Rec Room Culture

Context: This is a document I wrote in the early days of Rec Room in an attempt to codify our company culture. The intended audience was leads and managers - but it became a useful touchpoint for all employees.

Rec Room Inc is a pretty great place to work! We have a friendly, welcoming, yet high performance culture. Our "high trust, high autonomy" mode of operation is deeply embedded and - from my perspective at least - highly effective.

So the obvious question and concern is: How do we preserve and scale that company culture as we grow?

Can we preserve company culture as we grow? Especially as we grow rapidly? And as we collectively learn to be a world-class hybrid-remote team?

The answer is YES, but only if we make a continual effort.

The purpose of this document is to invite you, as a lead at the company, to actively contribute to that effort. As the company gets larger, you are increasingly the primary source of cultural guidance for your team.

Given that, I wanted to capture and share some of the principles and practices that are foundational to our culture. This is intended to be practical stuff that we can all apply in our day-to-day work. Here’s the TLDR:

Things to do

• 🥇 Set a good example
• 📢 Communicate strategy early, often and well
• 🏆 Seize opportunities and avoid catastrophes
• 🗨 Please ensure you're doing 1:1s
• 👍 Say the nice thing
• 📈 Cultivate an atmosphere of transparency and openness
• 🆘 Ask for help

Things to avoid

• 🎭 Prevent the emergence of internal "us vs. them" dynamics
• ⏳ Let’s not turn into a meeting culture
• 🙃 Be smart about the dynamics of status and ego
• 🚫 DO NOT LOWER YOUR HIRING BAR

This is the way

• 🧭 Understand the company principles deeply
• ⚽ Get really good at goal-setting
• 🌈 A welcoming environment for people from all walks of life
• 🤸‍♀️ Have high expectations

That’s a long list, and I don’t expect everyone to memorize it. I do ask that everyone read this entire doc at least once. Hopefully at least a couple of things will resonate and stick =]

OK, ready for the long version? Here we go…

Things to do

🥇 Set a good example

The most powerful tool you have is the example you set. We can't expect new team members to behave in ways that we don't. So guess what? If we want a team that...

• Is “high trust, high autonomy”,
• Balances relentless high performance with sustainable work-life balance,
• Balances efficient communication with being welcoming and supportive

...we have to model those behaviors every day. We are doing that, so this message is just: "Keep doing it, and remember why it's important.”

📢 Communicate strategy early, often and well

Communicate strategy early, often and well. Excellence in communication is a major reason we punch above our weight class as a company. As we grow, we need to adapt our communications to accommodate a larger group - there are many nuances to this, but the basic phenomena we'll encounter are (a) you can't assume everyone knows about stuff, and (b) it takes longer for information to propagate across the company.

To deal with (a), please get good at quickly setting context for a discussion. As a lead, you should be really good at explaining your team's strategy and current efforts to a cold audience, quickly and from scratch. We should always be able to quickly explain, from first principles, WHY we're doing something. I encourage you to practice! (But be aware you gotta be efficient and engaging... no-one wants three minutes of dry context at the start of every discussion. Think "elevator pitch".)

To deal with (b), if you have something important planned, talk about it early and talk about it often. It's really important to put things on the radar as early as possible, so it can seep into the "subconscious" of the group. And it's really important to say the same thing over and over - both because repetition aids recall, and because we're now large enough that statistically someone will be OOF for any given announcement. So... early and often!

Basically, if you’re not sure if you should communicate something - do it! We’ll regret under-communication a lot more than over-communication.

🏆 Seize opportunities and avoid catastrophes

Remember the Rec Room definition of ownership - we rely on you to seize opportunities and avoid catastrophes. This is a way of saying we want you to be active, not passive. If you see an opportunity, go get it (if it’s in your team’s purview), or make enough noise that we go get it as a company.

Same idea for catastrophes. If you see a catastrophe looming, take steps to avert it! What we shouldn’t do is passively watch as we sail into an iceberg. Saying “I saw that coming!” after the fact is of little help =]

The best way to do this is a combination of smart contextual awareness and excellent planning. That way we can seize/avoid without undue disruption.

But sometimes disruption is necessary. When time is of the essence, you might need to short-circuit established processes and move mountains to achieve an outcome we care about. Process is a guide, not a law. Sometimes the only way to succeed is to color outside the lines. Every day? No. But a day will come.

🗨 Please ensure you're doing 1:1s

Please ensure you're doing 1:1s. As well as being a great opportunity to identify blockers and work on career development, 1:1s are the best way to nip culture problems in the bud. 1:1s create time and space to build high trust relationships, and to truly understand the needs, frustrations, and goals of each individual on the team.

