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thadelightfulone · 5 years ago

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The Firm - Chapter 11

Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

Summary: Erik has been hired to find an embezzler for an old friend. The whole gang is back at GBI, ready to fight an old enemy and save their friend.

Pairing: Erik x Black!OC

Genre: Suspense

A/N: *steps up to the mic* Hello everyone! I want to thank everyone who has supported this story. Also, to let you know that this story is coming to a close. I will be dropping a chapter each week until its conclusion.

LaNyah stares at the older women whose hair is much longer and darker than when she helped her out in the parking lot, however long ago that was. Then she looks over at Laura, who is rocking back and forth, whimpering about not wanting to die. Why would she even ask such a thing? What does Laura know about this woman that LaNyah doesn’t? How does she know her? Did Gina say before her friends arrive? Does she mean Alex, Ashley, Stacey, and Erik? LaNyah tries to hold back her smile and closes her eyes to focus on keeping calm while this lady begins her tale.

Gina sitting in the center of the couch, looks between the two stunned women. “As I was saying, this story took place almost 20 years ago. There was a decorated officer who had a loving wife and kids.” She swoons at the memory of her loving brother. “He was the leader of a special ops team until an unjust allegation was brought against him by a team member. Someone he trusted and chose to be on his squad,” Gina snarls out. “He was under investigation during his last mission, and it would have led to a court-martial.” She rushes out before waving her hands in the air like it didn’t matter, “Anyway, before that could happen, members of his team took matters into their own hands. He was brutally murdered, and someone made it to look like an enemy ambush.”

“How do you know that it wasn’t?” Laura asks from beside her.

Gina taps Laura’s upper leg, “Oh dear, it was too perfect. The killing was too clean, everyone’s story was just so– in sync. Nothing about a military death is like that unless it is a cover-up.”

“Maybe, they were trying to spare the family’s feelings, you know, like friendly fire in combat or something?” LaNyah interjected.

“SHUT UP!!!” Gina shouts, startling both Laura and LaNyah. She takes a few deep breathes and smooths out her skirt, “It was not that. My twin brother was callously killed while overseas by members of the team he built.” LaNyah and Laura share a look, and Laura starts crying all over again.

“What does that have to do with us?” LaNyah somberly asks while staring at the crying pregnant woman over Gina.

Sniffling, Laura nods at LaNyah, “Yeah, I don’t know anyone in the military.”

LaNyah looks away, putting her head down at what Laura said because she knows that is not true for her. She only knew of one person until a few weeks ago. Gina can’t mean any of them, right? She inhales sharply, unaware that Gina has been watching her intently since Laura made that last statement, a small smile forming at the corners of her mouth.

She looks over them, “This is my favorite part,” a full smile breaking through while Gina takes Laura’s hands in hers before continuing. “Which brings me to why you two are here. I am going after those responsible for my brother’s death.” Gina rubs the tops of her hands, “Laura, your fiancé works for one of them.”

Laura closes her eyes at this, tears still falling and mutters, “But LaNyah was supposed to be the fall guy, not Matthew.” Gina’s eyes widen at that.

“When did he tell you?”

“What? Wait, he set me up?”

LaNyah and Gina blurt out at the same time. Laura rolls her eyes at LaNyah, “I told you this was all your fault.” LaNyah opens and closes her mouth before looking over at a laughing Gina. She can’t believe it. Minding her own business and she became the ultimate pawn in someone’s game of revenge. What is her life?

---

“Babe, stay here with Stacey. Let us handle this.” Alex moves to keep Ashley from coming with them. Kill is on the other side of the room, tying his combat boots while talking on the phone. Stacey is at the conference room table, pulling up floorplans to the warehouse. Alex and Kill changed into dark military fatigues in preparation for the battle zone they are entering.

“Fuck that! I already told you what I would do when it came to LaNyah.” She gets in his face, “I need to be there when you find her! So, don’t you dare try to keep me from being there!” Ashley snatches up another pair of fatigues and pushes past him towards the bathroom, slamming the door. Alex stops short as the door nearly misses hitting him.

Kill finished with his last call, turns towards him. “Green, stop.” Alex walks back over to him, “Just accept the fact that she is coming with us. You can’t stop her, and even I wouldn’t try to stop her.” Kill walks by Matt, who has been untied and snatches him up. “Come on. You got some more talking to do.”

Everyone packs into the fully loaded Chevy Suburban that one of Kill’s connects dropped off after Matt gave them the location for the warehouse where Gina is keeping the girls. Kill throws the keys to Green so he can drive. Bridges jumps into the front passenger seat. Kill drags Matt to the second row of the SUV; he is behind Green, and Matt is behind Bridges.

Once they hit the freeway headed south to San Diego, Kill turns in his seat to look at Matt. Clearing his throat; he waits until Matt’s attention is on him. Matt’s bloodshot eyes make direct contact with Kill. His petrified stare meets Kill’s murderous scowl. Bridges looks back, turning around in her seat to watch what happens between the two.

“I’m only gonna give you one chance to get this right. From the beginning, when you first met Gina and started working for her. GO!”

Matthew sputters to a start, clenching his hands into fists as they sit on his lap. “She didn’t give me all the details at first. All I know is that she was looking for someone to help her bring down Mr. Green. It was no secret that I had gone out for every single special project, and he never picked me. I know he knew who I was, and even my supervisor helped me become a lead analyst so that I would be on his radar. So, it was no love lost on my part to do something to Mr. Green for how he treated me.” Ashley sucks her teeth, “I swear I didn’t know she was after you when I first started.”

“What was her plan for GBI?” Kill asks him.

Directing his answer to Bridges, “She knew you were married to Mr. Green and figured the easiest way to get you was through him and the company. I was supposed to help her embezzle money from various accounts into her offshore accounts. Make sure all roads led back to him, showing that he was stealing from his own company leading to a prison sentence. My supervisor was her first inside man at GBI when she brought me on to begin the embezzlement, and she killed him.”

“So, Alan didn’t just quit as we all thought? Wow,” Green remarked as he listened to the conversation about Gina’s plan to take down him and GBI.

“No, his job was to find someone who had put in some time with the company and disliked you enough to make her plan a reality, then vouch for me. When that was done, so was he.” He starts to hiccup, struggling to get the next part out. “She said he served his purpose and shot him right in front of me. Not even 10 minutes after I met her.” He shudders and breaks eye contact with the group.

“What about LaNyah?” Ashley jumps in to ask. “Why her?”

Running his hand through his hair, “Convenience, I guess.” Matt shrugs and looks up at Ashley who glares at him, “It was supposed to be Stacey. Gina didn’t care who was in that position; she just needed to know that I was checking their work and would be able to change the reports and move the money. I only had been working for her about 6 months when Mr. Green hired Stacey as his assistant, causing a delay in the plan to search for a new fall guy. Once he hired LaNyah, I passed over whatever information I had to Gina, and she told me when we would start.”

Matthew explains that he only had the background check that HR completed on her. So, it contained the information that Gina would have needed to complete a deep dive of LaNyah, similar to what Kill did when he found out he would be working with her. They all knew what that meant, even if he didn’t.

With LaNyah being new and a personal hire by Green, it made her the perfect scapegoat because everything links her position and working for the company to Green. The money starts disappearing after she began working there, and no one would know because he was altering the reports after she completed her weekly data entry reconciling all the accounts her team handled.

“We started skimming money from the Scholarship account about 3 months after LaNyah joined the company. It would be believable since she needed time to learn the system before manipulating it.”

“So, she’s after Bridges and Green? Anyone else?” Kill asks Matt, wondering if he is the one who gave her the information she needed to track him down finally.

Matt’s eyes lift as he thinks about the question. “You know what, I think she might have, but I have no way of knowing. She only tells me what she feels I need to know when it matters.” He briefly pauses, inhaling deeply, “All I know was she asked me to increase the amount of money we were moving about 3 weeks ago. I told her we needed to be careful because I figured out that Mr. Stevens was here auditing the accounting department.”

“How did you know that?” Green speaks up.

“I am supposed to watch LaNyah, too, and noticed she was meeting with you often before your big trip. Then after you were gone, she was always disappearing to the 35th floor to ‘work’ with Stacey on some project. It didn’t make sense to me because she never stays in the office past 6 like the rest of us. But I do recall walking by her office one Friday afternoon, and she was on the ground surrounded by old reports, muttering to herself.” He loosens his tie, “I never thought she would double-check her work, so that could only mean that she may have figured out what was happening. If that was true, then I knew she probably went and told you,” looking at Green, “and Mr. Green must have hired you to look into it.” Kill nodded his head. “When you warned me to back off of her, I wasn’t sure if you worked for Gina. But I would only see you at GBI, so I guessed you were Mr. Green’s man.”

“When did you tell Gina about Erik?” Ashley asks through gritted teeth. He was the only one she could not find from the entire team all these years, and as soon as she finds him, LaNyah goes missing. Matt hasn’t said anything about kidnapping to make her believe that was part of her original plan. She more than likely planned for her to go to prison along with Alex, leaving Ashley by herself.

“About 3 weeks ago, when Gina called me about doubling the funds, I told her about the audit, and I gave her your name since I couldn’t find much about you on my own.” Matt removes the tie from his neck, placing it in his lap. “She screamed about something –” He jumps in his seat, “OMG, it’s you! She’s after you, too! Said something about you being the missing link.”

“Calm down, Matt.” Green rolls his eyes while watching the man panic through the rearview mirror.

“Gina has always scared me, but that call made me even more paranoid than usual. I just wanted to make sure Laura was ok. I made her go and stay with her mother in Bakersfield, 2 months ago.” Twirling the tie in his lap, “I decided to visit her after the call and walked in to find Gina sitting right next to Laura talking shop like this woman wouldn’t have all of us killed with a snap of her fingers.” Tears blur his vision, and Matt’s voice cracks, “Laura knew I was doing some illegal shit behind Mr. Green’s back, so I came clean about what she didn’t know and told her who she just met. Gina called me back that night and told me exactly how much she wanted to move the next time. A week later, I had everything in place to move more than a million from the account.”

“And it takes two weeks before the money moves from the scholarship account. That was what I saw the night before we came back home.” Green states.

Kill closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, “You were right, Green, she was planning to make her move which is why we saw the major movement from the account. She wanted us to notice.” Clenching his fists by his sides, “We just didn’t know that by the time we saw it, she already had LaNyah.”

“Laura and my son,” Matt squeaks out. Everyone looks at him as he breaks down.

---

Gina moves away from Laura on the couch, focus bouncing between the two of them. This is going to be better than she thought. Laura pissed at LaNyah. LaNyah upset about what she just found out; that she is a doll in this game. And yet, she still doesn’t even know how big a part she plays. With loathing, Gina gazes at her.

Turning to the right, now fully facing LaNyah, Gina’s smile morphs. Gina’s voice laced with all the malice she could muster, “You, Miss LaNyah Cole, have a relationship with every single person on my list.” Laura gasps and shrinks back on the couch, glad she is not in her place. Now, she and the baby stand a better chance of making it out of this place alive.

Tearing up, LaNyah whispers out, “What?”

“My brother was accused of sexually assaulting the only female member on his team, Ashley Bridges.” She stands up and walks to the other side of the table, looking down at both of them. “You both would recognize her by her married name, Ashley Green.”

LaNyah squeaks out, “Ashley! What do you want with her?”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, LaNyah, darling. I did not go through all this trouble for Ashley alone.”

“She wants Mr. Green, too, idiot.” Laura huffs out. LaNyah rolls her eyes at her, growing irritated by this whole situation. She didn’t ask to be put in the middle of this. But it seems everyone around her knew something that she didn’t, and that bothers her.

“You want the whole company to go down?” Gina starts slow clapping. LaNyah puts her head in her hands. Of course, she does. It is why she was the perfect patsy. Blame this on the girl who was like the daughter of the two people she held accountable for her brother’s death.

“You are a brilliant woman, Miss Cole.” She walks to her standalone chair and leans against it, “But you are missing the most important thing or person rather. The only person with the skills to kill my brother like that and clean it up so well. A man who, up until a few weeks ago, I only knew by his nickname, Killmonger.” No, no, no, please do not let it be him. LaNyah’s big, confused brown eyes meet steely grey ones, “Mr. Erik Stevens.”

The tears that she was holding back started rolling down her face. LaNyah clutched her chest with both hands while trying to stay seated in the chair. Her breathing was coming out in spurts between her loud sobs. Gina held her hand up to Laura, who was struggling to get up and go to her. She leans over and starts to rub circles into LaNyah’s back. LaNyah flinches at first but just closes her eyes to find something else to focus on to help her breathe.

