It's not fun to be banned even if you have a dream job as a game developer. That's why Blind Squirrel Games, a game development services company in Orange County, California, has done more to keep its employees entertained.
CEO Brad Hendricks and Kitty Mach, Blind squirrel gamesSenior community managers have improved employee entertainment to improve morale during the pandemic. Blind Squirrel Games has made this one of the top priorities of the 110 employees to keep them motivated and enthusiastic about the collaboration.
The management team is grateful that they were able to work almost normally with all their strength and would like to ensure that they do everything in their power to create positive interactions and engagements of the employees.
They created social spaces like digital clubs for employees. Through the company's platform, employees can set up clubs and discussion groups based on common interests such as comics and books, pets, cooking, video games, coding clubs, and board games. Employees can search for clubs, find information about where to socialize, search for planned digital meetups, or plan their own.
The company has also established a directory where employees can find other employees' livestream channels, social groups outside BSG's own channels, player IDs they want to share with each other so they can play with each other, and social networks. Before the work-from-home mandate, the company organized weekly Friday events that will continue. They run random raffles to give employees digital gift cards for the grocery or other business of their choice.
I talked to Hendricks and Mach about it. Here is an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Brad Hendricks is the founder and CEO of Blind Squirrel Games.
Photo credit: Blind Squirrel Games
GamesBeat: did you find out how to have fun?
Brad Hendricks: Yes I think so. We recognized early on that this will pose a significant psychological problem for certain people in the company. Obviously we have – game developers are usually single. Not always. We also have families. But we knew that a fairly large part of our population lives at home, possibly alone. We wanted to make sure we looked at what we thought was only four weeks at the time and then turned into something much longer. We were happy to be ahead of the curve.
I tapped Kitty (Mach), our community manager, who does a lot of other things too. Together with a few other people in the organization, she helped us work out a plan to engage employees, keep them excited and motivated, and provide them with tools to deal with the problems that we knew would arise. We just didn't know how they would manifest themselves or anything. We just thought that the best way to keep people busy is to give them things that they can do outside of work. If you can't get together, the form we're in right now is the only way we could have done it. We have developed many different types of programs to constantly involve people.
GamesBeat: Was this measured in a good way?
Hendricks: I'm sure Kitty has some data. She is the one who is responsible for it. For example, one of the things we do seems to be one of the most popular – I don't know if it's actually the most popular. But Beer Friday, which will take place at 5 a.m. today – basically we usually did it in the office. We went at five o'clock and turned on the taps. We have taps in the office. We'd all have a beer. We decided to keep it that way. We have a virtual beer Friday at 5 a.m. and everyone goes into zoom. We also have teams and other types of technology, but we thought zoom was the better way because we can do some fun things with zoom, such as: B. giving away prizes and things like that.
GamesBeat: How adventurous have you become with it? Have you considered sending beer to employee homes?
Hendricks: We didn't do that. I think we were a little concerned about the liability there. We thought people could get their own beer. We have sent gift packages. In fact, I think it was last week. We sent snacks to every employee in the company, no matter where they are. We have some remote workers in other states. It included healthy snacks and the like. And then everyone during Beer Friday – I think it is twice during Beer Friday, we spin the wheel and every name that takes part in the event is given a prize. That is fun.
Kitty Mach: We actually started our Friday social in March. Brad was great at it – immediately when we were away we needed an option to keep people busy and give them a place to socialize. We have found a way to make regular beer digital on Fridays. We set it up and do it every Friday. We have received feedback from employees about what they would like to see. We have raffles where, when you show up, we will give you a digital gift card to choose from for each service. We're all ordering online now because a lot of people can't go out.
We're even going to have a pub quiz tonight, where we do interesting facts and people can participate in fun categories. We also award prizes for this. We have been doing this every Friday since the end of March and it is becoming increasingly popular. More people showed up. It's a great time for people who give up their jobs, drop by, say hello and show what they're up to. We like to leave it open so people can come and go, just like in the office.