My understanding is you're all doing a great job with 1:1s - keep it up! If you've gotten lazy about it, I understand (I get lazy about them too). But please make sure you're having regular 1:1s with your reports, it is some of the highest ROI time you can spend as a lead.

👍 Say the nice thing

Say the nice thing - as a busy lead, it’s easy to fall into the trap of only providing negative feedback. Don’t do that. Make it a habit to reflexively provide positive feedback as well. This is a simple idea, but it takes mindfulness to actually do it.

When you find yourself thinking positive thoughts about someone’s work, tell them! No matter how trivial, each positive comment is another coin deposited into the trust bank.

It’s also really important to be mindful of the strengths and weaknesses of text-based communication (e.g., Slack messages). On the plus side, text facilitates efficient and asynchronous communication and allows us to be a world-class hybrid-remote company. On the negative side, text can lack nuance and cause offense where none was intended. When communicating via text:

As the sender, put some extra effort into framing your message. If you’re joking, make sure that’s obvious to someone who is busy!

As the receiver, remember to assume good intent. If a message is rubbing you the wrong way, start from the premise that it’s a limitation of text comms, not an attack. Talk to each other!

📈 Cultivate an atmosphere of transparency and openness

Please cultivate an atmosphere of transparency and openness. We can't fix problems we don't know about, and - as leads - it's easy to accidentally incentivize people to hide "bad news".

We don't want that. We want to hear about bad news ASAP! So people should feel rewarded and celebrated for being open about things that are messed up, even if it's their fault. In my experience it is quite possible to (a) incentivize transparency, while (b) providing a sense of accountability for genuine mistakes. Don't compromise (a) with your approach to (b).

This is a big part of “avoiding catastrophes”. Mistakes and failures are fine - in fact they’re a sign that we’re striving for ambitious goals. Catastrophes - i.e., mistakes with outcomes so bad they’re an existential threat to the company - are not fine! A powerful tool for avoiding them is to learn from our mistakes, which we can’t do if we’re busy blaming each other. The only real failure is a failure to learn. So when something inevitably goes wrong, don’t worry about whose fault it is. Set to work fixing it and learning from it, so it doesn’t happen again.

🆘 Ask for help

We are an ambitious team that takes big swings - if you're not feeling challenged sometimes, you're probably not pushing hard enough! This can be overwhelming, but it is an important part of the growth process. The important thing is to ask for help when you need it. You are surrounded by smart, talented peers who want you to succeed. It can be hard to see it in the moment, but help is right at hand. Just ask!

This is also part of setting a good example for your team. If they see you asking for help, they are more likely to do the same when they need it. And in my experience, teams respond really well to a leader who is honest, vulnerable and admits when they need help. As leads, we sometimes fear to "show weakness". This is usually a mistake. Ask for help. Your team will rally to your aid, and the company is here to support you.

Things to avoid

🎭 Prevent the emergence of internal "us vs. them" dynamics As we grow, we need to be on the lookout for the emergence of internal "us vs. them" dynamics at the company. In my experience, there are no good internal "us vs. them" dynamics. Whether it's management vs. employees, design vs. QA, or whatever - it's always bad.

Please work to proactively stamp out any "us vs. them" dynamics you see growing, because they will really mess us up if we let them get entrenched. This will be especially important as we learn to be a hybrid team, since "remote vs. in-office" is an obvious us vs. them dynamic waiting to happen. Let's not fall into that trap.

The company is one big team, with shared goals. We can disagree about stuff, but we can't let disagreements devolve into badly compromised lines of communication.

⏳ Let’s not turn into a meeting culture

Let’s not turn into a meeting culture. It’s not good if most peoples’ days are filled with meetings most of the time. ICs need multi-hour stretches of uninterrupted time to get into a flow state and do their best work. As a lead, you need to be proactive and creative about not letting meetings overwhelm us. Obviously meetings are a good, useful and necessary tool. But there’s a dangerous dynamic waiting for us: The company is growing, but the number of hours in a work week is not.

As a thought experiment, consider what happens if every new person adds one recurring meeting to the calendar. Before long, the entire work week is full! So we need to actively reduce the meeting load wherever possible.

Please experiment, and share best practices. You should regard scheduling a meeting - especially a recurring meeting - as a high cost operation. And please make it clear to your team: You can say no to meetings! You don’t have to go just because it’s on your calendar.

🙃 Be smart about the dynamics of status and ego

Please be smart about the dynamics of status and ego. These two closely-related concepts are the source of much trouble on teams. Bruised egos lead to acting out, which leads to more bruised egos, which leads to us vs. them dynamics. As a lead, you need to be the “adult in the room”, and do a good job managing the ego and status dynamics on your team. It’s amazing how often thirty seconds of respectful, face-saving status-management work (i.e., making sure someone feels valued and respected, even in a conversation where you’re delivering critical feedback) will save you thirty hours of weird, ego-driven team dynamics down the road. Get good at this.

