LogInHyper Hippo’s Megan Richardson and Jaime Oetter tell us about the company’s Digital First culture, talk about strategies for managing burnout and promoting health and wellness at work, and explain the studio’s approach to growth and development.
Introductions
Megan Richardson is the Director of the People and Culture team at Hyper Hippo. She has spent her career in tech and is passionate about working in organizations with a clear sense of purpose and culture. She loves having the opportunity to build cultures where creative, passionate people can thrive and do their best work.
Jaime Oetter is the Team Lead, Recruitment on the People and Culture team. She started her career at a recruitment agency working with various tech companies, tech stacks, and roles, and worked in talent acquisition internally for other tech companies before joining the team at Hyper Hippo. She has built the internal recruitment process for Hippo from the ground up and continues to build and iterate as recruitment is an ever-changing industry.
Digital First
Hyper Hippo is a digital-first company, and we have employees working remotely from across Canada and the United States. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were only hiring for Kelowna and occasionally Vancouver. When the pandemic hit, we realized the office landscape was changing and embraced it by transitioning to a digital-first company. In the early days of the transition, we understood that it was a scary time for many and prioritized messaging to help normalize the challenges of working during a global pandemic.
Some examples of this messaging included highlighting the mental health and wellness benefits available to employees, and ensuring that people knew the company was doing well and their jobs were not at risk. We also added a new all-staff meeting to help us connect as a company. The transition challenged us to find team-building and bonding activities that could be done digitally, and we’re continuing to explore ways that we can bring our team together through virtual events and activities.
The team got into the festive spirit at our holiday party last year:
During the transition, our Workplace & Tech team frequently checked in and surveyed our people to understand how everyone was feeling, and what work styles resonated with them. These check-ins made it clear that most of the team who was based in a hub office location preferred working remotely or having a hybrid option to come into an office on occasion. Given that we had many permanent remote employees who weren’t based in a hub office location and who did not want to relocate, we made the decision to adapt to a digital-first working style. Since moving to a digital-first model, we have offered employees two new benefits to help them optimize their home working spaces including a flexible $100/month workstyle benefit and a home office benefit that allows employees to have ergonomic furniture purchases for home offices reimbursed up to $1000.
Every team member has their own customized Lego figure, with blocks to represent anniversaries and other milestones:
Connection Hubs
Currently, we have hub office locations in Kelowna, Vancouver, and Seattle and team members in those locations have the flexibility to work from home full-time, work from the office full-time or choose a hybrid arrangement that works for them. Our hub locations are meant as places for culture and connection and are also used when there is an opportunity to get the team together for a brainstorm collaborative working session. Having the hubs available allows employees to choose a work style that best suits them, for example, some people choose to frequently work from the hubs and others often coordinate going in on the same day or half-day.
Regardless of whether team members are fully remote or choose to work out of a hub, we make sure that there are opportunities for the whole team to connect, through weekly all-staff touchpoints and frequent events, such as lunch-and-learns or team-building activities. Friendly competition in the Slack trivia channel, or sharing pet photos on #FuzzyFridays is always encouraged!
Our People & Culture team collaborating in our Vancouver hub space:
Health and Wellness
One of our core values at Hyper Hippo is that we are “one team”, meaning that we believe in supporting each other to be our best and sharing this value with new team members. We use a cohort start approach to help new team members feel welcomed and safe, as well as a robust digital onboarding program that introduces new employees to the different groups in the company and ensures that everyone is given the same information.
The onboarding sessions give us an opportunity to clarify that we don’t expect new team members to know everything right away – we want them to have the freedom to make decisions, experiment, and try new things, and we encourage a culture of asking. We also play “two truths and a lie” at our weekly staff meeting to get to know our new Hippos better!