“I know, sweetheart. It’s hard to find out that the man you like is a stone-cold killer.” LaNyah’s body tenses at her statement. She peeks over at Laura, who has a look of sympathy on her face as she watches LaNyah breaking down at what she learned. Gina closes her eyes as she continues to speak low, still soothing LaNyah with the circles on her back. “He hurt me, too dear. More than you could ever know.”

---

“Did she pay you well for this suicide mission?” Kill demands harshly, Bridges and Green grimly laugh as Matt turns green. “Matthew, you know if we handed you over to her, she would kill you herself. I mean, she did kill the guy you were supposed to replace when she hired you. The money had to be exceptional, right?”

“3 times my annual salary at GBI,” he meekly responds, “and she told me I didn’t have a choice.”

“Let me guess; she threatened to kill you on the spot? Over Alan’s dead body?” Green interjects. Matt just nods his head. They all shake their heads in understanding. It was gonna be him or someone else. But Gina was gonna execute her plan regardless of how many casualties lined the path.

The mood shifts in the SUV as everyone disappears into their thoughts. Ashley is sniffling upfront, swimming in guilt for putting LaNyah in harm’s way. There was no way she knew anyone was coming for her husband or her, but still, Nyah is like her daughter. And in her haste to find LaNyah something to be in control of and help her build a career, Ashley never considered how Nyah working under her husband could lead to such a moment.

Alex looks over at Ashley and grabs her hand, kissing it. “Stop beating yourself up. You could not have known this was gonna happen. We didn’t know McCoy had a twin who would seek vengeance for his death. There is nothing that could have prepared us for any of this. We deal with it now, together as a team. Just like we always have, ok?” Ashley squeezes his hand in response, not trusting her voice at this point.

Kill looks out at the passing fields, controlling his breathing. Gina knows about LaNyah’s connection to Green and Bridges. What else could she know? If Gina is thorough enough to uncover his identity and know that he was involved compared to the rest of the team, then she knows he was the one who killed her brother. She is gunning for him specifically, but she wants to take everyone down – Bridges, who was her brother’s victim; her husband and protector, Green; and their ‘daughter,’ LaNyah. She is using her as bait to bring all three of them to her. No one is supposed to make it out of there alive, except for Gina and her goons.

LaNyah. How is she handling all of this? If he didn’t push her so hard, he could have been watching her like he was supposed to be. Instead, he had hoped his updates from Stacey, as infrequent as those were, would provide him with enough information to know she was doing fine and safe from harm. But this is something else altogether; she was kidnapped in broad daylight by a maniac with no regard for human life. Kill laughs to himself, just like him back then – one goal, one focus, by any means necessary. He runs his hands through his dreads, grateful that he decided to braid them back today. There is no room for any mistakes here and too many lives at risk. It’s LaNyah or bust. He’ll deal with all the other bullshit later.

Snapping his fingers, Bridges and Matt look at him. “You know you’re done, right?” Matt nods, “Good. You’ll serve time in federal prison, but at least you will be alive to meet your son and maybe save your family.”

Matt sighs, “I just wanted to provide for my family. I understand, but I am grateful to be alive.” He glances up at Green catching his eyes in the rearview mirror, “I’m sorry for everything I did to you, sir. To your business and your family, including LaNyah.” Green acknowledges his apology.

Green turns off the road into an industrial complex, leading to Gina’s warehouse. Kill slaps the back of his seat, an old signal from when Green used to drive during other missions. The mission has started, and nothing else matters until they get back into the SUV. Releasing Ashley’s hand, she watches the two of them, Killmonger and Green. The two men who saved her all those years ago are back and ready to do it all over again. She smiles to herself, and they are going to save LaNyah, too.

“You know she’s probably expecting you?” Matt says that like wasn’t the most prominent thought in all of their heads as they approach lot near the warehouse. Everyone was smart enough to keep it to themselves.

“We know.” Green declares.

“And we are ready for her.” The sound of a gun rack sliding catches Matt’s attention, and he looks over to see Kill holding a Glock.

Chapter 12

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#erik killmonger #erik killmonger x oc #black panther fanfiction #the firm #thadelightfulone

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mental-health-advice · 5 years ago

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1/2+ Last night i was home alone & decided to drink. My partner stopped talking to me many hours ago. So I was super lonely. I was happy in general. I started doing shots so after 5 I was a lil drunk. I made a post saying I want you(him). When he saw it literally 1 hr after i posted it he flipped out. -- So he has a hard time accepting that I only want him& it puts pressure everytime I post something. I have no prob reassuring him. But sometimes it becomes an argument. Last night i got depressed

2/2+ I watched my happiness turn so quickly. He always asks a 100x a week if I only want him. It's the same answer. If i post something he assumes its abt him &gets his own feelings hurt. I do love him. But sometimes the overly asking just kills my mood. I get mad& delete everything. It tends to annoy me. No matter how many times i tell him I love him/want only him he still asks. I don't want to leave him either. I just don't know how to handle this. Any advice I'd really appreciate.

Hi there!

Thank you for getting in touch with us here at MHA. This sounds like it must be a tough situation for you to be in, but hopefully, I’ll be able to give you a little advice :)

In my opinion, honesty and communication are the most important parts of a healthy relationship. It sounds like you have a pretty good and open line of communication between the two of you as it is, but I think maybe you need to sit down and have an in-depth conversation about this whole situation. I can see how hard it must be for you to feel like you must always be providing him with reassurance and telling him how much you care for him, but I can also feel how hard it must be for him to feel inside that he isn’t good enough for you and how he requires this reassurance. I think if you can sit down together and both describe your emotions and feelings about this situation, you will both have a better understanding of each other's needs and wants, then you can begin to put actions in place to help both of you out.

If this is something that you want to do, I think it’s important that you are in a neutral environment, one where you both feel at home, somewhere that you aren’t going to be interrupted and can focus on each other. If saying it out loud is going to be really hard, maybe you could even both try writing a letter to each other describing everything? Just an idea.

Another option is to introduce another person into the equation to help you discuss how you are feeling. That could be a friend or family member who can help you both express yourselves. Or if you feel like this is something that is really damaging your relationship, you could look into specific couples therapy, so a completely neutral professional can help you work through this situation and the problems that may be underlying it. I am just going to link our page about getting help here in case there are any further details you want to look at regarding the process.

I do think that it is important to remember to look after your own mental health in this case - if you are finding yourself struggling with declining mental health, please consider reaching out for some support to take care of just yourself, and it’s okay if you need to ask your boyfriend to step back a bit so you can focus on yourself. I understand that you don’t want to leave him, and I can tell that you care deeply for him, but maybe a little break would be good for you both? This is something that I cannot decide for you, you would have to discuss this together, but I am just putting the idea out there. Remember to practise lots of self-care, like running yourself a nice long bubble bath, spending time with your friends, etc!

If there is anything else that we can help you with, please feel free to get in touch again and one of our lovely admins, or I, will get back to you as soon as we can. Sending lots of positive vibes your way! Take care,

Rhiann xo

#mha #advice #advice blog #mental health advice #mental health blog #mharhiann #relationship problems #relationships #talking to a professional #communication problems #needing reassurance #depression mention #self care

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meditativeyoga · 5 years ago

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5 Lessons from flowers

As I sit below creating, wintertime has well and also really finished as well as spring impends. I have actually just been out for a stroll and also the proof of a brand-new season is plentiful: cows in the fields with their young calves, cozy early morning sunshine, the have to wear one much less layer of outside apparel [hooray!] and also flowers.

There are beautiful spring blossoms around the countryside where I live. It's nearly as if one minute there was no indication of them and afterwards suddenly they showed up in their uplifting splendor. My eyes are honored with a swathe of intense yellow, cream and purple petals. Some are wild blossoms, some have been actively planted however they are all beautiful.

And this obtained me thinking. We can learn so a lot from nature and blossoms are no exemption. Inspired by Voltaire's viewpoint and jazzed up by this jump ahead in nature, what lessons can we gather from blossoms about living a better, much more favorable life?

1. Be part of a network

Many research studies recommend that social partnerships can have a plethora of advantages. From lowering our vulnerability to minor disorders such as colds to expanding our long life, social contact is considered to be exceptionally powerful.

In our active lives, it's very easy to be drawn into working hard for long hrs and for social or family members time to fall to all-time low of the list.

Flowers become part of an important network which keeps the globe of nature switching. They attract bees as well as various other pets to them who help the pollination process that then makes certain the spread of a new generation of seeds and also seed startings. Blossoms offer nourishment for a whole host of animals consisting of bats, primates, ants, butterflies and also beetles.

We might not constantly feel like it, but we as well each have something unique and unique to offer the world. It may be appealing to close ourselves away on darker days yet we could not exist alone forever.

Although others might appear different to us [We could not share the same values] we are all still component of the very same environment and also we depend upon each other for our wellness as well as survival.

Pick up the phone, speak to your neighbor, or set up to fulfill a good friend or relative for supper, and volunteer in your area. The 'to do' heap will certainly always be there yet those that are special to us may not. Discover a means to attach with a person today.

2. Don't give up

Think of a seed or a bulb grown in late autumn or very early springtime. From this minute, the seed's goal is to become a blossom which is rooted and active. Usually, seeds will certainly need to sustain modifications in soil temperature level, variations in the quantity of wetness they obtain and also pets aiming to dig them up as food. They persevere and they emerge.

It could be extremely alluring to believe that if we aren't presented with the exact conditions we think we need to do well at something that we simply won't do well. This does not need to be the case.

Whatever you're attempting to carry out in life, you have actually already begun to be effective by beginning action one: trying.

From below on, assume of on your own as an arising plant. Do not provide up and, like an arising flower, want to adapt to your transforming circumstances.

Think of a plant expanding on the smallest patch of dirt arising from a split in concrete. Although not an 'ideal' atmosphere, the seed makes exactly what it can of it nonetheless.

3. Enjoy the sunshine

All frequently, we hurry about in life [ myself consisted of] and also are as well preoccupied to appreciate the magnificence of days.

Flowers open their petals when the sunlight is shining as well as bask in the sunlight's warmth. All points need power to expand. Plants utilize the sun's light to photosynthesise and also produce food.

Whilst we consume food to physically sustain our energy levels, we likewise need to ensure that our emotional health is cared for. Stopping briefly to enjoy the sunshine, whether it's warm outside or not, is an action in living life as opposed to just enduring it.

When I was strolling earlier, although I had set myself a 'time frame', I enabled myself to quit and observe a couple of points as I trundled down the lanes. Because this was an adjustment in the speed of my day, it felt good. In those minutes, I was really existing and engaged with myself and my surroundings.

Every day is a present - attempt to take a look at just what you can value in each one.

4. Take time to rest

Have you ever noticed that some blossoms close their petals at evening? There appear to be a number of concepts for this. It isn't assumed that these flowers are sleeping yet that they may be preserving power as well as safeguarding their pollen up until the day time. This method, they could gain from pollination during daylight hrs when most pests are active.

Whilst we are captured up in our every day lives, we could not permit ourselves time for a great evening's rest not to mentioned take a five-minute break throughout the day. Our bodies need time to heal as well as repair literally which they do when we are sleeping. And also, our mind as well as emotions need a break too.

Even a min's repose could be helpful. I have actually just recently started to train to teach Tai Chi Movements for Wellness and also, as component of this, carry out day-to-day practise. Occasionally I take care of twenty mins as well as often I manage one.

When you believe about it, one minute (and even five) from your day is nothing. Have no idea where to start? Try resting on a chair as well as shutting your eyes - established a timer if you believe you may maintain inspecting the clock. Take a breath slowly and deeply as well as concentrate on the in and out breath, keeping your body as unwinded as possible.

A short walk, a couple of mins paying attention to songs, extending, taking a snooze, playing your preferred musical instrument, writing a journal or vocal singing are just several of the means to take a break. Do whatever you delight in as well as what benefit you.

5. Be elegant as your blossoms change

To paraphrase an old Greek Thinker, Herakleitos is thought to have claimed that the only constant in life is change.

I locate that this is a valuable ideology due to the fact that modification appears to be among the hardest concepts for us as people to approve. Like us, flowers pass via phases of change, from seedling to plant. There are times when they move exterior to bloom and also times when they relocate inward to rest as well as revitalize. Their lives may be temporary yet they could still be purposeful and lively in those moments.

Try not to get captured up in trying to hold into the past. Each moment is a moment of your life, your existence. Live your life now.

#Yoga #Yoga Weight Loss

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premk-blog · 4 years ago

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The power of culture: How to hire and attract amazing people

Before Amazon bought Zappos.com for $1.2 billion, the online shoe retailer was already known for two things: exceptional customer service and a vibrant company culture.

As CEO Tony Hsieh once said, “Zappos is a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes.”

Zappos empowers its call center staff to make emotional connections and to wow their customers in every interaction. That explains the service-driven reputation. But how do you create a strong, healthy culture — especially as your company grows?

