Management

Paid to play

In a huge loft on Saint Lawrence Boulevard, a group of youngsters is gathered around a PlayStation console. Controls in hand, they are completely absorbed in the Prince of Persia video game. Comments and praise come in from all sides. Yet this is not a break; they’re all working. At UbiSoft, the employees are paid to play! “The atmosphere is very relaxed,” confirms Laurent Simon, “a professor at HEC Montréal. “You could say that every employee has recreated part of the room he had as a teenager in his office. There are plastic figurines, posters inspired by cartoons, all sorts of cars, etc.”

From 1998 to 2000, Laurent Simon observed the habits of employees at UbiSoft, a French multimedia creation company that employs 700 worldwide. He wrote a doctoral thesis that he defended in September 2003. “When I began my doctorate, the 300 Ubisoft employees in Montréal had an average of age of 25 years! I wondered how these young generation Net artists could work together. I decided to go and see first hand.”

Laurent Simon discovered that most of the employees were self-taught in the new technologies. These hip youngsters moved around freely, shouted to one another, talked on the phone or pecked away at their keyboards. In spite of the noise, work goes on. Multimedia executives simply can’t adopt traditional management approaches if they want to succeed. “You can’t impose a classic hierarchical structure in this type of company,” he explains. “The young artists are not really motivated by promotions, power and money. They are more attracted by the job itself and the possibilities for expression through their work. Above all they want to enjoy their work. Like the characters in their video games, these young creators want to live in a play world.”

During his two years of observation, Mr. Simon learned all the steps in creating a video game. “It is a job that involves many skills. A single game can monopolize 80 people for two years. At the head of this team are one or more coordinators called game-designers.” Once the script of the game is thought out and developed, the graphic designers draw some characters in 2D, and then in 3D. From the 3D model, an animator then defines a set of movements for each character. The programmers, who often work in the dark, focus on making the movements realistic and fluid. Lastly, the coordinator assembles the parts to create action or an ambiance in the spirit of the game script. He also makes sure the project is on time and on budget.

Hired as a professor in the HEC before he even defended his thesis, Mr. Simon is preparing to launch new research projects relating to management of creators and innovators. “I try to better understand the organizations that hire creators and help them create stimulating environments for their employees.”