It's been a long time since my boss called me into their office
and gave me a stern talking to. It wasn't easy and I had it coming
but the good news is that most of what the boss,
that's you, is asking for has been underway for months
or in some cases even years. That's why we're under new management.
But as happy as I am that Taren's here, he can't make these kinds of changes
alone which is why step one was an all-hands
meeting to hear directly from everyone on our team and step two was
to kick off an unprecedented company-wide period of
introspection. No videos, no tweets, no product launches.
For an entire week we have done almost nothing
but dig through every misstep and conduct face-to-face meetings between
our teams with the goal of surfacing the communication
and the teamwork challenges that have brought us to this point.
It's been a bit of a roller coaster full of passionate disagreement
and then finding common ground airing grievances and then
reconciliation but through it all we put together a plan.
It took longer than the week that we promised you but the way that I see it
that's not a bug. That's a feature and it underscores our new commitment to do
whatever it takes to move beyond just entertainment to become the
authoritative voice that you guys deserve
and the one that we all want to be. Before I lay it out though I just want
to address two important groups. First to everyone
who wanted to see us rise up from this better than ever
I just want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing our passion
for technology. Thank you for the countless messages
that you guys have sent encouraging us as we navigate this
difficult time and most of all thank you for being
willing to criticize something that you love
in order to make it better. We're here for you we are not going anywhere.
Second I want to address everyone who wanted to see us fail.
I guess all the same stuff we're here for you
we're not going anywhere and you're going to have to deal with that.
Let's kick off with the content reforms then shall we? For starters
along with our reduction in video output to get a handle on all of our new
quality focused process changes we have officially killed the haven't
missed an upload in 10 plus years mentality
and we've made it explicitly clear that if a video is not ready for prime time
we're going to stop the presses until we've had a chance to make the proper
fixes. Now that might sometimes come in the form
of an on-screen correction but there's going to be better
transparency. We've created a clear rubric that defines error severity
and prescribes the appropriate fix which can range from
a pinned comment to a full reshoot or even the outright cancellation of the
video. You're going to find that linked down
below. Second we've made significant changes to project management
and load balancing with a prioritization on in-person meetings to help define
project scope and ensure that everyone is aligned. Our
expectation going forward is that nobody is ever just making graphs
about something that hasn't been explained to them or that they don't
fully understand. This will not only improve accuracy but
it will give us the opportunity to present data in
more interesting and more digestible ways. I've actually got a preview of what
this might look like from an upcoming video that the labs team is
super proud of where they're analyzing the consistency of performance
across a 12-unit sampling of what are supposedly identical AMD Ryzen processors.
Based on these preliminary results looks like you can buy the exact
same computer as your friend and end up with pretty different performance.
Interesting if true. Of course I'm not going to ask you to take my word for it.
We have a lot of progress to make on our goal of publishing our full testing
methodologies but we've opened up the forum thread that we promised
soliciting feedback and we've outlined the dates that we're
expecting to deliver on some of our methodologies
and the open sourcing of our in-game testing harnesses.
For those who don't want to click the link you can expect to find some updates
around the middle of September. A good methodology is only a small part
of the battle though and if there's one thing that we learned from all of this
it's that we need better processes for accuracy checking.
The good news is that flowcharts are good for more than just memes
and we have just such a process now. Every video with labs testing will be
checked by labs one to two times before shooting and
then an additional time after the video has been edited. Any
show-stopping issues found during these reviews will do
exactly that. They will stop the show. You guys deserve better than what we've
delivered up until this time and that's what we want to give you.
After our internal reviews this week we have unlisted and demonetized
multiple videos that contained erroneous data and we will be updating or
otherwise issuing error corrections on others. You'll find a link to a summary
of these changes to previous labs content down below
but our priority going forward is to publish our error corrections according
to the new guidelines that I gave you guys a
moment ago. One problem that we can't solve
internally is that nobody can know everything and even
experts can make mistakes. That's why we're kicking off the error
checking community or ECC squad. It's still in the alpha stage
right now with a group of fewer than 10 extremely
knowledgeable community members and we may or we may not ever expand
beyond that but we are going to have a link down
below if you're interested in hearing more about this program in the event
that we roll it out more broadly. In the short term as we roll out all our
new processes and inevitably find some wrinkles these folks
might find stuff that does get missed but in the longer term our goal is to
have our internal systems be so solid that the ECC squad pretty much turns
into a free early access group for subject
matter experts in our community with the odd um actually to help us do
better. Now something I want to be clear about
is that you are still going to see some ad hoc
less formal testing. I mean we've got a video coming up where I'm
fixing my computer and I run over to Lucas in the lab to help diagnose a dead
power supply. We're going to conduct quick and dirty
tests where we just take two laptops and press buttons and see how long it takes
to open an application. Sometimes the full treatment isn't
necessary but we're going to make sure that we are
clearly communicating that to you. Finally recognizing that improvement is
a journey not a destination we're using our newfound
time to run weekly writing team post mortems to identify the areas where
we're killing it and the ones where we're really not. Our
findings will be used to both improve accuracy and also the quality
of our content. Moving on to the business side of things
there's not much changing here except more transparency and that's
actually a common theme throughout all of this.
We've recognized many of our biggest areas for improvement
for years I mean that's why we have the sponsor complaint thread on the forum
for example which we've now committed to providing
weekly updates on and that's why we had our internal
sponsorship guidelines which now you will find linked down
below available in public. That's also why we brought in an
experienced manager Terren who is off site this week or I would
have brought him in to chat with you guys as well.
