The 4-day work week has arrived at Splash Damage
October 3, 2023
In September we officially kicked off our 4-day working week for all Splashers with a bang!
Our studio is buzzing as we come back together again after so long.
We celebrated with a festival of food vans and party games as Splashers shared what they got up to on their first non-working Monday.
Across our industry work is being reinvented. The upheaval of the last few years has given us the opportunity to test out lots of different ways of working – from hybrid, to remote, to whole new approaches.
Over the last few years we’ve learnt that to build the incredible multiplayer experiences we’re known for, our talented people being together is crucial. Being together helps us build the relationships needed for high-performing teams, it helps us innovate by bouncing ideas off each other, and it helps us learn from each other to become better at our craft – and ultimately create experiences for our players that we’re proud of.
Our sister studio Bulkhead adopted the 4-day working week on site over 18 months ago, and experienced first-hand how it can radically improve wellbeing, engagement, and delivery. Armed with these results, we decided to adopt the 4-day working week for everybody at Splash Damage – bringing our teams together for a shorter, more focussed, week.
This isn’t about compressing five days’ worth of hours into four, or expecting our teams to deliver the same work in the same way in less time. Instead, we are looking for ways we can move faster, calling out things that need changing, utilising our time together effectively – binning pointless meetings and testing new ways to deliver our upcoming games.
Transformers: Reactivate and Project Astrid are our most ambitious projects yet. Having 4 days together and a non-working day for people to take care of their minds and improve themselves means we come to work more recharged, more creative, and more brilliantly ourselves.
Steve Hessel, VP of People at Splash says:
“We’re still at the start of our journey. We kicked off the 4-day week for 100 Splashers in August, and let them take the reins. We called them our Early Adopters. They tested out the 4-day week and let us know how it should work for the rest of the studio.
In September we moved the whole studio to working a 4-day week. It’s still early days, and the hard work is yet to come. Now the challenge sits with every single one of us to find ways to work smarter and deliver our ambitious projects for our players.”
We believe the 4-day work is the future of work for our studio, and has the potential to change our industry for the better. We’ll be sharing more about our experiences implementing the 4-day work week here at Splash over the coming months.
If you want to be part of our journey and help us build our most ambitious multiplayer experiences yet, check out our Careers website.
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