Well, Zappos defined 10 core values that guide the whole organization. It’s their hiring process, though, that really stands out.

Zappos has two different interview types. The first explores the candidate’s abilities, experience, and team fit. The usual stuff.

Next, the HR department does another round, purely to evaluate culture fit. As Hsieh told Forbes back in 2010, you have to pass both interview types to get the job:

“We’ve rejected many talented people who we know would have made an immediate impact on our top or bottom line. Because culture is our number one priority, we’re willing to give up short-term profits or revenue growth to make sure we have the best culture. In fact, after orientation we offer people $2,000 not to work at Zappos. The ones who stay are right for our culture.”

Also, when an applicant flies in for an interview, the company sends a shuttle to the airport. Zappos leaders will later ask the driver if the person was nice, or if they were rude or standoffish.

No matter how talented the candidate, rude people never make the cut. Talk about living your culture — and your values.

Ambitious companies attract ambitious people

“Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield.”

- Marcus Buckingham, author and business consultant

It starts at the roots. Whether you’re selling airline tickets, eyeglasses, software, or burritos, you need to have a great product.

After all, talented people want to work in organizations that make an impact. They want to change the world — even just a little. And there are many ways to become world class.

There’s a terrific restaurant near our office that changes its menu every month. If you’re an ambitious, creative chef who’s hungry to learn, this is where you want to land.

Even if you provide a “boring” product (like, ahem ahem, web forms), your approach could make it an amazing place to work.

“If you are lucky enough to be someone’s employer, then you have a moral obligation to make sure people do look forward to coming to work in the morning.”

- John Mackey, CEO, Whole Foods

Culture can be a major asset. It helps you to attract top-notch people and encourages them to stay for the long run.

1. Ensure a comfortable work environment

Make sure your office is a place you and your team want to spend time in, even if it’s small. Equip staff with powerful technology, up-to-date equipment, and all the tools they need to work safely and efficiently. Free drinks and snacks don’t hurt (but you don’t need the ping-pong table). All these details are also cheap to provide, relative to employee salaries. Don’t cut corners on your most valuable asset.

2. Always choose positive, collaborative people

I know it might sound simple, but having smart, friendly, talented, positive people lays the foundation for your culture. Good people attract more good people, and you’re also promoting an inspiring work environment. Nothing will send people running for the door faster than a culture of infighting, gossip, and petty competition.

Leverage good word-of-mouth

You’re scrolling through Instagram. In one post, your friend tags a hotel they love. The next post is a sponsored ad for a competing hotel brand.

Which are you more likely to remember and try for yourself?

Real endorsements from our network are powerful. If you love your job, company, or work environment, you’re likely to tell friends and family.

We post our job openings on LinkedIn and online job boards. We’ve also used head-hunters for leadership positions. But nothing works better than word-of-mouth.

When valued employees refer their friends and former colleagues, we pay close attention. These are often our best candidates.

Interview efficiently and decide quickly:

According to a recruiting survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, employers hiring new college graduates take, on average, two weeks to make a job offer after an interview.

Beyond new graduates, author and HR expert Liz Ryan says companies should never take more than 3–4 business days to contact or share feedback with candidates after an interview.

Often, we call the candidate as they’re walking to their car — right after the interview.

If you don’t move fast, there’s a good chance someone else will snap up a great employee. Forget about waiting periods or outdated rules and do it your way.

How is it possible to move so quickly?

Well, we believe in having all the decision makers in the room. Everyone has the chance to observe and ask questions.

After the interview, we have a five-minute discussion. If it’s a long debate, the person is probably not right. But a quick, easy consensus usually means that we’ve found a great fit.

Hire for skills and knowledge:

Knowledge and skills are not the same.

Whatever position you’re hiring for, ask the candidate to perform a hands-on task. Over the years, we’ve encountered both “developers” who can’t actually code and dark horses who performed far beyond our expectations.

It’s equally important to talk with the applicant about their chosen field. Can you have an intelligent discussion? Do their ideas and arguments make sense?

Sometimes, people speak in buzzwords but they don’t have real knowledge. They’ve just memorized headlines and jargon.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of balance. Candidates need to have some real skills (and that level will vary by position), but the right person can also acquire what they’re missing.

The same goes for knowledge. Young employees will gain deeper expertise over time, but if they’re truly interested in the topic, they will already have opinions about marketing or data science or design.

One more note: Watch for people with side projects. If a developer has their own app, for example, that’s a great sign. It means they’re ambitious and engaged.

In different fields, this could also be a blog, a podcast, a passion for reading, participation in a professional group, or taking extra classes and workshops.

“Leadership is absolutely about inspiring action, but it is also about guarding against mis-action.”

- Simon Sinek, author, speaker and marketing consultant

Company culture is like the infinity symbol, or the old chicken-or-the-egg dilemma.

Which comes first: great people who establish a healthy culture, or a healthy culture that attracts great people?

Answer: it doesn’t matter.

People talk about culture as a static entity, but it’s constantly changing. Culture also has its own equilibrium. Sometimes it evolves for the better, and sometimes it needs to be nudged in a better direction.

Internal culture is a topic that can easily fill entire books, but here are my top lessons.

Culture changes as you grow

Our first 10 employees were men. That wasn’t my intention. It just happened, but then I learned about this mistake and realized we needed to attract more women. As the balance (happily) shifted, our company became more professional, just to name one improvement. Change made us stronger. These are the kind of culture shifts that organizations should always embrace.

People influence the culture

Let your staff contribute. Our small, cross-functional teams naturally develop their own cultures — and that’s a good thing. They enrich our entire company and make more interesting and diverse place to work.

Don’t enable incongruent behavior

Just as Zappos measured candidates’ humility and openness by talking to their shuttle drivers, it’s important to weed out both people and actions that don’t match your values.

For example, we care deeply about our users and we take responsibility when they make mistakes.

One day, we were watching a usability test, and an employee joked that the user was stupid. I realized that I had to immediately change the narrative, without publicly chastising the employee.

I told the team that we should assume people are busy and overwhelmed. That’s why our goal is to make a simple, incredibly easy-to-use product.

If we had all laughed, other team members would have assumed that it’s okay to mock our users — and that doesn’t align with our values or our culture.

“A company’s culture is the foundation for future innovation. An entrepreneur’s job is to build the foundation.”

- Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb

While I’ve never offered someone thousands of dollars NOT to take a job, we do believe in humility and we reward learning. I’ll also share a little secret.

Every intern — whether they’re studying programming, marketing, UI, design, or business — spends their first week answering customer support questions.

Throughout this process, they are being rated; not just on their skills, but also on how they listen and treat our customers.

Sometimes, they think support work is beneath them. That attitude overshadows their skills and their knowledge.

And those interns will never have a seat in our company.

#recruitment #jobs hiring

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rylanzvpi535 · 4 years ago

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15 Vidéos Hilarantes à Propos De Reveil Nocturne Bebe

These are typically problems that a lot of new mothers and fathers wrestle with. Since the indicating goes: "Anyone who suggests they sleep like a child never ever had just one." I keep in mind my worries with my 1st Kid's snooze complications. Throughout the initially calendar year, it absolutely was rare which i bought even three-4 hrs of uninterrupted snooze!

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Pros

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As being a spouse and children therapist and also a seasoned parent, I do know we are inclined to around-Believe our parenting conclusions. Do not forget that irrespective of which way you end up picking, be confident that if make your parenting choices thoughtfully, you will do a very good work in increasing your child. A caring, considering, insightful mum or dad like you will very likely end up with a healthy, joyful baby. And one which sleeps in the night time. Eventually.

As the guardian of the new child, it's possible you'll start to question when your toddler will start sleeping in the night time. This can be the result of your individual sleep deprivation and desperation to at last get some slumber during the night time, or you could begin to experience strain from Those people around you who say that toddler must be sleeping from the night at a certain age. The reality is, Every single child differs and there are numerous variables that contribute to how often infant wakes at nighttime.

Despite Everything you've listened to, not all infants will slumber in the night at a certain age. There are several things that may keep a infant waking up during the night and each aspect really should be dealt with and remedied separately. You might need to simply feed and rock little one slightly excess during these instances, recognizing that they are short term conditions. Most of all, take into account that The dearth of sleep would not previous for good and infants start to sleep extended the older they get.

youtube

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kevindurkiin · 5 years ago

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Paradigm Establishes $1.1M Employee Relief Fund After Layoffs

Nearly three weeks after laying off around 100 employees in light of this COVID-19 pandemic, and Paradigm has responded to harsh criticisms by establishing a $1.1M employee relief fund. It also follows a $2 million wrongful termination suit against the agency, chairman and CEO Sam Gores by former agent Debbee Klein.

In a company wide letter from Gores, he announced to the employees who were laid off, who from the beginning were told they would be hired back when possible, would have their healthcare covered through June. Gores also announced he is forgoing the remainder of his salary for 2020 – adding that he would continue to do so “beyond if necessary.”

Gores’ full letter to the agency is below.

Dear Colleagues,

I am committed to improving our flow of communication as we weather this uncertain time. The difficult and urgent actions we took on March 20th were the hardest of my 37-year career.

Paradigm’s great strength is its enormously talented staff. It always has been and always will be. The vital and significant actions we took, though necessary for the health of the company, were hard and painful. And while immediate action was required, I realize that the way the message was conveyed to you lacked compassion and made you feel alienated from Paradigm.

You are part of this team because we believe in your talent, and we hope that you will be the people who will help build Paradigm’s future after the COVID crisis. From the beginning, we have considered these layoffs temporary and it bears repeating that our intention is to bring as many of you back as possible.

Over the past weeks, we have been working to mitigate the effects of these temporary layoffs and provide extended benefits, comfort, and assistance as we prepare for this pandemic to end and go back to work as a community at the agency I’m proud to call my home.

• Paradigm has established a $1.1M Employee Relief Fund to provide additional support of our temporarily laid off employees. We will have further details regarding this fund on or before Friday, April 10.

• Your health care coverage has been extended through the end of June and we will continue to monitor the situation closely.

• Your Human Resources Team is available seven days a week to answer any questions you may have on benefits coverage including access to Telehealth options and our Employee Assistance Program (“EAP”). [HR info redacted]

• Our intention is to support you as a member of the Paradigm family. Our desire is to help our teams and help you maintain your books of business. If you have any questions regarding the structure that has been put in place to support agents and their team members who have been temporarily laid off, please contact your office leader or department head.

The coronavirus has affected almost every business in the world and certainly our industry. When months of film and television productions, concerts, tours, and festivals were cancelled or postponed overnight, every aspect of our business was dramatically impacted. I thought you’d like to know about several actions Paradigm has taken to ensure that the company remains on solid ground.

• Paradigm has secured interim financing that will provide a bridge through this global crisis.

• Paradigm has signed a new franchise agreement with the Writers Guild of America, allowing the agency to resume representation of its WGA-represented film and TV writer clients. Paradigm is the first major talent agency engaged in television packaging to sign a new franchise agreement with the WGA. This is a huge step forward in a situation that stretches back almost two years. In signing the agreement, it enables our literary agents to re-sign our writer clients and get them back to work.

• I have forgone my salary for the remainder of 2020, and beyond if necessary.

• Like all other agencies industry wide, staff above Coordinator level are working at reduced wages until business picks up again.

I am deeply sorry about the financial impact this crisis has had on so many of our colleagues, friends, and families as we confront one of the most urgent health and economic challenges of the modern era.

I’ll contact you again on or before Friday with more information about the Employee Relief Fund. Stay safe, stay well, and we’ll continue to be in touch and keep you informed regarding our efforts on your behalf.

Warmly and with great respect,

Sam Gores, Chairman & CEO

via Hollywood Reporter

This article was first published on Your EDM. Source: Paradigm Establishes $1.1M Employee Relief Fund After Layoffs

Paradigm Establishes $1.1M Employee Relief Fund After Layoffs published first on https://soundwizreview.tumblr.com/

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bestdjkit · 5 years ago

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Paradigm Establishes $1.1M Employee Relief Fund After Layoffs

Gores’ full letter to the agency is below.

Dear Colleagues,

I am committed to improving our flow of communication as we weather this uncertain time. The difficult and urgent actions we took on March 20th were the hardest of my 37-year career.

• Your health care coverage has been extended through the end of June and we will continue to monitor the situation closely.

• Paradigm has secured interim financing that will provide a bridge through this global crisis.

• I have forgone my salary for the remainder of 2020, and beyond if necessary.

• Like all other agencies industry wide, staff above Coordinator level are working at reduced wages until business picks up again.

Warmly and with great respect,

Sam Gores, Chairman & CEO

via Hollywood Reporter

This article was first published on Your EDM. Source: Paradigm Establishes $1.1M Employee Relief Fund After Layoffs

from Best DJ Kit https://www.youredm.com/2020/04/09/paradigm-establishes-1-1m-employee-relief-fund-after-layoffs/

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bluebuzzmusic · 5 years ago

Text

Paradigm Establishes $1.1M Employee Relief Fund After Layoffs

Gores’ full letter to the agency is below.

