What are the challenges that come with staff changes in different departments? What are the challenges you face when changing producers? Do you need to re-assign certain responsibilities? Do you guys share all responsibilities, and have similar knowledge/information about current tasks, or is it split between you? How do you effectively share information? Do you ever find it difficult to exchange information with other studios due to cultural, or language barriers? If the buck knife breaks while defending yourselfs, do to poor workmanship, how do you punish the employee you assigned to make it?asked by Masq

That's a lot of fantastic questions.

We stab them with the stump of the buck knife.

There you go! A lot of those could be answered in different portions...I think that's like 4 of 5 different questions, I think the first one to speak to for sure is staff changes, production changes, responsibilities, sharing knowledge.

Work still needs to get done.

In this industry, in many industries of creativity. People move around, it's a very common place. People get another job, people get a promotion, they change, their spouse needs to move around the country, their kids need to go to another school, there's all kinds of reasons people come and go, it's a pretty fluid thing it's just business, right? Any company any industry has this, this is not new.So for us it's about building contingency plans and understanding who can own what in the current environment. So as somebody ships out, there's by no means ever an expectation that every producer needs to know everything, there's no way we could all do that, at the number of production we have at this company alone, it would be an overwhelming amount. So yes, we do break it down by responsibilities, we do try to say alright Darian, you're going to work with the engineering and design team in Santa Monica, you're also going to work on live releases, you're also going to do X, Y and Z, that's what you're going to try and own. You will be likely involved in these three things and you may hear about "this" stuff because it's in your studio, so you should be aware of it but by no means he's required to know it all.In fact, we have to trust each other, so yes when someone says hey I got another great job, my wife needs to move to this, my husband this, right, whatever. We go "cool, here's the contingency plan", we start to either shift out that work, look at what we may need to rehire right? It's kind of the part of the last question, re-evaluating the business needs and then we can filter that out. So if it makes sense they go okay that chunk of work that person was owning, we can probably still cover that here for a short period of time until we get support, we'll do this this and this and we'll fan it out. But ultimately we'll have a longer term plan of okay the job will go up on the website or we'll promote this person and were going to give these responsibilities, so we come up with a contingency plan and then we generally have a contingency on back of that.We also you know, you may have heard this before, the hit by the bus plan, as vulgar as that sounds and how much I hate that because I never want anyone to get hit by a bus, the idea is that would we still be able to function? Yes, we want to make sure that people are, they understand enough of what everyone is working on so we can step in to help whenever possible.

It's also a good sign of good management practices that the company doesn't fall apart I mean if you're someone who's so central to everything that if you can't leave for a day without things falling apart, that highlights a lot of inefficiencies in that management practice, you should be able to step away for weeks on them, because as a manager as a project manager or producer, everybody should have an understanding of what they're doing and that if I step away, those things continue on like clockwork.

Yes, that's right. So there's some other questions in here. There's a good one in about difficulty exchanging information with cultural barriers, that's a great question and in fact these are two good guys to talk about it. When we were in our previous place expected to work in China for many months to set certain things up, certain operations, and that was kind of, for me personally, I know I've travelled but that was my first on the business side dealing with cultural barriers and so yeah absolutely you work with anyone that's not within 50 miles of yourself there are cultural barriers, whether it's phrases you use or the terminologies in an email or knock on effects. I just use that in this thing but that's apparently a very large thing you use in the UK, we don't use it here at all. There was also someone reference soccer, I'm sorry football, and how we should do something and I'm like I don't understand that, what are you, use basketball terms, or something else.

Or what they call take out food, or to go, is take away.

Yeah, that's right, and that's obviously our silly examples but there definitely are on the business side, questions. We do have that added element of, 'oh what does that mean or how do we do that or you know'. It's not as bad with other english speaking cultures, right? But I know our Frankfurt office, those guys are all very fluent in english so it's worked pretty well,but there are definitely challenges.

It also helps that we have our guys going back and forth between offices. We have our UK producer Ricky Jutley, we've had a few of their designers here. We've sent a few of our guys out there so there is kind of a cultural exchange that goes on and it keeps the company more homogenized and unified in how we view things.

Totally, that is absolutely right, so the last question on here about how do you punish an employee who is assigned a maggot.

Have they not seen my lead pipe of project pub scheduling?

Yes, yes you have. That's a good question, it's not always as simple as that. Poor workmanship isn't always that one person failed at one thing, this is a team effort, it's always a team effort and so we want to look at it that way. We do like to find where a problem is at the root and fix it for sure but we don't run around and going "oh this is wrong, you did it!" Blame games don't help anyone: they don't help in family, they don't help in business, they don't help in a team.

It just created animosity and toxicity.

Yes.

It's a knee jerk reaction to instantly want to point your finger like it's their fault.

That's right. So it's more about understanding what the problem was, going to the root of it and then going let's figure out how to solve that problem on a mass scale as opposed to just, you know if somebody is a problem, obviously take the correct business steps for that but that's not necessarily what this conversation is about. But there are things you want to fix so you want to find the root cause and fix them.

Yup.

[In the background] Communicate expectations.

Yes, that's right.

I think there's a book Eric has.

Communicating, making sure that you're clearing communicating it because if they don't, maybe the expectations weren't clearly communicated and by clearly communicating it expectations that is the step to you know, because then if they fail again.

Mhmm, we set these expectations, what happened?