Exploration and creativity make the workplace happier and more productive, which is why we hold an annual Jam Week. Once a year, the studio pauses all daily tasks and dedicates a week to creative freedom, which we call “Jam Week”. Before the five-day event starts, Schell Gamers craft proto-pitches, gather materials, and form teams. Our team members use Jam Week to experiment with tools, hone their skills, and work on passion projects. Their goal is to learn something new or create an experience to showcase at the end of the week. We’ve found that dedicating time for Jam Week makes our staff more energetic and engaged at work, which makes for a happier workplace with great employee retention.
Fostering creativity in the workplace allows employees to have new experiences while also giving them the freedom to challenge their intellect, improve teamwork abilities, and reignite their passion. The benefits definitely outweigh the costs, which is why researchers like Harvard Professor of Business Administration Teresa Amabile are studying the benefits of creativity in work environments. She found that employees tend to be the most creative when they are granted the freedom to choose their goals and how to attain them. With encouragement from executives as well as resources like time and money secured in advance, employees will experience increased morale, passion, and problem-solving abilities.
“I believe that creativity leads to productivity, provided that the workplace environment is developed and nurtured in a way that allows the two to peacefully co-exist.”
Scheduling this time for teams to freely express themselves makes our studio a happier place, despite the haphazard nature of a typical game jam. A game jam is a gathering of people for the purpose of planning, designing, and creating one or more games within a set timespan. Naturally, this kind of time-constrained rapid prototyping can often lead to failure. However, nurturing a creative environment in the workplace gives people the freedom to fail. The fear of failing often cripples innovative ideas in studios. One of our key principles is to be brave, so mitigating the fear of failure during Jam Week means that we can pursue new ideas and ship amazing experiences. Games such as Until You Fall, Happy Atoms, HoloLAB Champions, and Orion Trail were all worked on during Jam Week.
“No matter what procedures you have in place, it’s only the creative confidence and drive of individuals — and the collective intelligence of teams — that takes companies to new frontiers, revealing a better world and boosting an organization’s bottom-line performance.”
Words like professionalism and creativity are not mutually exclusive. At a glance, they seem to be opposites. Creativity can’t be measured or quantified whereas professionalism seems productive and more quantifiable. Despite these snap-judgments, research from the IBM Global CEO Study states that creativity is the most crucial factor for future success. 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries said that creativity builds a professional environment better than qualities like rigor, management discipline, integrity, and vision. They found that exploring creative solutions led to better professionalism, which positively transformed their organization structure, finances, human resources, and strategy. Due to the accelerating complexity of technology and how it’s reconstructing the world to be a massive, interconnected system, it’s no surprise that the creative professional is leading the way toward further innovation.
Thanks to solutions like Jam Week, we can provide a work environment where creative professionals have the freedom to innovate and explore. Working on projects in the studio is rewarding, but focusing on a passion project for a week is a priceless experience. Our efforts have proved successful thus far, in that Schell Games is an award-winning company and is marking its tenth consecutive year as one of Pittsburgh’s Best Places to Work.
“The dream of working on video games is to be able to work on whatever wonderful things are in your imagination, and that’s a beautiful dream, but the reality is that there are so many constraints of what we can do that it can be confining. To be able, once and a while, to take those constraints away and say ‘no really, do whatever you want’ is a great feeling and something I think is very worthwhile.”