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