Bobby Stein is associate narrative director at the company. Create multidisciplinary podsĪrenaNet is best known for Guild Wars 2. The 12 companies we spoke to shared the biggest lessons they've learned during the pandemic, and how they plan to use those tools and strategies over the next few years. The next stage of WFH is going to take a thoughtful, deliberate approach, as company leaders balance productivity and creative goals alongside individual employee desires, and a collective sense that new policies are equitable and, for that matter, workable. Most companies we spoke to expressed a general satisfaction with their immediate response, followed by a long and difficult learning process that is still ongoing. Lockdown was a necessary crisis that required a fire-fighting mentality. Also, smaller central offices can mean lower costs, especially in big cities. Their reasoning is that a lot of workers prefer to work from home, and their performance has been more than satisfactory during the pandemic. In conversations with a dozen companies, found that most companies are looking at some kind of WFH / in-office hybrid going forward.
But it also alerted companies to the benefits of WFH as well as solutions to problems inherent to managing teams of remote workers. The games industry has spent at least a chunk of the past 18 months working from home and, oh boy, it's been disruptive.
