Working from home poses both challenges and opportunities. Today December 3rd we focus on working from home; staying connected and being creative.
The year 2020 will go down in history as a true disruptive year in so many ways. The devastation of the pandemic has left millions of people bereaved and forced us into completely different living and working habits. In particular, the way many of us carry out our daily work has changed and we have entered the era of digital communities. At Gaming Corps this change was not as dramatic at first since many of us already worked from home on a partial basis. We were already also a team based in two locations at the time, Uppsala and Malta, and had some structures in place to manage that. Gradually, we however also experienced the challenges of being forced apart, because even for those who do work from home a lot, there was always the option of meeting face to face. And of course the possibility of travelling between our locations. Not so much a challenge in terms of efficiency of work, but rather the challenge of missing out on social interaction. And in the middle of this pandemic we added another location when the Kyiv team came onboard, so we are now truly a digital community where most team members have not met each other face to face, yet still manage to successfully work very closely together.
At Gaming Corps we rely heavily on our digital tools to stay connected and manage the chain of connected tasks and responsibilities. Now more than ever. We have a set of interconnected software to handle the sharing of files, the sharing of tasks for the construction of the games and most importantly communication within the team. As many of us have had to work under new circumstances, for instance while having children at home, we have had to adapt to each other more and be flexible sometimes when it comes to working hours and helping each other out.
For us, as for everyone else in the same situation, this new 2020 way of working has an impact on creativity. At small companies like Gaming Corps everyone must wear a big hat or more than one hat, which means having to be creative – whether that is business creativity, technological creativity, structural creativity or artistic creativity. We have come to find that the current conditions can both increase and decrease creativity, depending on what you do and what normally fuels your creativity. For those who need the social interaction being alone a lot can be difficult, and we have to keep finding new ways of ensuring that creativity can still flow for them. For those who need some space to be creative, this new reality has had a positive impact.
We chose the image of the day to represent working from home because it shows creativity in your home environment. Our CEO Juha Kauppinen lives in the countryside and hand crafted this ax, writing on it in runes “Undead Vikings”. We have not been able to settle what to do with it as all team members want it!
Stay tuned tomorrow December 4th when the advent calendar focuses on the next step in the iGaming production process – Art, as seen through the eyes of our very own Art Director James Sciberras. If you missed the first part of the iGaming production process, have a look at Day 1 (link below)