Dear Colleagues,

I am committed to improving our flow of communication as we weather this uncertain time. The difficult and urgent actions we took on March 20th were the hardest of my 37-year career.

• Your health care coverage has been extended through the end of June and we will continue to monitor the situation closely.

• Paradigm has secured interim financing that will provide a bridge through this global crisis.

• I have forgone my salary for the remainder of 2020, and beyond if necessary.

• Like all other agencies industry wide, staff above Coordinator level are working at reduced wages until business picks up again.

Warmly and with great respect,

Sam Gores, Chairman & CEO

via Hollywood Reporter

This article was first published on Your EDM. Source: Paradigm Establishes $1.1M Employee Relief Fund After Layoffs

source https://www.youredm.com/2020/04/09/paradigm-establishes-1-1m-employee-relief-fund-after-layoffs/

#edm #music #music production #music news #edm news

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strategicpause · 5 years ago

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What is your level of People Management Engagement?

Very roughly, there are four levels of engagement in people management. As you grow as a people manager and team builder, I submit that you should be striving to increase/deepen your level of engagement. Let’s get to it.

Hands-off (Level 0)

In my experience, when someone declares themselves a “hands-off manager”, it is a rationalization for not putting the people management effort forth. Yes, being “hands-off” makes sense for direct reports who are highly motivated and highly skilled. That would be delegation. But, it does not make sense as a default approach. As a result, I call it “Level 0” for no credit given. I refuse to even list it on the picture for the post. On this level, direct reports do not think much of their manager. Attrition is well above normal. If senior management understands leadership on any level, they will move the people manager out.

Mutual Respect (Level 1)

On the Mutual Respect level, you are likely transactional. You are clearly managing work queues and work is getting done.

You may have even built a strong working group, but it is not a “team”. You have a professional relationship with your direct reports. You check all the HR boxes. When moments of truth hit, you have to make clear assignments and be deeply involved in the resolution until the end. Team attrition is average.

Empathy (Level 2)

On the Empathy level, you have situational awareness. You and your team know which assignments are important and which are less important. You know how close to capacity your team’s work queues are. You have a good sense of your team’s and each member of your team’s core strengths and weaknesses. You have regular professional development and performance evaluation conversations. You have a one-on-one relationship with each member of your team. You team is a “team” versus a working group. When a critical “can’t mess it up” assignment comes in, you know who on your team are your stars to be assigned. In moments of truth, most of your team is willing to help, but you still need to be engaged on a leadership level. But, you are in good shape. Team attrition is below average. Your team appreciates you as a manager and is not afraid to tell others.

Caring (Level 3)

On the Caring level, you are a servant leader. You view your role as empowering and aligning each member of your team. Your people are always your #1 priority. You know them personally well beyond their core strengths and weaknesses. You view it as your job to get them promoted and/or help them fulfill their individual potential. You know their family on some level and they know your family on some level. There is no doubt in your team’s mind that you care about them. In moments of truth, your team will volunteer to do whatever it takes. Negative moments of truth may not even happen because your team anticipated and proactively remediated any issues. Team attrition is way below average. In fact, your team actively recruits others to join the team. When members leave the team, there is a good chance they will seek to return at some point.

So, which level of people management engagement are you delivering? Where would your team say you are performing? Where are you falling down? Are you striving to advance to the next level?

—

#leadership #management #Empowerment

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joannawoo · 6 years ago

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What is HR really?

Industry 4.0, Business 4.0, whatever you want to call it. That's the new buzzword popping up everywhere. If business is changing so much, why isn't HR keeping up? At most, we're maybe at HR 2.5. HR 1.0 was when policies and procedures were brought in along with unions to make sure we didn't put our employees in danger and paid them just enough so they wouldn't want to burn the business down. HR 2.0 was maybe when we actually started to care about people a little bit more. The 2.5 part is now adding in diversity and minimal analytics. When are we going to get to HR 4.0?

People always think that HR is there to protect the company, not the people. I don't see why HR can't do both. Protecting the company IS protecting the people. Fundamentally at my core, I care about people. Because I care, I will do whatever I can to ensure that the business has sustainable growth year over year. This is important because a healthy business means that more jobs get created with minimal layoffs. Several companies in the region have gone through layoffs recently and hundreds of lives have now been impacted.

So what does HR 4.0 look like? Actually, let's start with HR 3.0 because a lot of businesses aren't even there yet. HR 3.0 is where you care deeply about people and help them grow. Enable them to exceed your expectations. Apply tech design and development practices into HR. Run HR as a business. With HR 4.0, it's mostly figuring out how to balance between technology and human, and running HR as a profitable business. So what does all of this look like in practice?

I wrote an article years ago about applying software design and development principles to HR. This was back in 2015 and sadly the site that hosted the article is no longer around so I can't pull it up but the piece to take away is that when faced with an HR problem, tackle it like a product problem. Analyze the situation, gather information and do research, brainstorm solutions, build the solution, gather feedback and validate that it solves the problem, and iterate. If your recruitment process isn't getting the results you want, run a retro to figure out what you're doing wrong. Too much on your plate? Do some backlog grooming, figure out what will deliver most value with least amount of effort, do some sprint planning. Start talking to your employees and figure out what they want to do in life. When that opportunity comes up, reach out to them. Stop misusing data. Applicant tracking systems love to track "source of hire". You see that 50% of your employees are from Source X, and only 1% of employees from Source Y, so naturally people come to the conclusion that they need to talk to more Source X people. THAT'S WRONG. Plot your source of hire data against employee performance. Don't just settle for where all your employees come from, figure out where your top performers come from. If all your top performers are from Source Y, then your job is to figure out how to increase that 1%. And if you think "top performer" is only defined by one thing, that's wrong too. It's a combination of productivity, impact to company culture, impact on coworker productivity, potential for growth...the list goes on. Stop being so one dimensional. This is all still HR 3.0.

I don't think too many companies are doing HR 4.0. I know I'm not there yet because I don't have the expertise or capacity to run analytics on certain things. Google's probably the opposite where they've got the analytics and tech piece, but don't have the human side. Let's talk about the easy part first which would be the analytics. We need to start doing more industrial/organizational psychology research to study employees in the workplace. We also need to hire more data scientists into HR to help analyze this data. Humans are so complex. Issues are so divisive nowadays and as a society, more and more people are suffering from mental health issues. Most of the research done was from decades ago. Have we really studied workers in today's world? We've evolved, yet our research has not. I'll use job postings as an example of all the analytics that could be done on an important, but very small piece of HR in the grand scheme. We should be doing tests on what information to include (or not) in job postings, how it affects application rates and quality of candidates, what the length of the job posting should be, different methods of application and what barriers are being created, when to post the job posting, where to post it, do you change the format and content based on where it's posted...that's just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to sourcing, testing out different reach out messages, how/when to contact a candidate, etc. If it's a junior candidate, how long after they start a new job do you wait before you poach? What if they're an intermediate/senior candidate? Have you studied turnover rates and timing of turnover for certain companies? Then you have the rest of recruitment which is actually so much important than the 2 I just mentioned. And "recruitment" is just 1 of 9 of the mandatory HR courses to take. So think about how much there actually is to know and analyze when it comes to HR. Let that sink in.

Now let's talk about the hard part. How do we balance all the analytics with the human-ness of HR? What is actually the human side of HR and what does it look like? I share so many ideas of how to balance between business and people. Let's start by picking on unlimited vacation. Companies sometimes use this as a tactic to get their employees to take less vacation. That's what the analytics show. It's great for PR, people take less vacation, for a company that wants to take advantage of employees, it's a no brainer to implement this (at an org that has employees that already care about the company). So then if you knew that's what the analytics said and you truly believe the other studies that show employees perform better when they're well rested and feel taken care of, along with the studies that show that underrepresented groups usually take less vacation than their peers because they feel the need to "prove themselves" and to appear hardworking...then maybe HR would change those policies. There are definitely ways to make unlimited vacation less intimidating, usually by implementing a minimum vacation policy and letting people know that on average, people take x number of weeks of vacation, but we've also seen as high as y weeks and that's absolutely fine too, can't even remember who the employee was. Could also monitor vacation time to make sure that there aren't certain groups who tend to take less vacation than everyone else. But really...the better solution is just to get rid of unlimited vacation and give everyone 6 weeks. Typically, people don't take 6 weeks. It's seen as over and above "unlimited". To balance the business though and to ensure that you don't get stuck with millions of dollars of vacation liability, have it only accrue up to 3 weeks and it stops accruing until you actually use up certain days. This way, payout is never more than 3 weeks and employees will be using up vacation throughout the year and getting some breaks in instead of waiting until the end of the year or worse, when they burn out. Next, let's talk about catered meals. Companies sometimes implement it because they think that way it'll save time for employees and they can then spend that time working instead and it's a cost savings overall for the company. The pitch is that we cater lunches though which is a draw for people...FREE LUNCH! (There is no free lunch in life as my dad always says.) It's a taxable benefit, it's usually not the healthiest meal, there are food allergies or preferences not considered, employees complain about the food options, etc. For any company who truly believes that they want to improve lives of employees and offer them a good healthy meal at work, why not bring in fresh groceries and have a meal prep station at work? It doesn't need to be a full kitchen (but that'd be super nice!), but have some way of cooking meals at work. This way, employees choose what food they want to eat and you're helping them build life skills and teaching them how to cook. The analytics part? Have you ever considered how many people are becoming complacent at your place of work because of these perks or the golden handcuffs you've placed on them? Are they still passionate about their jobs or are they only there for the free lunch? Don't even get me started on catered dinner. People should be going home to their families for dinner, not stick around until a certain time just to get a "free meal" out of it. Look into the analytics of how a strong social network and family life outside of work can affect someone's job performance. This is why I have always believed that we need to do whatever we can to help people be successful outside of work. Whenever a new father tells me that him and his partner are expecting, yes I'll go through all the parental stuff with him, but I also tell him these are the entitlements his spouse is eligible for at their place of work, and advise him on how to best support his partner through this, and if his partner decides to take time off work to later transition back in, how to help with that transition. I help employees' friends and family members find jobs, because I believe that if a company truly cares about an employee, they'll also care about that employee's extended network. Think about the studies that talk about how personal lives can affect performance at work. If a company can do more to help people remove stressors from their personal lives as well, then that employee will have so much more positive energy to put into their work. Salary negotiations, most people hate these. If a company actually cared, they'd pay their employees as much as they can that is fair before the employee has to ask for it. When people have to ask, it taxes that relationship. People like to be recognized and should be paid what they're worth. Just because someone is an inexperienced negotiator doesn't mean they're inexperienced at their job (unless you're a lawyer maybe? or a salesperson?). Why not just be transparent with salary all the time? I find that it's usually an easy conversation for me in terms of, this is what I think you could be making anywhere else based on your skills, but this is the money we have right now. Or I don't think your skills are there yet, here are some goals for you to meet before you can get this salary. If a candidate gives you a salary expectation lower than your actual range, do you really think you can just go with their number and get away with it? People will talk. That employee will find out that they lowballed themselves and then they'll resent you and just leave for another company. Is it really worth it when you think about all the money you'll now need to spend to backfill the role and retrain someone? Look at the costs of onboarding. There's your analytics piece and now figure out how you can treat people like humans first of all and then secondly as adults so that they don't leave your organization and will also give you 100% of themselves at work. Let's be realistic here, most companies only get about 40-60% of their employees' focus/performance potential.

I could probably go on forever about what HR 4.0 looks like, considering I've spent the last 72 hours (on and off) writing this. FFS just treat people better and get some data to back up why you should treat people better. I do what I do because I believe that's how you help grow a business; you start by growing the people. When you do a good job at taking care of the people, the people will take care of the business.

P.S. I've had so many people thank me for doing what I've been doing lately with the layoff stuff, telling me how they've never met anyone who cared so much...stop thanking me. This is what being a good human being means and what we should all be doing. Again, I'm not particularly kind. I'm just trying to be a good person and ideally, this is what an average person should look like and the things I talked about above are what every average company should be doing. Let's create change together.

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lindsaynsmith · 6 years ago

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Inside Rockstar Games' Culture Of Crunch

Inside Rockstar Games' Culture Of Crunch https://ift.tt/2Ra7RtQ

Red Dead Redemption 2, the next game from Rockstar, will be out on October 26.

In the final year of development on Red Dead Redemption 2, the upcoming Western game, the top directors decided to add black bars to the top and bottom of every non-interactive cutscene in hopes of making those scenes feel more cinematic, like an old-school cowboy film. Everyone agreed it was the right creative move, but there was a catch: It would add weeks of work to many people’s schedules.