Hippos wore pink shirts on February 23 to show support for anti-bullying initiatives:
Preventing Burnout
Mental health and work-life balance are very important to us, and our teams work hard to ensure that when we’re estimating projects, we do so in a way that incorporates balance and spreads out the work to prevent last-minute crunch periods as much as possible. This doesn’t eliminate the need for crunch time before a deadline 100% but it makes a big difference. If a deadline is not achievable for the team and it makes sense to push it out, given the team’s bandwidth, we will.
Our philosophy at Hyper Hippo is that overall, your life is more important than work. To prevent burnout, we also utilize a flexible working schedule and empower our leaders to make sure that team members who put in extra time when required get some extra time back to re-balance the work-life scales.
GIBiz's Health and Wellbeing Award
Hyper Hippo was recently recognized for the Best Places to Work in Canada 2021 Award, as well as the Health and Wellbeing Award by GamesIndustry.Biz. These recognitions mean a lot to us as they reflect our commitment to supporting and caring for each other as fellow Hippos. One factor contributing to that achievement is our benefits package which includes a health or wellness account; an employee family assistance program; mental health practitioner allowance up to $1500 per year; and a generous allocation of 10 “personal days” per year which can be used for both physical and mental wellbeing. Mental health and wellness are ingrained in the culture at Hippo, and our leaders at the company openly talk about mental health and the importance of taking care of yourself.
For example, our SVP, Portfolio, Jon Warner, runs an Emotional Intelligence course monthly for Hippos who want to learn more about EQ and the factors that contribute to them feeling healthy, safe, and secure at work and in their personal lives. We also launched a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) task force in 2021 to help educate, bring awareness to issues and initiate a safe, inclusive, caring, and diverse workforce.
Growth and Empowerment
Education
Growth and development are part of our core philosophy at Hyper Hippo. We offer a $3000 Brain Fund for all employees and have created an Inspiration page where team members can inspire others by sharing the learning and growth opportunities they’re pursuing, and be inspired by seeing how their colleagues are using this benefit. Leadership courses and training are offered to those who are currently in leadership positions, or on a path to leadership. For example, our people leaders all participated in group leadership training and are participating in conflict resolution training this year.
Other learning opportunities include monthly lunch & learns, game design classes led by team members, mental health and burnout training, and an upcoming diversity, equity, and inclusion training session. Apart from formal learning, informal learning is always happening in different ways - for example, the art team at Hippo has a weekly drawing hang out, as well as a “For Fun Friday” on Slack where employees share what they’re working on or experimenting with outside of work. There’s also ongoing resource-sharing and just a lot of love and appreciation for each other’s work!
At Hippo, we utilize a performance growth system called the “Hippo Feedback Loop” which is centered on empowering our people to set goals, and ensuring they have the tools and feedback needed to achieve them. Team members have quarterly check-ins with their people leaders where they discuss their goals and have a conversation about their careers and what they find motivating.
Additional touchpoints include semi-annual peer reviews, quarterly conversations around goal progression and career growth, and weekly or bi-weekly (depending on the team) one-on-ones between people leaders and team members to ensure that people are getting continuous feedback.
Growth
To ensure that our team sees a path to growth in their career, we utilize a set of transparent tools which clearly define career levels and what success looks like in different roles. Additionally, all roles are posted internally so that people are aware of opportunities coming up that they might be interested in. Employees are also encouraged to use the Brain Fund benefit to support their individual goals and pursue their creative interests.
Our team got creative with their Lego creations at a team-building event:
Conclusion and Advice
Keep an eye on our careers page for a list of up-to-date roles that we’re hiring for. Follow us on LinkedIn as we often post statuses of which roles we’re hiring for. If there are any mandatory application questions, we recommend taking some time crafting your responses, as those are often the first part of your profile our hiring team will review. Make sure to showcase a detailed resume with a list of achievements and actions you took in those roles. If you are in the process of moving, have a gap in your resume you want to let us know about or anything else that you want to add, there’s a spot at the bottom of each application to do just that.
Our job board is always up to date with the roles we are actively hiring for, check them out here.
Check out what it’s like to be a Hippo on our LinkedIn Life page here.