The Riot Games global control center in Los Angeles
As the coronavirus crisis disrupts all businesses differently, Im finding that even the most favorably placed firms are facing significant disruption. Facebook, for instance, would at first glance be a natural winner: but while usage at Facebook is up, ad spend is down.
Riot Games is the global developer and publisher of e-sports, including the iconic League of Legends. Earlier this week, I talked with Chris Hymes, Chief Information Security Officer at Riot Games, and Ahmed Sidky, Riots Head of Business Agility. Chris leads information security and I.T. at Riot with responsibility for all of its computer security and corporate computer systems.He alsoleads the Business Continuity Working Group. We discussed how Riots headquarters in Los Angeles handled the crisis so far, including
What is the impact on Riots business strategy?
What measures did Riot take?
What surprises?
Did Riots multi-year investment in business agility help?
The Business Continuity Working Group was set up to help Riot through the specifics of the coronavirus crisis, although in a sense Riot has been laying the foundation for dealing with crises like this with its multiyear commitment to business agility.
Impact On Riots Strategy
Steve Denning: One set of questions concerns: has the crisis changed your business strategy?
Chris Hymes: When we talk about strategic impact, Riot always prioritizes our players first in every decision we make and this situation was no different. The number one priority for us was ensuring that our games stay up and operational even if it meant no new development. Overall, we just want to be there for our players during these hard times. For many of our players, our games keep them going and are the primary way they have fun with their friends.
Ahmed Sidky: This year is a critical year for us. We're launching new games. If we didn't have the right mindset in our people, this crisis would have been devastating.
Coping With Day-to-Day Disruption
Denning: Rioters used to work at the office all day, every day, and now they're home. What has the crisis meant in practical terms?
Hymes: This was a challenge that we were able to handle only because of the work and the foundations that we laid for years. One of the primary missions of the IT team for the last two years was to enable Rioters to be able to work from anywhere. We were working towards that and we were able to flip a bunch of switches when the time came. So it was two years worth of work that came together in two weeks.
In late February, I began leading the Business Continuity Working Group to develop a framework for thinking specifically about the coronavirus crisis, given the critical importance to our business to keep the online gaming experience running 24/7 everywhere in the world. Here we had to consider: how do we balance the health and safety of Rioters with continuing to deliver on our mission to players?
Very early we decided that we would follow local health authorities. If they asked us to do something, we would do it. And since we're a global company, we empowered our local office managers to make decisions for their local office.
And then we began developing a plan to get all Rioters working from home. This isnt as easy as it looks. Most of our work is done in small teams that work face-to-face in short cycles. Sending Rioters home creates massive disruption in normal work routines. There are also technology issues because we have a lot of artists, composers, engineers and others who work on very specialized equipment and require high-speed digital transmission. They can't simply go home and automatically be successful at work.
We examined which teams would have big problems and which teams could be successful on day one. And then we asked teams to send people home to understand what was involved working from home. Very quickly, over ten days, we had people reporting back on issues and we set about solving those problems.
De-risking Riots Headquarters
Hymes: This was the end of February and the first week of March. Before any government instructions in California, we set about de-risking our headquarters, which is 75% of Rioters. That meant two things. One, if an authority required sending people home, we wanted to be ready. To minimize chaos, we wanted to have a smaller percentage of our workforce to send home when the order came.
Second, we started creating social distancing for Rioters who had difficulty in working from home, like artists and composers.
We compiled a list of all the teams who could leave immediately if they needed to. Then we asked representatives of larger groups like artists or composers to explore what was involved in literally picking up all their equipment and taking it home. The security team made sure that we had the appropriate security controls on those devices. After they arrived home, we asked, could they set the equipment up? Could they connect? Could they do their work? And what didnt function? We started to work through these issues while recognizing output was going to be slower over the corporate VPN.
Surprises
One surprise: we found that a large number of Rioters didnt have a laptop. We quickly got our IT team to build as many laptops as possible and generated around 450 working laptops over two days. We then began handing them out to people in case they needed to work from home.
We knew that other Rioters wouldnt be able to work if they didn't have their desktop computer. So we began exploring the security controls we would need to put on the computers so that Rioters couldpick up their computer, their keyboard, their mouse and everything and bring it all home. We let all Rioters make the choice of what they wanted to do. They could use their laptop or take their desktop and all their equipment, even their desk chair.
Changes For Millennials
We also had challenges given that many Rioters are millennials, with little space at home. They are used to having lunch and dinner at the office in closely packed cafeteria queues. Rioters really depend on and love the community they have at the company. Many of the relationships and the community are built through those face-to-face interactions.
We're trying to figure out ways to keep everyone together and having fun. We actually had a competition for the best work from home setup with awards for the best setup, the most interesting use of a household object, the messiest, and the most zen. Everyone was posting. Even the CEO posted pictures of his work-from-home setup. These small examples help make Riot such a unique and amazing place to work.
Getting Ahead Of The Government
Hymes: Basically everyone is working from home now. Within two weeks of when we started planning, we made the call to start implementing the staged work-from-home approach where we began asking individual teams to begin working from home. By the time we opened on March 16, we had a thousand people off-campus working from home. By March 19, 92% of the campus was working at home.
The actual government order came late on March 19, but by this time, it was already implemented. We had seen the writing on the wall. Now there's a list of fewer than 50 people authorized to work at headquarters, most of them only for emergencies. There are security guards, the mailroom and a few IT people.