“You can’t just slap black bars on the cinematics we’ve already shot,” said one person who worked on the game. “You have to reframe the camera so that the cinematics flow in a particular way, and you’re emphasizing what you weren’t emphasizing initially with that shot.”

With no hope of delaying the game any further—Red Dead Redemption 2 had already been bumped internally before it was announced, then publicly delayed twice—there was no way for the developers at Rockstar Games to add more time to their schedule. Instead, they would have to crunch, putting in extra nights and weekends in order to redo these scenes and deal with the rest of the massive workload that was ahead of them. Would the black bars prove to be worth it?

This has been a common occurrence in the last years of development on a Rockstar game. Dan and Sam Houser, the co-founders of Rockstar and creative leads on Red Dead Redemption 2, are renowned for rebooting, overhauling, and discarding large chunks of their games. Through eight years of development on Red Dead Redemption 2, the Housers and other directors have made a number of major changes to the story, the core gameplay mechanics, and the game’s overall presentation. It’s a process that some see as essential for making a game of this nature, but it’s also one that leads to a great deal of overtime, and has contributed to a culture of crunch at Rockstar Games that is impossible to deny, according to interviews with dozens of current and former employees. This isn’t crunch that came in a burst of a few weeks—it’s crunch that, those employees say, has lasted for months or even years.

Two Sundays ago, a glowing article in New York Magazine about the making of Red Dead Redemption 2 ignited controversy thanks to a quote, left unexamined and unexplained, in which Dan Houser described working “100-hour weeks” to get the game out the door. The following Monday, Houser said in an e-mailed statement to Kotaku that he was only referring to the writing team and only for a period of three weeks. On Wednesday the company lifted its social media policies, allowing employees to share thoughts on their own experiences with crunch.

The article and its fallout have led to widespread industry discussion of crunch and plenty of questions about work conditions at Rockstar. Does the company behind Grand Theft Auto V, the most lucrative video game of all time, overwork its employees? How much unpaid overtime went into Red Dead Redemption 2? Is crunch required to make games with the scope and scale of Red Dead Redemption and its sequel, which comes out on Friday and is likely to be a massive commercial success? What is Rockstar’s culture really like?

This account, a peek inside one of the most secretive companies in gaming, is based on interviews with 34 current and 43 former employees, over phone calls and e-mails and texts. Last Wednesday, Rockstar told current employees that they were allowed to speak to journalists (so long as they gave HR a heads up), but almost all of the people who spoke to me for this story requested anonymity. Some said they feared retaliation for being candid about their negative experiences at Rockstar, and some said they were worried about coming across as dishonest for sharing positive stories.

In addition, Rockstar provided us interviews with 12 current employees over group video chats as well as its head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, who oversees all of Rockstar’s studios.

The tale of Red Dead Redemption 2’s development is complicated and sometimes contradictory. For some people at Rockstar, it was a satisfying project, an ambitious game that took reasonable hours and far less crunch than the company’s previous games. Many current employees say they’re happy to work at Rockstar and love being able to help make some of the best games in the world. Others described Red Dead 2 as a difficult experience, one that cost them friendships, family time, and mental health. Nobody interviewed said they had worked 100-hour weeks—that would equate to seven 14-hour days—but many said their average weekly hours came close to 55 or 60, which would make for six 10-hour days. Most current and former Rockstar employees said they had been asked or felt compelled to work nights and weekends. Some were on hourly contracts and got paid for overtime, but many were salaried and did not receive any compensation for their extra hours. Those who are still at the company hope that their 2018 bonuses—expected to be significant if Red Dead 2 does well—will help make up for that.

Many of the most harrowing stories shared by current and former employees—anecdotes of damaged relationships, mental breakdowns, and heavy drinking at work—were impossible to print without risking that the individuals involved might be identified. Given Rockstar’s complex non-disclosure agreements and possible repercussions for violating them, we erred on the side of being as cautious as possible in this piece, which meant leaving out some of the roughest details we’d heard.

Rockstar consists of thousands of people in eight offices across five countries, so it’s no surprise that its employees would have a wide variety of experiences. Last week, Rockstar shared several statistics with Kotaku and other outlets, including the average reported weekly hours across all of its offices from January to September of this year. From January through March 2018, according to those statistics, Rockstar employees worked an average of 42.4 hours. From April through June, they hit 45.5 hours. And from July through September, 45.8 hours. The averages include people from all disciplines and working on all of the company’s projects, which helps explain the discrepancy between those numbers and the anecdotes we’ve heard. People whose work on Red Dead Redemption 2 was finished earlier, or who were working on different projects (like Grand Theft Auto Online) that weren’t in heavy crunch mode this year, may have worked far fewer hours. Those who have worked on Red Dead Redemption 2 describe the cinematics team, the design team, and especially the quality assurance team as facing some of the worst crunch.

In an e-mail on Monday, Kolbe offered another explanation for the discrepancy, saying that the “averages for Red Dead only would not be meaningfully different” and that days off were actually included in those averages, although weeks off were not. “However, the explanation for the discrepancy between the cross-company data and the individual anecdotes is just that: you are hearing individual anecdotes which are usually self-selecting both for the most extreme ends of the scale as well as for people who clearly have issues with our process,” she said.

“There are absolutely people who, at various times, worked really long hours,” Kolbe added. “There are also individuals who are exaggerating what their actual hours were, as we have confirmed their self-reported numbers at the time as substantially lower from what they recall having done in their online postings, and we have offered to share the evidence of that with you if given permission from those people.”

(We could not discuss any individuals’ stories with Rockstar, as we had agreed to protect their identities.)

Even among those who said they crunched hard on Red Dead Redemption 2, accounts varied. Some said they left or were planning to leave because they felt mistreated, while others described Rockstar as a great place to work, aside from the long hours. Several current staff said they were infuriated by Houser’s comments implying that overtime at the company was voluntary. “I didn’t volunteer for it,” said one current developer. “I just know that’s the cost of working where I’m at.” We’ve heard the highest number of tough crunch stories from two offices in particular: Rockstar Lincoln in the United Kingdom and Rockstar’s main headquarters in New York City. From other Rockstar studios, we’ve heard a variety of positive and negative stories. (One studio we did not hear much from was Rockstar India, although those at other offices said they’d heard that overtime was bad there as well.)

Personal experiences may differ, but anecdotes from current and former employees paint a consistent picture: Rockstar Games is a complicated and sometimes difficult company, one where working “hard” is equated to working for as many hours as possible. Many told Kotaku they felt pressured to stay at the office at night and even come in on weekends if they wanted to succeed. Despite Dan Houser’s quote that “No one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard,” people who have worked and currently work at Rockstar say that overtime is mandatory. In conversations, several used the phrase “culture of fear,” with some saying that they were worried about lawsuits or other retaliation for speaking up.

“We care deeply about the games... You can become obsessive about certain things.” - Rockstar head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe

“The overall tone at Rockstar is that what the company values most is not the bugs you fix but the hours you put in,” said one current employee, echoing a view shared by most of the people interviewed for this article.

Rockstar’s Kolbe disagreed with this characterization but acknowledged that many members of her team have worked evenings and weekends in the lead up to Red Dead Redemption 2’s launch.

“In an ideal world, I’d like to think that we could have all of our work done so that we didn’t actually have to spend late nights here, but at the same time I think we do push ourselves really hard,” she said. “I think that’s across the board. It’s not just the games team, I think it’s the people involved in all aspects of what we’re creating here in that we will push ourselves to get the best piece, whether it’s the best piece of creative, whether that’s a television commercial, a trailer, whether that’s back-of-box copy… We care deeply about the games. I think that can sometimes result in a little bit of— You can become obsessive about certain things.”

Many video game studios crunch, and it’s rare to find a big game that didn’t require excessive overtime to make. But accounts from dozens of current and former Rockstar employees describe a company that appears to embrace crunch more than most, one where people have traditionally struggled to find success without working long hours. Rockstar makes some of the most impressive games in the world. The question is: What’s the cost?

Rockstar’s crunch culture first became public nearly nine years ago. On January 7, 2010, an anonymous author published a letter claiming to be from a group of “wives of Rockstar San Diego employees.” The account, which was well-publicized, criticized Rockstar’s California studio for forcing staff to work 12-hour days for six days a week in order to finish the first Red Dead Redemption, which would come out four months later, in May 2010. At the time, Rockstar waved it off as “a few anonymous posters on message boards,” but people who worked on the game say the letter accurately depicted what they went through.

“If you left early on a weekday or weekend, you’d get dirty looks,” said one former employee of Rockstar San Diego who told me they worked an average of 70 hours a week during Red Dead Redemption. “You’d feel the stare down, and sometimes you’d see it as you were leaving. There was this culture of, if you don’t put in the hours, you’re not worth working here.”

In the thick of this crunch, Rockstar San Diego began offering laundry service, according to two people who worked there, which as another former employee pointed out left some people feeling uncomfortable—they wouldn’t even have enough spare time to do their own laundry?

Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption (2010) was a massive critical and commercial success.

“The temperament from these guys has always been: It should be a privilege to serve in this organization,” said a person who was there. “And if you don’t agree with that, there’s a long line of people waiting to take your place.”

That’s a common sentiment from those who have had negative experiences at Rockstar, especially those who were there during the first Red Dead. “I would normally never speak about my time at Rockstar—it’s not my style,” said another person who worked at Rockstar San Diego during that game’s development, “but we absolutely were forced to work six-day weeks in the six to nine months leading to launch.”

Even Rockstar’s management now admits that it was a problematic time for the company, despite originally dismissing the anonymous letter.

“We certainly looked at Red Dead 1 and what came out of that, and knew we did not want to have a situation like that again,” said Rockstar’s Jennifer Kolbe. “I think naturally as the team has grown in its working practices together, we have made improvements into how the teams are run.”

Rockstar’s next project after Red Dead Redemption was L.A. Noire (2011), which went through a rough production under the Australian studio Team Bondi, and then came Max Payne 3 (2012), a third-person shooter about an alcoholic vigilante. People who worked on Max Payne 3 have described it as a “death march,” a brutal period of time for the company that involved long nights and plenty of mandatory crunch.

Max Payne 3, released in 2012, was made under heavy crunch and did not sell well, leading to low annual bonuses for its developers.

“I’m gonna be honest, a lot of the details of my life during that time are pretty blank,” said one person who worked on Max Payne 3 at Rockstar’s New England office in Massachusetts. “It was a lot of getting into the office at 9 or 10 AM and leaving at 10 or 11 at night.”

That person, who was salaried, did not get paid for their extra hours. Instead, they had to hope that the game would sell well enough to net everyone on staff a healthy bonus.

Bonuses are a big deal at Rockstar Games. The standard compensation package for a Rockstar employee includes an annual bonus, one that grows substantially during years when the company ships a game. It’s tied to a number of factors, Rockstar says, including the sales of that game and individual employee performance. Some former Rockstar employees described receiving hefty bonuses after the first Red Dead Redemption, sometimes reaching the mid-five digits. But Max Payne 3 did not sell well, according to the former Rockstar employee, so bonuses in 2012 were significantly lower than expected.

Then came 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, which required crunch from many who worked across Rockstar’s studios. One former employee at Rockstar’s Toronto office shared documents showing how many hours one team had worked during a week in the months leading up to GTA V’s release. Those who had worked fewer than 60 hours were marked with the word “Under” in red letters. One person who worked at one of Rockstar’s offices in the United Kingdom said that the stress of constant overtime for nearly a decade had cost them their relationship and their mental health, although the person also insisted that it was one of the best places they’d ever worked. “They were—are—one of the best companies going,” the person said. “But the thing is, for the people who work for them, it’s not just a job, it’s an absolute way of life.”

“Maybe they didn’t tell anyone 100 hours, but they definitely told us 80.” - Former Rockstar employee

It’s not uncommon to hear current and former employees describe Rockstar as a family—or, less charitably, as a “cult.” Some have shared stories of the company going out of its way to help them out during hard times, like family deaths or serious illnesses. Some said they saw Rockstar as a sort of trial by fire: Work there for a few years, put in the extra hours, and your resume will be armed with a Grand Theft Auto or a Red Dead Redemption, giving you the prestige to get hired by any game development studio you’d like.

During the development of Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar began formally shifting to a new policy. Instead of different studios or clusters of studios working on each project, as they had for Red Dead 1 and Max Payne 3, all of Rockstar’s offices would combine forces. For some departments, that helped alleviate the workload.

Others said they still had it rough, however. Three people who worked at Rockstar San Diego between 2011 and 2016 recall a period where they were told that overtime wasn’t optional. “It was mandatory 80 hours for basically the whole studio,” said one person who was there. “If you don’t have any work to do on Red Dead 2, just test GTA V for another eight hours.” Said a second: “Maybe they didn’t tell anyone 100 hours, but they definitely told us 80. Concept artists were sitting there being glorified QA.”

