The benefits of working remotely | GI Sprint
During the pandemic, studios quickly adapted to working remotely. This way of operating seems to have stuck, with many studios opting to stay fully remote rather than returning to the office.
Two developers that have adopted this way of work are Bossa Studios and FuturLab, both based in the UK with employees working remotely worldwide.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz for GI Sprint, Bossa co-founder and CEO Henrique Olifiers and FuturLab head of production Toby Adam-Smith discuss the benefits of working remotely, and how teams can still maintain a creative and collaborative environment online rather than in an office.
Adam-Smith notes that in an office setting, producers and managers would be able to notice small things during production such as "spotting something on a person's screen, or overhearing a conversation and being able to jump in [to] help or provide feedback."
Toby Adam-Smith
"In this way, progress and issues would often be shared and raised organically regardless of your project or discipline," he says.
FuturLab has tried to find similar ways of implementing this sort of collaborative nature in remote work, and found that embracing an open environment online was the solution.
Adam-Smith suggested using communication channels such as Slack, and more recently Gather, to enable teams to share thoughts and ideas as they would've done in an office environment.
"Trust is so important with remote working, and we trust that our team shares our vision and goals, and make it everyone's responsibility to deliver on them," Adam-Smith explains.
"So long as employees are empowered and understand shared visions and goals, they find the best way to work to achieve them."
Not being in one place to work as a team can affect vision alignment during development, which is something Olifiers has recognised since going fully remote. (Vision alignment is a challenge in itself that we tackled in a previous GI Sprint session with Graham McAllister).
"If you're not careful, misalignment
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