Creative culture

Whether managing a team or a studio, it is important that you build a culture that supports creativity. For me this starts with how people work together and how they are expected to treat each other. Defining this is far more important in my opinion than how fashionably creative your office looks. Having an environment that feels creative and makes people feel comfortable is important, but it all starts with how your teams interact and how their managers behave.

At the start of Cohort Studios I thought it was important to define how we wanted to work as a company and how we expected people to work together. I started by writing what I can best describe as a manifesto, but soon realised that no one was going to bother reading a 20 odd page document. I boiled this document down to its core principles to something I called CREATE, which I hoped people could more easily digest and would be much easier to refer to. You can download this as a PDF using the PDF icon bottom left on this page. This could be a lot more elegant and leaner, but I think it set out very early on how we wanted to work.

This was largely successful, especially in how we expected managers to act and reinforcing that everyones opinion counted and that everyone should be treated as a creative individual. It was fully integrated into the performance review process both for team members, and the company review where the team would provide feedback on the company performance. People contributed and provided feedback to its content, and we would have an award each year at the christmas party for the people who best exemplified these principles.

The challenge with CREATE was in its exposure to clients who did not care how the team were treated and had little regard for good direction and design process or how your company worked. I think that is the real challenge for any work culture, how external pressures and forces effect the way you work, especially if they are in contradiction.

CREATE later evolved to include You Can Play as a company mantra which simply summarised our design processes and development methodologies. Our previous tagline had been 'Partners in Development' which really wasn't very inspirational internally or externally and I wanted a statement that said more about the company as a whole. We wanted to focus on creating experiences that were easy to enjoy but complex to master, with the emphasis on accessibility. An inclusive approach to appeal to wide audiences and players of different abilities by providing layers and depth. You Can Play also emphasised our team-centric approach to development that encouraged a culture of creative collaboration where everyone is treated as a valued and creative individual and vision holder.