A current Rockstar San Diego employee also confirmed that they had been asked to work 80-hour weeks for periods back then. That’d be an average of 11-hour work days—10am to 9pm—for all seven days of the week.

In order to keep track of hours, Rockstar asks many employees to log into the company’s proprietary bug-tracking software, BugStar, every day when they get into work, then log out when they leave. (Some Rockstar offices use other software to track their hours.) Employees are also told to log their individual tasks, which Rockstar says is for project management purposes, so the company can know how long it takes to fix bugs or implement features. It’s an environment that has made some staff feel as if they’re constantly being watched, and several current employees have shared stories of being called into their manager’s office and asked why they aren’t working more than 40 or 45 hours a week.

“The idea that Rockstar cares about its employees and their health is laughable,” said one former San Diego employee who left during production of Red Dead Redemption 2. “I was pushed further into depression and anxiety than I had ever been while I worked there. My body was exhausted, I did not feel as though I was able to have any friends outside of work, I felt like I was going insane for much of my time there and I started drinking heavily… Now, I have heard from some friends that are still working there that some improvements have been made, but Dan’s statement about crunch being optional is ridiculous. It is optional if you want to lose your job or never move forward in your career.”

When Red Dead Redemption came out in May 2010, it was a massive critical and commercial success. It was widely seen as one of the greatest games of all time, and it was no surprise that Rockstar greenlit a sequel.

Red Dead Redemption 2, announced in October 2016, has been in some form of development since the beginning of 2011. Those who have worked on the game over the past seven years have expressed nothing but positivity about it, and even those who feel bitterly about how Rockstar treated them acknowledge that working on the sequel to Red Dead was creatively satisfying. “The work I did there was the most fun, most interesting work I’ve ever done,” said one former Rockstar employee who otherwise had nothing but negative things to say about his experiences with crunch, management, and the company as a whole. “I think I enjoyed the actual work more than I have doing really anything.”

Current and former employees use high praise when talking about Red Dead Redemption 2, describing it as unlike anything anyone has played before. It’s poised to be one of the most technically impressive games of all time. It was also developed under a great deal of crunch.

The word “crunch” is something of a misnomer. It implies a short period of time toward the end of a project—crunch time, the final opportunity for everyone to make the game as good as possible. But in the video game industry, crunch can happen any time, for a variety of reasons. Whether there’s a big publisher milestone coming up, some executives are coming to town, or the creative director wants to look at a new demo, there are many periods when game developers might have to work nights and weekends to finish big tasks.

For some people working on Red Dead Redemption 2, crunch started as early as 2016. For others at Rockstar, crunch periods started in the fall of 2017, a year before the game’s release date. Even when the company wasn’t in official crunch mode, dozens of current and former employees say they’ve felt compelled to stay late for a variety of reasons. “Rockstar pressures employees to put in overtime in several direct and indirect ways,” said one current Rockstar developer. “Coming in on weekends is perhaps the only way to show you are dedicated and care. So you can be very efficient and hard-working during the week, but if you don’t show up on the weekend, you’re accused of not doing your share and will be constantly harassed.”

In conversations and e-mails, six current and former employees all independently used the term “culture of fear” to describe their experiences at Rockstar, in large part because of that overtime pressure. “There is a lot of fear at Rockstar,” said a former employee, “fear of getting fired, fear of under-performing, fear of getting yelled at, fear of delivering a shitty game. For some people fear is a great motivator, for others it just incites rebellion.” Some current employees, when asked, said they’d experienced nothing like this, noting that it would all be dependent on their department and individual manager. But those who have worked in several of Rockstar’s offices have described feeling like they had to be in the office as much as possible out of fear of getting yelled at, having their bonuses docked, or losing their jobs.

Even over the past week, as Rockstar’s management sent multiple messages to employees telling them that they were welcome to talk about their experiences, some current staff said they were terrified of being open. Last weekend, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson sent an e-mail to everyone at the company acknowledging that management was looking to improve “the way we approach development at this scale” and promising that nobody would be targeted for sharing feedback. “He reiterated an offer he made last week that if any of us wants to talk to him, he’s happy to do so,” said a current employee, “but everyone I’ve spoken with is still afraid to open up.”

One common fear at Rockstar is that if you leave during a game’s production, your name won’t be in the credits, no matter how much work you put in. Several former Rockstar employees lamented this fact, and Rockstar confirmed it when I asked. “That has been a consistent policy because we have always felt that we want the team to get to the finish line,” said Jennifer Kolbe. “And so a very long time ago, we decided that if you didn’t actually finish the game, then you wouldn’t be in the credits.”

Kolbe later told me that for Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar was “planning to recognize many people who made a contribution, including many former employees,” which turned out to be a list of their names on the company’s website. That list includes those who worked on Red Dead Redemption 2 for years but left before the game shipped, leading Rockstar to exclude their names from the in-game credits. This appears to be the first time Rockstar has credited former employees in a fashion like this.

“Rockstar pressures employees to put in overtime in several direct and indirect ways.” - Current Rockstar employee

For some, crunching on Red Dead Redemption 2 was a choice, one that several proud current employees told me they made because they wanted to help ensure that the game was as good as possible. Many have argued about the ethics of voluntary crunch—and the pressures it creates on one’s co-workers—but quite a few Rockstar staff insisted that their overtime had not been mandatory. They were workaholics, they told me. They wanted to put in that extra push to make Red Dead 2 great.

For others, crunch emerged for other reasons. During development of Red Dead Redemption 2, several sources say, there were many points where the Houser brothers weren’t pleased with how the game was shaping up. They made major changes to the map and the camp system, a core part of Red Dead Redemption 2 that involves protagonist Arthur Morgan’s gang of fellow criminals moving around the world. “There was a point where the Houser bros. were extremely disappointed at how the game was turning out,” said a former Rockstar employee. “They didn’t like the gameplay, didn’t find it fun or interesting, and this triggered an overhaul on a lot of different things.”

Even something as simple as changing the name of a city could lead to tons of extra work. At one point, Red Dead Redemption 2’s biggest city was called New Bordeaux, two sources confirmed, but when Rockstar found out that the open-world game Mafia III (developed by 2K, which is also owned by Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive) had used that name, they changed it to Saint Denis. That meant taking voice actors into the dialogue booth for a whole lot of re-recording, which meant a whole lot of extra work for anyone involved with cinematics—not to mention all the artwork and interface changes.

Ask any game developer what the most important part of making games is and they’ll likely give you a single-word answer: Iteration. What that means is experimenting and prototyping and changing your game until you learn what works best. Inevitably, that means throwing out work that’s already done, and even more inevitably, that means that an entire team will have to put extra hours into a game. Many game developers see this as one of the reasons that crunch is unavoidable, especially for those at the end of the pipeline. The audio team, for example, can’t work until other parts of the game are finalized.

“You cannot possibly accurately plan out a project as complicated as RDR2,” said a current Rockstar employee. “There are always going to be unexpected problems or dependencies that arise that generate bottlenecks which are going to require somebody get some work done quickly, otherwise 20 other people are held up. If someone is looking for an absolute 9-5 no surprises type job, then there are plenty of those jobs available in different industries that someone who works in games is more than qualified to do.”

Yet Rockstar’s crunch feels different than that of other studios. For years, whispers have circulated in industry circles about crunch at the company behind Red Dead Redemption 2, and there are plenty of people with stories to tell.

Over the course of reporting for this article, I heard a wide range of varying and often contradictory opinions and anecdotes. Even within the same office, one team might be going through brutal crunch while another team works standard nine-hour days. One current employee at Rockstar NYC, for example, told me that they’d been working 60- to 70-hour weeks for the past two years. They said that they can’t see themselves doing this kind of work for that much longer. But they also said they didn’t see how else a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 could be made.

“I think one of the big misunderstandings that I see a lot in comments and articles is that this isn’t number crunching,” said the employee. “We have an understanding that we’re trying to make a work of art more than just churning out a product. If I was just churning out a product, [at] 5 p.m. I’m heading out. But we’re making something you’ve never seen before.”

The employee said they’d reached out because of Dan Houser’s comments implying that crunch was limited and voluntary at Rockstar—comments that the employee said were infuriating to them and others in their office. “We got a few e-mails where they were like, ‘Look, guys, we need to be hitting these deadlines, doing this—I don’t see any butts in the seats on Saturdays,’” they said. They added that their crunch had “100 percent had long-term ramifications” on their friendships and relationships, yet they’d do it all again if they could. “This game would have never come out if we did not put in the hours that we did,” the employee said.

A second Rockstar NYC developer also said they reached out because of Houser’s comments. “While nobody I know worked 100 hour weeks, many of us worked 60-80 hour weeks for the past one or two years,” they said. “To hear one of the heads of the company effectively go on record as saying none of that ever happened has been a huge blow to morale at a time when we should be celebrating.”

A third Rockstar developer in the New York office said they’d had far more positive experiences. “We crunch far less than articles so far have presented and there is no ‘secret shaming’ of people who leave early,” that person said.

A fourth current developer, also in New York City, said they were terrified even to reach out to me, and that they felt like they worked long hours under an “abject culture of fear.” A fifth employee at Rockstar New York said their past few years had been great. “I would really hate for all of Rockstar’s management to get vilified when some managers/leads really are doing a phenomenal job and genuinely care about their employees,” that person said.

As with any massive, multi-national company, experiences at Rockstar can differ drastically. Yet there are a few common themes. The current Rockstar employee who said they’d crunched far less than articles have presented also brought up a point echoed by many others: At Rockstar, being in the office is valued above all else. “Rockstar does have a pervasive issue with the ‘appearance of work,’” that person said in an e-mail. “They like seeing people at their desks (they don’t allow work from home unless for medical reason and even then they strongly urge PTO [paid time off]). They also like people staying for dinner and you do see a bit of shame if you haven’t stayed until dinner (7:30) in a few weeks.”

At Rockstar’s New York City office, dinner has been catered three to four nights a week since the heaviest crunch started, in fall of 2017, according to those who spoke to me. To some teams, this wasn’t presented as a voluntary option. One e-mail shared with Kotaku from the fall of 2017 makes it clear that crunch was required, starting with three nights a week.

On Twitter over the past week, Rockstar employees have shared a number of positive stories, with many, especially at Rockstar North in Edinburgh, Scotland, stating that crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 was the easiest they’ve ever had it. Although Rockstar explicitly told employees not to “sugarcoat” any of their stories, outside observers were skeptical that anyone would publicly trash their current employer. Indeed, when I spoke to some of those who tweeted, some who responded said they had been honest but may have left out some parts of their stories—and that they were hoping that this month’s events might lead to change for those Rockstar staff in departments that had it rougher.

Former employees have also publicly shared negative experiences. Job Stauffer, who worked in PR for Rockstar, said on Twitter that he had worked weekends during his time at the company. “It’s been nearly a decade since I parted from Rockstar, but I can assure you that during the GTA IV era, it was like working with a gun to your head 7 days a week. ‘Be here Saturday & Sunday too, just in case Sam or Dan [Houser] come in, they want to see everyone working as hard as them.’”

“It was never about working, it was always about, you want that good bonus so you need Dan and Sam to see you sitting there.” - Current Rockstar employee

Privately, several current employees told me that this hasn’t changed. Those who didn’t work in the New York City office shared stories of everyone having to work extra hours whenever the Housers came to town, while those who do work in New York echoed Stauffer’s comments.

“There’d be Saturdays that I’d go there with nothing to do,” said one. “I’d sit in the office for six to eight hours just in case Sam or Dan was there, so they could see me. It was always dictated to me about my bonus. It was never about working, it was always about, you want that good bonus so you need Dan and Sam to see you sitting there.”

Said another: “The stories you’ve heard about people coming in to be visible for the Housers (more frequently Dan than Sam) are 100% true... I myself have been told at least once to walk a lap around the floor on an otherwise slow Saturday so that he could see there were people around.”

When asked about this, Rockstar head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe said she found it shocking. “I can’t speak to any particular manager that might say that type of stuff,” she said. “I don’t know the last game review with Dan or Sam that actually flowed over to a weekend… I’d like to believe that we don’t believe in the idea of mandatory face time, if that makes sense. I think it’s more if you have work that needs to get done, we expect it to get done.”

Kolbe said she used to come into the office nearly every weekend until around two years ago, when she had a child. She said she found it productive to be there when other people weren’t around, so she could catch up on e-mails and other work without having to take any meetings. “I don’t know if I was inadvertently sending a message to people that because I was here, they needed to be here,” she said. “Now that I look back, I don’t know. I would’ve hoped they would’ve stayed home so I could get my stuff done.”

