasn’t harder, but feeling like a team was. We’re very productive, but productivity isn’t everything because we aren’t just making products. We’re making experiences for us and for our players. Our own life experiences, our human interactions, play a big part in making us creative and joyful and bringing that spark to our work.
The spark isn’t tangential to our job, it’s essential. As long as social distancing remains important for our communities, we have to be intentional and thoughtful about making space for our relationships and connections to other people, however we can.
Recent Comments