Also, please model selfless behavior. It’s natural to feel territorial about stuff, but sometimes people are going to touch/change things you care about without asking you about it first. Show your team that it’s possible to be cool about that.

🚫 DO NOT LOWER YOUR HIRING BAR

DO NOT LOWER YOUR HIRING BAR. No matter how urgently we may want to fill a position, we must never do it by lowering our standards. On that path lies much regret, both for us and for the person we hired who wasn't well-suited for the job. This might create short term pain, but that is vastly preferable to the long term pain of either (a) having the wrong person in a key role, or (b) having to exit someone.

When hiring, we must look through both a technical lens (can they do the job?) and a culture lens (are they a good fit for the culture described in this document?). Unless a candidate is clearing both bars, we have to say no.

We also want to be excited about every hire we make. A lukewarm thumbs up from everyone on the loop is not enough. There should be at least one “champion” for the candidate in any interview round up. There’s no “on the fence” option when evaluating a candidate - if you can’t say yes, then you gotta say no.

This is the way

🧭 Understand the company principles deeply

Culture grows like a crystal - i.e., the initial seed is replicated as the structure grows. In our case the initial seed was our company principles: When in doubt, build it. Iteration is Quality*. It's a small world.

Please make sure you understand the company principles deeply, and apply them in your day-to-day work and behavior. If you're uncertain/skeptical about the principles, please ask - there is thought and intent behind them that may not be obvious at first. The principles are not intended to be empty words, they guide our behavior in meaningful and differentiated ways. Especially during challenging times.

Protip: It’s a good idea to cite the principles explicitly when you apply them - it reinforces to the team that we actually use them!

*2024 update: We have retired Ready, Fire, Aim... Repeat! in favor of Iteration is Quality. But the seed of “Ready, Fire, Aim…” persists in the cultural crystal that has grown around it: A general bias to action. A preference for lean MVPs wherever possible. A willingness to “learn in public”.

⚽ Get really good at goal-setting

The best way to communicate strategy is goals. Please get really good at the goal-setting process, as it is a foundation of our high autonomy work style. You know how people say “let’s get on the same page” when trying to align an effort? What do you think is written on that page? I’ll tell you: It’s a well-crafted list of goals!

Goals are outcomes we care about, generated via an iterative and collaborative process, that sum up to a crisp vision of how the world will be when the work is done. Well-crafted goals are useful...

At the beginning of a project - the process of goal-setting forces you to have the right conversations up front, to think deeply about the outcomes we want (and don’t want), and is a great opportunity to invite a broad group of people to contribute in a constructive and manageable way.

During a project - when disagreements come up, goals are the best way to resolve them. Try to stick to this: “Only argue about goals”. If you find team members A and B are having an endless, circular, increasingly bitter argument - intervene and have them zoom out to the goal level. 99% of these disagreements are goal misalignments in disguise. So don’t argue about the thing, argue about the goals behind the thing! (And if you did a great job goal-setting up front, this will happen much less often)

After a project - the initial list of goals makes a great scorecard for assessing how something went after the fact.

🌈 A welcoming environment for people from all walks of life

Let's continue to put effort into being a welcoming environment for people from all walks of life. Frankly, the company is not as diverse as we want - the team is pretty straight, cis, white and male. We look at this through both a recruiting and retention lens. As we grow…

1. We'll look for opportunities to increase team diversity over time (recruiting)
2. We’ll continue to invest in supporting our existing diverse workforce (retention)

Whatever the current state of team diversity, we need to be mindful of our culture and communication. Building a high trust environment means attending to the nuances of communication, making space for all voices to be heard, and working together through any rough spots and challenges with open minds and open hearts.

As a lead, team health is your responsibility. You are our first line of defense against unhealthy crunch, harassment and bullying. Don’t tolerate it.

Please listen to your team members, and be alert to individuals who aren’t getting a chance to speak. Why is this important? I invite you to read about these interesting studies conducted by MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory. What is the data signature of a high performance team? Check it out (emphasis added):

Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.

Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.

Members connect directly with one another - not just with the team leader.

Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.

Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back.

🤸‍♀️ Have high expectations

Our goal is to be one of the highest performing development teams on the planet. To do this, we need to set clear expectations about what good looks like: Excellent communication and teamwork, reliable follow through, and achieving a sustainable rhythm that balances world-class output with the necessary investments in mental, physical and social health to make that sustainable.

** Show your team the respect of having high expectations.** Maybe it’s possible to scare a team into high performance - but that is not the Rec Room way, because it is not sustainable (It’s a small world). Instead, invite them to share in what we hope will be a career highlight for them - a team environment where they will learn, grow, be challenged, and do the best work of their career.