And what of other studios? Some who currently work for Rockstar North have shared positive experiences, both on Twitter and privately with Kotaku, outside of those in the scripting or design department, who say they’ve been hit pretty hard by crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2. One current Rockstar North staffer said their hours have ranged from 40 all the way up to 80 per week during crunch. “I love working there, during my time I’ve had multiple promotions, get to make great games and I feel the pay is ok/good,” they said in an e-mail. “Outside of crunch hours the job is amazing.” A second current Rockstar North staffer described a bleaker situation: “Not once have I approached 100 hour weeks, even in the worst of crunch. I have, however, been on a steady death march of mostly mandated 50-60 hour weeks for quite honestly years.“

(To conceptualize this, a 50-hour week would be five 10-hour days, say 10am to 8pm. A 60-hour week would add a full Saturday or Sunday to one’s work schedule.)

Two current employees at Rockstar New England, which is located in Andover, Massachusetts, both shared glowing stories. “I really can’t imagine working at another game company at this point,” said one. “I’m working on the best products with amazingly talented people using the best tools and pipeline in the industry under a company that puts the quality of the game above anything else. I’m also working very reasonable hours and I’m very well off financially. It’s a comfortable and exciting career, and they take care of us.” A third, also at Rockstar New England, said they loved working at the company but that they’d been told to work 55- to 60-hour weeks during crunch over the past year.

In San Diego, some said things have changed drastically from the days of the first Red Dead Redemption and that anonymous letter from employees’ spouses, while others said they’ve felt pressured to work nights and weekends. Two current staffers each said they’d been asked to work more hours, although they weren’t given specific guidelines or quotas. “It’s a culture thing,” said one. “You’re going out to lunch and everyone’s talking about work hours—how many hours you’ve done, how many you’ve logged in. The culture values being a workaholic.”

Some Rockstar staff said they were paid annual salaries, so they didn’t get any extra money for putting in hours on top of their standard schedules. Others said they were paid hourly, although several said they’d compared their wages to those co-workers making annual salaries and found that they’d have to work overtime just to make the same amount. (The people on annual salaries tended to be more senior, so it follows that they were paid more.)

And then there’s Rockstar Lincoln. Of all of the current Rockstar employees who reached out to tell their stories, nearly a dozen worked at Lincoln. More than a dozen former employees from that office also chimed in with their own experiences, painting a bleak picture. Even some current staff who worked at other offices and told me they had positive experiences at Rockstar acknowledged that Lincoln had serious issues. If crunch culture is a problem across Rockstar, then at Rockstar Lincoln, it appears to be an epidemic.

At many game studios, there’s one department on the very bottom of the totem pole, a place where it’s tough to get a lot of respect: Quality Assurance, or QA, where people play different sections of the game in as many ways as possible, trying to find all of the bugs. Although QA testers are essential to the success of a game, they’re also seen by many game studios as low-skilled and dispensable.

Rockstar has a few QA departments, but a large number of its testers work at one particular office: Rockstar Lincoln, located in the English city of the same name. Current and former employees of Rockstar Lincoln describe it as a tough place to work, one where the testers are paid low wages, asked to work extremely long hours, and subject to strict security practices.

“The QA department at Rockstar Lincoln has been working mandatory OT since August 2017,” said one current employee. “In October 2017 we officially began our crunch and have been in this crunch since to this date.” As Rockstar has confirmed, Lincoln’s testers have been asked to work on evenings and weekends since then, starting with three nights a week and later moving up to five, and starting with one weekend day per month and later moving up to every weekend. Anyone who wanted a two-day weekend would have to work an extra weekend day on another week, which meant 12 straight days of work between days off.

Even before then, however, some staff said they were working overtime. Some explained that testers were hired on a temporary contract basis, and they’d felt compelled to work extra hours in order to get permanent jobs. “A large amount of staff are on rolling temporary contracts and live in the hope that they will be extended and able to pay rent as the end of their contract approaches,” said one current tester. “I don’t feel like anyone is comfortable speaking out in the hopes that they can be extended long enough to be made permanent. Staff are often reminded how lucky they are, simply to be working for Rockstar.”

“The QA department at Rockstar Lincoln has been working mandatory OT since August 2017.” - Current Rockstar employee

“I have never suffered from depression before working at Rockstar,” said a former Lincoln tester. “Now some time after leaving it’s a recurring issue for me… One tester who worked below me told me he had gone to the doctor for help dealing with depression, was asked where he worked and when he replied Rockstar, the doctor said. ‘For god’s sake, another one.’” Two different spouses of Rockstar Lincoln employees contacted me to share stories, saying they hadn’t seen much of their partners lately.

Others said they had positive experiences as well, with one current Rockstar tester even calling it “the greatest place I have ever worked,” outside of the crunch. But, they said, “This type of work should never be placed on people to maintain over the course of an entire year and beyond.”

Only some of Lincoln’s testers were paid overtime. People working in the localization department received annual salaries, as did lead testers, creating an uncomfortable situation where some testers were getting paid more than their leads. Some told me they didn’t want promotions as a result.

On top of the overtime, those who work or have worked at Rockstar Lincoln describe restrictions they saw as unfair. Three testers said they weren’t allowed their cell phones at their desks during the work day, and had to put them in lockers before starting their shifts, which made it difficult to deal with doctor’s appointments or other essential activities aside from their breaks. Two said that after a tester spotted a drone that might have been filming through the windows, they were no longer allowed to open the blinds at night. Testers said they weren’t allowed to eat hot food at their desks—desks that were shared between day- and night-shift employees.

Rockstar’s Jennifer Kolbe confirmed these details, saying in an e-mail, “We believe that the vast majority of our team in Lincoln feels positively about work conditions there, and these specific difficulties mentioned are either not generally considered real hardships or are not based on any current reality.”

For some, that was certainly the case—except for the hours. “Ultimately, the job is a good job,” said one former tester. “And Rockstar is a good company to work for. When it’s not crunch, it’s not a bad place at all. The money’s alright, there’s a bonus at the end of the year. It’s just that crunch practically kills people.”

In conversations, some testers said they’d missed out on important events and time with their families due to this crunch. Others said their hours were monitored down to the minute, with managers reacting harshly to any missed time. One former Lincoln tester said they’d arrived late at work one day due to a heavy snowstorm that had led other businesses in the area to shut down. “There was no, ‘Thanks for making it in,’” the tester said. “It was, ‘Can you work back that?’”

“I feel like I’m going to need to get to know my partner again,” said a current tester.

On Friday, October 19, Rockstar Lincoln told its staff that overtime would no longer be mandatory. Although Kolbe characterized this as a clarification of a previous policy, and said it hadn’t been mandatory before, nearly a dozen current and former Rockstar Lincoln employees have reached out to Kotaku since then to say otherwise. All said that this overtime was a regular part of their schedule, and one even said they had received e-mails using the word “mandatory” to describe crunch.

In an e-mail on Monday, Kolbe offered more clarification: “We have spoken with the Lincoln team to make sure it’s clear that the scheduled extra time is requested, and yes we have only been requesting what we feel is really needed to get this game finished at the quality level we need. From talking to our team last week, we have heard that there were references to ‘mandatory’ overtime from some managers. At the same time we don’t believe that was a blanket message for the Lincoln team, and that is borne out by the comments from some that while they knew it was not in fact mandatory, they felt an obligation to do it. Either way, it is clear to us that our communication has not been perfect and we take responsibility for the situations in which the team has been confused or has received confusing messages from us. We have pushed hard over the last years to build and optimize the structure of our QA team, including doubling the size of the permanent team since 2014 and introducing scheduled day and night shifts so that we can increasingly avoid asking the QA team to work overtime. We will continue to make progress on that.”

Last Friday, Kolbe shared numbers that appeared to show normal work hours at Rockstar Lincoln, despite the company’s request that daytime testers work nights and weekends. From October 9, 2017 to May 13, 2018, she said, the average work week at Lincoln was 38.4 hours. From May 14, 2018 to August 5, 2018, she said the average work week was 45.4 hours. But if these averages accounted for days off, as Kolbe had later clarified, then the data was skewed—and it certainly doesn’t mesh with the experiences of those who shared their stories.

“Some of us on dayshift feel a bit cheated by the averaged out hours,” said a current Lincoln employee in an e-mail last weekend. “It diminishes the work we’ve put in, if some higher-up tries to gloss over or down-play the actual hours we were forced to crunch. Rockstar doesn’t need to use such underhanded tactics to make themselves look slightly better, all they should do is resolve the issue at hand—which they have started to, credit where credit’s due.”

Some at Rockstar Lincoln are optimistic about the change to optional overtime, although two lead testers have lamented the fact that their extra hours remain unpaid. “While I’m still a bit skeptical as to whether this voluntary overtime can remain free of peer pressure/job security/’passion’ anxieties, it’s comforting to see leads/supervisors commit to no more than two overtime shifts per week and two weekend shifts a month,” said the current employee. “Especially considering how much we were supposed to be crunching in November. Now I’m in control of how much I can work, it feels great. I’ll actually have meaningful free time in an evening!”

“Some of us on dayshift feel a bit cheated by the averaged out hours.” - Current Rockstar tester

From people across all of Rockstar’s studios, we’ve heard mixed feelings: Pride at having worked on a game like Red Dead Redemption 2. Weariness after putting in so many hours. And anger that Rockstar’s management has seemingly downplayed the crunch in public over the past week.

As Rockstar’s approach to work has made headlines over the past couple of weeks, the company has tried to get on top of things by taking some unusual steps. Normally a secretive institution that would prefer the press stay away and their developers not talk publicly about their jobs, Rockstar last week made the unprecedented move of allowing its developers to speak publicly about work conditions. It also opened up its doors to Kotaku—in a particularly unconventional way.

It was cold last Thursday when I went down to Rockstar’s office in SoHo, Manhattan at the company’s invitation. Rockstar had learned that I was working on this story earlier in October, a week before Houser’s comments set off public discussion of crunch culture, and said it would make its employees available for interviews. Over the course of a few conversations, some of Rockstar’s top people, including head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe, told me that they took this issue very seriously and wanted to make sure I had a chance to speak to staff on the ground at all of their studios.

What followed was one of the strangest interview experiences I’ve ever had. Rockstar’s head of PR and communications, Simon Ramsey, sat with me at a table in a fourth-floor conference room. Ramsey said we’d be video-chatting with staff from all across the world, and after some brief technical issues, we were faced with two boxes on a screen. In one box, on the left, two employees sat on a couch at Rockstar New England. In another box, on the right, three Rockstar North employees also sat on a couch. They all wore casual clothes, some adorned with Red Dead Redemption logos and slogans. We exchanged quick introductions, and then I was given free rein to interview them about their work-life balances and crunch experiences. All five of them. At once.

Over the next two hours, the company also brought in groups from Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar Lincoln, and Rockstar Toronto, a mix of junior and senior employees. Rockstar said I could quote them but asked that I not use any of their names.

It’s difficult to gauge whether someone’s being completely candid about their work experiences when they’re on a video chat with a group of their co-workers, a journalist, and the company’s head of PR. Still, the 12 employees who spoke to me on these calls offered perspectives that are worth sharing, much like those who publicly tweeted about their experiences.

“I know when I feel like I need to put in the extra time—you certainly have weeks when you feel like you’re going to have a lot more hours than others,” said one Rockstar New England employee. “The other side of it is that it’s been very easy for me to balance my work life and my personal life.”

“I’ve worked one day of the weekend in five years,” said a lead at Rockstar North, noting that things had changed drastically for them since the development of Grand Theft Auto V. “I’ve got people who just want to go home at 5 p.m., and that’s not an issue… I see in the company that we’ve changed, and that people feel more like they’re being treated well, but there are still some cultures that remain from the old days.”

“Out of all those projects, Red Dead Redemption 2 has been the easiest I’ve experienced personally,” said one Rockstar San Diego employee. “Core hours, including lunch, would be nine hours. I’d say I probably get in an extra two hours on top of that most times. During crunch I probably put in another hour or two on top of that.”

“Nobody’s ever told me, ‘You need to work X amount of hours,’” said a Rockstar Toronto employee. “We will on occasion be asked if we have availability on weekends.”

After one of these calls, Ramsey turned to me and asked what I thought so far. I told him that I believed these stories but was skeptical that anyone could be transparent under interview circumstances like this. He seemed surprised.

This tracks with my encounters with Rockstar higher-ups over the past week. While they’ve made efforts to discuss the allegations of overwork and have loosened restrictions on their employees speaking up, I’ve not gotten much sense that they see that workers will inevitably fear retaliation from bosses, no matter how much those bosses say they can speak freely. It’s human nature. In an e-mail sent to Rockstar employees this past weekend, Rockstar North studio co-head Rob Nelson said that a few people had mentioned wanting some place to submit their thoughts anonymously, and that the company was looking into setting that up. That will undoubtedly inspire more candid feedback.