There are some other changes we've committed to and
followed through on providing more proactive information to our team during
crisis time. We've built out a clear schedule for
one-on-ones between team members and managers
and we've established a path to reducing the number of direct reports for each
manager and a bunch of other stuff that we're
going to continue to work on in the background.
I do think one of the most pressing things that you guys want to hear about
though is that we have revised our process for
item tracking to a heartbeat system that requires our
procurement team to follow up pending projects and update their status.
They didn't do anything wrong before but this should help to avoid any confusion
going forward around items that start out as we don't
need it back and then turn into a loan later on.
I do not want to see something accidentally end up in the Christmas
party pile or any other don't need it anymore pile
again. Now let's talk about our workplace
culture. We offer a solid benefits package
including extended health, mental health and dental coverage as well as
retirement savings contributions and matching.
We proactively host regular team building events including Summer of Fun
which gives every full-time local employee up to $300 to spend on
any activities they want with other members of our team, bi-weekly gaming
nights in the lounge with free food, weekly badminton nights, bi-weekly
softball nights and a quarterly budget for department-wide team building events.
We organize occasional surprise field trips where people are paid to have fun
together and our Christmas parties are legendary
with surprise bonuses that over the years have included
free laptops, wild raffle prize halls and $10,000 in bonus money per person
not once but twice on that last one. And while we don't make a point of talking
about that stuff much and while our intention was never to
publish our findings, earlier this year we also asked our HR
team to conduct one-on-one meetings company-wide to identify key issues and
do a temperature check to see how everyone was feeling.
Our communication internally about the actions we've taken based on the
surveys hasn't been perfect. We've gotten some feedback that the
Monday morning meeting notes are dense and hard to parse but in June we
laid out a roadmap for many of the improvements that we had already made
or planned to make based on the one-on-ones.
Now for those of you paying very close attention you probably heard me mention
our HR team which isn't consistent with the impression that many people seem to
have of our structure here. A portion of our community seems to
think that the only option to report grievances here is
to your boss or to your other boss and I just don't really know what to say
other than that is simply not the case.
There was a time when we were very small and yes
I did handle all the HR complaints. That was years ago and the same is true
for Yvonne. In 2018 we passed 25 employees and we
engaged an outside HR council to advise us on what we were doing right
and what could be done better. In 2020 we grew to 40 team members
and we brought in an outside HR firm making them available to all employees
if they needed to talk to them. This was on top of the usual recommended conflict
resolution steps of discussing your issue with the other
person, talking to your manager, talking to their manager, talking to
ownership or filling out an anonymous feedback form.
Then as we approached 100 team members we added a dedicated
in-house HR department with the goal of providing even more resources to our
team. To be clear Yvonne and I do both still
have an open door policy so team members do still have the option
of talking to us directly if that's their preference and
I don't know how to emphasize this enough.
Everything that I just talked about existed before
last week. This is not some kind of knee-jerk
reactionary corpo nonsense. The one exception the one new thing is the
emergency upgrade that we made to our health plan.
In recent weeks a shocking number of our team members have been harassed,
bullied and even threatened on social media. So
effective September 2023 we have doubled our coverage for mental health counseling
and all I have to say other than that is that if you're one of the people who
engaged in this behavior I refuse to refer to you as members of
our community. You know who you are and shame on you. Not one of our team
members deserved that. We have a zero tolerance policy for any
of that crap and we always have. Regarding our workload we work hard here.
I've never denied that but we also aren't running some kind of
deranged Twitter 2.0 ultra hardcore operation.
This is the morning and night surveillance footage of our parking lot
at the studio for five work days leading up to our
week of introspection. We offer some flexibility around start and end times
so you'll see that some people roll in starting around 8 30
and then as you can see the ones who arrive later are typically gone by
around 6 30. There are exceptions. That Friday
you'll see we were filming up until the WAN show.
Thanks guys. Also our cleaning contractors come in
after hours so that's um that's their van so that they don't disrupt
production and sometimes folks will stick around if
they need a big space for tabletop gaming.
But to characterize our environment as some kind of
24/7 sweatshop is frankly ridiculous. We also do work overtime sometimes.
We're in a competitive industry. It happens and I've never denied that
either but we care about our team and I think
this is reflected both in our commitment to cut content
moving forward until we get our house in order
and in our historical turnover rate. From 2013
to 2023 inclusive our average turnover rate was 7.5 percent
with a median value of 7.7. Those numbers include
both people who resigned their positions and people who were dismissed.
For context according to workforce research firm Mercer
the Canadian average is 18% while in the US it's around
20%. We have had two years over that span that were less than exemplary
but even then we were lower than average. Removing the people who were dismissed
from their positions we fall to 3.65% percent average 1.9%
median. Being a media company our departures are
a little louder than most but in the grand scheme of things I hope you guys
can see that the numbers show there really aren't
that many of them. But with that said we have heard you
as part of our unwavering commitment to improve
our turnover may rise as we take decisive steps to do better for you.
To be clear this is not supposed to be stressful
for the hard-working members of our team. We have no plans for layoffs
or even still hiring. Our rainy day fund is going to comfortably carry us through
this storm. The vast majority of this team is world
class. They care so much about our community and igniting passion for
technology and they are going to be here for you.