Denning: Are you operating at 100% effectiveness or less?
Hymes: I could answer that better in a couple weeks. Our teams are adjusting as work is continuing. This is the first full week that we'll have the entire workforce working from home. We haven't seen many issues.
Work-Life balance
Hymes: I'm more concerned about whats happening in the households. Schools are closed. I have a three-month-old at home. Many Rioters have children who are now home all day and their significant other also has to work from home.
Theres a balance to be achieved. How do you work effectively when you have kids running around the house? We have many Rioters who live in smaller apartments and theydon't have dedicated spaces like an office to work in. Work efficiency will be less for some people.
We will learn a lot over the coming weeks and get better at this. One of the things you can always expect from Rioters is continuous improvement and a desire to keep making progress.
Sidky: This is a critical time for us. During all this, weve launched Teamfight Tactics Mobile. That's a new game in the app store. A key thing is the passion that our Rioters have to serve players. Thats still there. It's there even more right now. It's how to balance work with life, literally. It's not just the tech at this point. It's life. And this is new for everyone.
Collaboration
Hymes: A key factor is Rioters passion. Thats what makes Riot extraordinary. Its not only that Rioters want to keep the games running but also helping each other. There are so many Rioters who are like, Hey, if you need this, I have it. Come get it or I'll drop it off to you. Hey, here's some best practices for working from home. It's the community that Rioters have that is keeping us together.
Within our security team, we've created weekly sessions for everyone just to hang out. Not to do work, just to talk about, Hey, how's life? What's going on? Learning the things that we would have learned in the office during lunches together.
Return To The Office
Denning: What are the longer term implications?
Hymes: Just as we did a phased approach out, we'll probably do a phased approach for return. Some will find their life, their ability to work is still much better in the office. Our composers and artists for example. There are also people who dont like working at home and we'd enable those individuals to come back sooner. We want to maintain social distancing and all the best practices society demands of us.
Thinking ahead to our e-sports competitions, we are running some of our League of Legends leagues right now without live audiences. We're enabling some professional players to have their matches remotely. Our players can watch online and we can bring them the joy of being able to see their favorite players and teams play while keeping our professional players safe. Making e-sports competitions virtual is obviously easier than football and soccer but still not trivial: there are a lot of implications and challenges from a technology perspective.
The Impact Of Riots Culture
Sidky: It all depends on the kind of workforce you have. Are the staff mission-aligned or just transactional? If work is just a job for a paycheck, youll see that become even more evident in times like these when accountability and transparency are much less. With Riot, its the years of investment we've put in to ensure that Rioters are mission-aligned and are passionate about delighting our players.
Its hard times that reveal the passion that Rioters have for the mission of creating great experiences for our players, to persevere and become resilient and figure out the way to still deliver even when there are many constraints. Thats really living our mission to be the most player focused game company in the world.:
It makes a difference whether its a transactional or mission-driven workforce. What I've seen at Rioters so far is mission-driven behavior. Its all about doing what's right for Riots players
Hymes: I agree. I have friends who work at other companies where they are looking at this like a vacation. But for Rioters, its, how do I get to do the work? How do I keep delivering on the mission? It's been inspiring to see.
Sidky: The seeds that weve been planting are really showing their fruits today because the commitment and the camaraderie Rioters have are priceless in todays environment. That's a dream that many companies aspire to. Here, its a reality. I think we're fortunate to have the workforce we have.
Is Working Virtually Better?
Denning: Is anything actually better when you work virtually?
Hymes: An immediate positive is getting time back from not having to battle Los Angeles traffic. Someone can sit down at 9am without having had to commute for more than an hour and then again going home. That's impactful for people and it's going to be difficult for them to go back to the office routine, especially if this persists for some time.
A negative is that so much business gets done through brief hallway conversations. So how do you keep that level of informal interaction and understanding for the company? Do we need to have a two-way camera on all the time? Or is it Slack messaging?
And these are some of the behaviors that we're beginning to learn. And the question ultimately is, how do those behaviors carry back to the office? What are the good practices that we will bring with us? And will life ever truly return to normal? I think it will, but it will be different.
Coronavirus cases in Italy, USA & S. Korea as of March 25
The Importance Of Business Agility
Denning: I think some Californian firms began to think about this on March 19th. Riot is in a very different situation.
Sidky: We are all learning. So I don't want to suggest Riot just flipped the switch and things are easy. This is something we talk about a lot, which is how can we have greater and greater business agility to serve our players. Agility is not a capability that you can flip a switch in a day or a week. It is a multi-year investment actually its even more of part of our identity. The interesting thing is that you may only really see it fully in action it when the going gets really tough.
It's like building muscles that you don't even know about until theyre needed. A lot of companies seem to think you can buy agility. But its not something that you go to a shop and ask for two boxes of business agility.
Its not like that. Its all about the mindset. Its the community, the relationships, the trust, the leadership, the culture, the tech, and the infrastructure, all together. All of that has been years in the making. It's wonderful moments like this where you can really see it.
I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but we know that challenges like what we're going through today will happen again in the future. I hope companies prepare for that in times of peace and calm. Its an investment because disruptions are going to be more frequent and more challenging.
And read also:
Why The U.S. Coronavirus Strategy Must Change
Leadership In The Time Of The Coronavirus
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