Karman, Culture, and Policy Pt 1 — Why?
When Jon and I started Karman one of the most exciting aspects was designing the policies of our company…
“Policies?! Are you serious?”
I know, I know, it sounds stale but stick with me for a second. Especially if you’re finding your current workplace tiresome, boring, or frustrating. Jon, myself, and the rest of the team at Karman have set out to create a dream workplace for interactive makers (devs, designers, etc..) who have been chewed up by the industry. People that want to play with new technologies and explore their own ideas without the risk or overhead of starting their own business. Internally, we jokingly refer to Karman as The Center for Tired and Neglected Interactive Workers.
OK, so that’s my pitch. If you still don’t think policies can be interesting there’s no hope, go do some work, watch some Black Mirror, or whatever else keeps you occupied…
Those of you that stuck around, great! By the end of this series I hope to make you profoundly envious of the way we work and have you fixated on the way things could be.
Quick Disclaimer
We’ve spent 10 years working with and talking to people at countless studios about their frustrations. The issues we mention are the ones that come up frequently across the industry and what we aim to address in Karman’s culture.
Why Create This Post at All?
There are two main reasons we want to share our policies:
- Expression — Speaking with others and experiencing first hand at previous places, we watched far too many talented people leave the industry because their needs were misunderstood or unmet. We see the potential to keep more people in the interactive industry without studios needing to increase salaries or jeopardize quality. For example, the typical strategy of last minute raises are effective short term fixes but we’ve never seen it effectively retain people over the long term. Retaining more talent in the industry can only benefit us all.
- Feedback — We’ve created a dream environment for the 10 of us that currently work at Karman but we want our approach to have mass appeal. When an experienced maker sits back and thinks of where they’d love to work we want Karman to be on that list.
Our hope is that these posts inspire some sort of response. Whether that means enacting change in your own workplace, grabbing a coffee to discuss further, or figuring out a way to work with us. If over the course of this series you don’t agree with a policy, the entire approach, or find a hole let us know. In the end we’re just happy to have made an impact.
We’re looking for any type of feedback, positive or negative. At the end of the day we want our culture, freedom, and transparency to be our primary attractor for new talent.
Why Now?
The honest answer is that in 5 years we’ve only just finished writing these policies. Over the first few years, when Karman was just Jon and I, there wasn’t much motivation to flesh out the details of our ideas. It takes a lot of time to properly articulate these concepts and since we’ve totally mind melded on this aspect of the business there was no reason to record ideas beyond a couple bullet points and a few grandiose sentences.
“This isn’t called a studio, company, organization, etc. It’s a community, almost like an artist commune out of the 70’s. Of course we won’t all be living together in a camp…”
— 2012 Mike…Who are you?
Once we started bringing on new team members it was time to start putting our ideas into words and getting people to poke holes in them. Creating a written set of expectations gives us a solid foundation to refer to whenever there are conflicts or diversions in the future. Not to mention we were in the market for a 3rd partner and having everything written out helped communicate our values completely.
A Little Context to Set You Up
To give you an idea of where we’re coming from here are a few key contextual items that are worth keeping in mind.
These ideas and policies are designed to work at a relatively small scale of 3–15 people — maybe 30 at max. The ideas rely on a lot of small community dynamics and trust. We’ve never intended to scale the core Karman team larger than 30 so that’s not something we’re concerned with.
The plan for the business, or “exit strategy”, if you’re really craving some buzzwords, is to retire having created a studio with guiding principles strong enough to continue well after our departure. We want to have spent a career creating experiences that we love and enabling others to do the same.
Financially speaking, year-end profits will skew towards the following objectives in order of importance
- Significantly better-than-average stability. It seems the average is a three to six month zero revenue runway. For us it’s twelve.
- Allocating as much exploratory/research time as possible vs. client work. More on this later but research time is basically undirected opportunities to scratch the curiosity itch that anyone working in this industry gets from time to time.
- Rewarding the team in a predictable and unrestricted way. If the company significantly benefits so do all involved. (aka. bonuses)
Finally, A Few Overarching Goals
The following are a collection of goals and guiding principles that we’ve followed when defining each policy:
Keep it flat
Grant as much freedom as possible to employees while making the role Jon, Ram, and I play as owners/founders as meaningless as possible. The only (non-legal) responsibility we have is to continue to uphold the values of transparency, fairness and freedom.
- Equal contribution results in equal compensation.
- When the company benefits, employees will always see a benefit as well.
- Don’t like something? Fix it.
Retention
Encourage long term retention. Having experienced software companies, first hand, with incredible 25-year developer retention, we know it’s possible to achieve better than the average 1–4 years we see in many studios.
Aspirational
Become a place that people aspire to join in the digital creative field. Particularly people with any or all of the following characteristics:
- An entrepreneurial spirit with low-medium risk tolerance
- Side projects/game ideas that they can’t pursue because their current employer prevents side projects, owns everything they do, or offers unfair profit share for released projects
- Seasoned workers that love the work and industry but are sick of the long hours, stress, no accountability, or other typical studio BS. Remember, we’re “The Center for Tired and Neglected Interactive Workers” :)
The whole team here have spent a lot of time trying to create a set of policies that would make a great place to work. If we knew of a company that met all of these goals we would never have founded Karman and applied there instead!
Enough Preamble, Let’s Get Started!
Alright, this post is already long enough. Let’s wrap this up with some quick expectation setting.
Once per week we’ll release a post with 1–2 policies depending on policy importance and complexity. As each post is released I’ll be updating the links here. Keep up to date by following us through your favourite social platform or, if social networks aren’t your jam, just check here regularly.
What we hope for from you, dear reader, is that you’ll think critically about what we’re doing and share those thoughts with us. Does any of this:
- Worry you from the perspective of an owner/manager?
- Worry you as a developer, designer, producer, artist or other production resource.
- Make you super excited to work for a company like this? Why or why not? What would change your mind?
- Have aspects that could be exploited?
- Feel unfair or bias to certain individuals or backgrounds?
- Open any potential legal issues?
- Leave you with any questions?
We can’t wait to start sharing what we’ve come up with and hearing your feedback. We’ve always talked about being transparent and while I think we’ve lived up to that internally, we haven’t shared all that much externally.
Finally, if you’re just starting a studio, agree with what we’re saying and want to use our policies as a starting point, please do! In fact, leave a comment or email us. We’d love to hear your spin on things and talk through any concepts in greater detail.