What plenty of Rockstar employees say they believe, even those who spoke to me privately, is that things have changed for the better since the days of the first Red Dead Redemption. It’s a sentiment that Rockstar’s Kolbe also shared, when I asked her if she thought crunch was sustainable.

“I think we’ve realized that it’s not sustainable,” she said, “but I don’t necessarily think we realized it through burnout. I think we’ve realized it through having children, because I think that naturally means you’re going to work less hours. I think even for the people who don’t have children, who have gone through crunch periods on other games, they approach the game they then go onto next a little differently. Because no matter who you are, your health is a concern to you. I think everyone approaches each new project with the goal of: It’s got to be better than what I did last time.”

Kolbe added that many members of her team have worked together for 15 to 20 years. “We want to continue working together, but we also know that certainly as you get older, it gets harder,” she said. “We’re dealing now with the generation after mine. They have very different ideas about work-life balance than my generation has, and they are bringing that into the company, and I think that’s a positive thing. They probably think we’re all crazy, but I think it actually has changed our ideas of how you can work.”

Just how much has changed at Rockstar depends who you ask. During the Red Dead 1 days, at least, life at Rockstar appealed to a certain type of person—a workaholic, one who loved the thought of spending long hours with their co-workers, pushing as hard as possible to finish the gargantuan, ambitious projects that have made Rockstar one of the most beloved companies in games. Some employees compared it to a family. One described making games at Rockstar as feeling like fighting a war together. Others used the words Stockholm Syndrome.

“If you’re really passionate about the game and working there, and want to prioritize that over your life, it’s a really great place,” said a former Rockstar San Diego employee. “But if you want to prioritize your life, it’s not.”

One lead at another major game studio told me that in the last few weeks he’d interviewed two different candidates from Rockstar. He asked why they were looking to leave. “[They] said, ‘If you work at Rockstar, it is expected you have no life outside of Rockstar,’” he told me.

“If you’re really passionate about the game and working there, and want to prioritize that over your life, it’s a really great place. But if you want to prioritize your life, it’s not.” - Former Rockstar employee

What’s become clear over the past week is that many of those who work and have worked for Rockstar—even those who have had positive experiences—want things to change. They want a better atmosphere for themselves and their colleagues, one where overtime is an exception rather than the rule, and where working on a dream game doesn’t mean burning themselves out.

Or, at the very least, they want a future where all employees are paid for their extra hours.

“I’m not writing because I want to harm the company or the game,” said one current employee in a recent e-mail. “I’m proud of both and I stand by them. I think the incredible amount of time and effort put into the game will show and I can’t wait for people to see it next week. I’m writing because I think this is a unique opportunity to raise our voices against the insanity of crunch, and that Rockstar really could change for the better as a result. If that happens, maybe other studios will follow suit.”

Some fans have asked if they should avoid buying or playing Red Dead Redemption 2 to show support for those who had tough experiences making it, but many of Rockstar’s current and former employees—even those who had the worst things to say about the company—say they’re against the idea. For one, those who put long weeks into the game want people to see what they’ve done. Also, given that this year’s bonuses will be based on royalties, any sort of large-scale boycott may hurt Rockstar employees more than it helps, some current employees have said. What fans can instead do, those people say, is speak out about crunch and workplace issues like this, helping put public pressure on the company.

On Friday, Rockstar will release Red Dead Redemption 2, and next month, it will launch Red Dead Online, which some current employees are now crunching to finish. Then, Rockstar will move on to new projects. The work of making video games at Rockstar will continue, and it is unclear how much the process of creating them will change.

Is it possible to make great art without unreasonable sacrifice? That’s a question that’s haunted the video game industry for decades, and it’s one that remains difficult if not impossible to definitively answer. Can Rockstar continue to make great games without putting in the crunch hours that have been so pervasive in its long history of successful art? Is crunch just, as CD Projekt Red CEO Marcin Iwiński once told me in an interview about his studio’s mega-hit The Witcher 3, a “necessary evil” in game development? These are questions that will be debated for years to come. For now, at least, many hope that by coming together to share their stories, they can push for some change at Rockstar Games.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com October 23, 2018 at 04:03PM

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nerd #Repost

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hbrascend-blog · 7 years ago

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Who hasn’t fantasized about walking into the boss’s office, saying: “I quit!” and then marching straight out the door? The rational side of you knows, of course, that that’s the wrong way to resign from a job. But what is the right approach? Who should you tell first? How much notice should you give? And how honest should you be about your reasons for leaving?

What the Experts Say Chances are that you’ll get a lot of practice quitting jobs over the course of your career. The average worker today stays at a job for 4.6 years, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “People are more accustomed to the comings and goings of colleagues than in the past,” says Daniel Gulati, the coauthor of Passion & Purpose. “It’s all part and parcel of company life.” And yet, there will inevitably be some curiosity about your departure. “Colleagues may be trying to read you and understand why you’re leaving,” he says. Remember: “You set the tone.” According to Len Schlesinger, a professor at Harvard Business School and coauthor of Just Start: “The bookends — how you start and how you end — are the most important parts of any professional relationship.” The trouble is that people tend to spend a lot of time preparing for and strategizing about their first impressions, and rarely give much thought to their last ones. Quitting your job for any reason — whether it’s because you’re deeply unhappy or you’re embarking on a new opportunity — “requires sensitivity and planning,” says Schlesinger. Here’s how to handle it.

Be flexible To leave an organization with anything less than two weeks’ notice is simply “bad form,” says Schlesinger. And while two weeks is customary, you might consider “offering to work even longer if you haven’t already committed to a start date at another organization,” he says. The higher up you are in an organization the longer it will take to extricate yourself and possibly train the next person coming in so you may need to give closer to a month if possible. On the other hand, giving too much notice — more than three months, say — is not necessarily wise, says Gulati. “The moment you tell people you’re leaving, you’re perceived as an outsider,” he says. You likely won’t be invited to certain meetings, and team-bonding events will take on a different dynamic. “You don’t want to be hanging around too long.”

Tell your boss first Once you’ve decided to resign, the first person you should tell is your manager. The reason is obvious: you “don’t want your boss to hear the news from anyone else,” says Schlesinger. After you’ve revealed your plans, though, “you’re no longer in the driver’s seat,” he says. Decisions surrounding the nature and timing of your departure are best left up to your supervisor. You may, however, weigh in on how your resignation is communicated, according to Gulati. Will the news be announced in a team meeting? In an email? Are you responsible for telling key people in the organization? “You want to establish that up front” to keep the rumor mill at bay.

Be transparent While you’re under no legal or moral obligation to reveal your next career move, it’s worthwhile to take the “long view” on this one, advises Gulati. “In this hyper-connected world, your [former coworkers] are going to know all about your new role and new company” the minute you update your LinkedIn profile. When you’re honest and straightforward about your plans, you “own the narrative,” he says. “The more transparent you are, the more likely you are to preserve and build on the relationships you already have.” Former coworkers are a crucial part of your network and you want to keep those relationships in tact.

Don’t gossip “There are no secrets and no off-the-record conversations in the workplace,” says Schlesinger. If you give different reasons for your departure to different groups — if your boss hears one story, for example, while your close colleagues hear another — expect that you’ll be Topic A at the water cooler. “Learn the essential lesson of being a politician: There is only one story, told one way, and you stick to it,” he says. “That way nobody can ever say they heard anything different.”

Be strategic about your time Regardless of your reasons for quitting, you have one final responsibility to your company — and that is to engender an “orderly and positive transition,” according Schlesinger. “Your only orientation [during your notice period] is to make sure you don’t leave your boss in a pickle,” he adds. To that end, you need to “collaborate with your boss,” suggests Schlesinger. Ask your manager for direction and close supervision on how you ought to tie up loose ends. After you leave, “you want your former boss and colleagues to feel nothing but positive about your professionalism,” Schlesinger says.

Express gratitude Even if you’re ecstatic to be leaving your job, you need to adopt an appreciative mindset about the position and people you’re leaving behind, says Gulati. As he points out: “Even in the worst situations, there are parts that you enjoy and colleagues you like working with. You need to be grateful for the things that went well.” Modest farewell gifts or thoughtful notes to your direct supervisor, mentors, and other people you worked with leave a good impression. If, however, you’re dealing with a supervisor or direct reports who are taking your departure personally by “acting emotionally or accusing you of disloyalty, you need to just chalk it up to collateral damage,” says Gulati. “It’s not productive to waste your time and energy trying to change their minds.”

Beware the exit interview It might be tempting to be brutally honest during your exit interview and offer up detailed information on everything that’s wrong with your company. But Schlesinger warns against it. “The exit interview is not the time to give the feedback you wished you had given while you were a full-time employee,” he says. His reasons are twofold. “First, you’re not guaranteed anonymity; it’s a small world. Second, your feedback is not going to change the organization.” If you like your job and had a wonderful relationship with your boss but got a better offer, “feel free to talk about it, but don’t feel obliged,” he says. Gulati’s exit interview advice: “No venting. And no emotional conversations.”

Principles to Remember:

Give at least two weeks’ notice and — if your schedule allows — offer to work longer to create a smooth and orderly transition

Collaborate with your boss to figure out the best use of your remaining days and how you should tie up loose ends

Be thankful about what you learned at your job and openly express gratitude to colleagues

Don’t

Give different reasons to different people — stick to one story about why you’re leaving

Be dishonest or overly secretive about your next move — your boss and former colleagues will find out where you’ve landed soon enough

Divulge too much during your exit interview — it’s not the time to give detailed feedback and ideas for improvement

Case study #1: Take initiative to create a smooth transition Nancy Twine had spent close to seven years at Goldman Sachs. She began her career in the commodities sales division, and was later promoted to vice president. But this spring, Nancy was at a crossroads. For the past two years, Nancy had spent nights and weekends pursuing a side project: a business selling natural shampoos and soaps inspired by a family tradition of making those products from scratch. “I finally made a decision: I was going to leave my job and focus on my business full time,” she says, adding that it was important to her that she leave Goldman on good terms. “I had learned so much over the years, and I had built a lot of strong relationships.”

She planned to give a month’s notice because she knew from experience that abrupt departures “cause turmoil” on a team. When the moment came, she was honest with her boss. “I said I was going to pursue an entrepreneurial venture in the beauty business — that it was something I’d been wanting to do for a while and that now was the right time.” Her manager took the news well but she did ask whether Nancy would be willing to extend her notice period by two weeks. Nancy agreed on the spot. “I knew I could spare the time and it would help smooth the transition.”

During her remaining six weeks at the bank, Nancy put together a detailed spreadsheet of all her accounts and went over this information in several meetings with her boss. “I wanted to be a team member until the very end,” she says.

Nancy left her job in April and today is the CEO of Briogeo Hair Care. She is also the youngest African American female to ever launch a line with Sephora, the cosmetics chain. “Even though what I do now is very different from my old job in finance, I use a lot of what I learned there in my day-to-day — how to be strategic, how to see a project through from start to finish, and how to communicate. “It was the right decision to leave but I am grateful to have worked there.”

Case study #2: Be open about your plans When it was time for Ben Sullivan* to give his notice, he felt a mixture of giddy excitement and guilty dread.

On one hand, Ben was ecstatic to be leaving his company. Not only had he just landed his dream job at a well-funded San Francisco-based start-up, he was also happy to be rid of his old firm. His two-year tenure at the technology company had been frustrating. Ben reported to two different supervisors — one in HR and the other in legal. His managers did not get along particularly well and they often disagreed on company strategy.

On the other hand, Ben felt guilty about announcing his departure. He knew his absence would put his team in a bind — particularly with the holidays coming and his closest colleague soon going out on maternity leave. In light of that, he planned to give three weeks’ notice.

After he delivered the news to his first boss, she immediately tried to persuade him to stay. “I told her I was flattered but I wasn’t interested in more money,” he says. “I had already accepted an opportunity at another company. And when I told her where I was going, she was very supportive and told me it was a good fit and wished me well.”

His second supervisor’s response was underwhelming. “He just shrugged and asked me when my last day was,” says Ben. “He had always been a difficult person to work with, and his reaction was typical. It actually helped me feel that I made the right decision.”

When word got out that Ben was leaving, his colleagues from other business units were naturally curious. Ben was forthcoming but professional. “They asked a lot of questions about what I’m doing next and what perks I was getting,” he says. “They were happy for me.”

As his last days neared, Ben says he was prepared to offer constructive feedback to his bosses. He had specific ideas on how to improve the reporting structure of his position as well as advice on how they could more efficiently delegate responsibilities to his eventual replacement. “But no one asked,” says Ben. “It’s probably just as well.”

He starts his new job next month.

*not his real name

Originally published at www.hbrascend.in.

#professional transitions

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