78% of People Making Games Are Happy Working Remote

People sure are resilient. Around the globe families, individuals, and companies are managing to live reasonably normal lives during a completely unpredictable time. Entertainment is still being produced. Books are still being written. And, yep, games are still being released.

We’re also reaching a strange, special point where everyone’s realizing that remote work is a lot more viable than we thought. It doesn’t seem like it impacts creativity, productivity, or quality of work for most people.

Supporting a more dynamic system of work — where people are at home some of the time, in an office some of the time, working asynchronously — is going to be a strategic choice most companies face. Do you try to go back to the way things were before? Or do you give folks the right to work from anywhere, at any time, on their own terms?

Parsec’s had first-hand experience with this. Our team went from working out of our Flatiron office to being dispersed out across the world. We’ve got people moving to rural Pennsylvania to spread out with their growing families, or falling in love with the mountains, or moving closer to family, or deciding to plant even more firmly into NYC. As we’ve hired, we’ve stopped thinking about location as a requirement. It’s opened us up to more unique experiences and backgrounds that we wouldn’t have looked at while hiring exclusively in New York.

It feels like five years of enterprise technology has accelerated into existence in just five months. People’s perspectives are changing at that same pace. PWC recently found that 83% of workers are going to want to continue working from home at least one day per week, and that 55% of executives expect to empower their teams to do so. That means work and life are becoming more intertwined. Your home obligations don’t have to wait until after you get back from an office. Any company building around this demand for flexibility is doing the smart thing.

We’ve gotten experience working with some of the most iconic global entertainment brands in the world as they’ve adapted to this demand. Parsec for Teams is helping creatives in gaming, animation, and film — industries that have real limitations in their hardware to move toward remote work — to find a path forward. We’ve learned a lot from them.

The people who create, design, edit, and test what we watch, play, and experience have always been tied to their desks because they need access to high-end, five figure hardware with specialized processors and displays. This can be a cause for “crunch” at the office. These long hours could be avoided for some if they could work asynchronously from anywhere.

Well, these creatives are starting to see a new reality.

Too bad [working remotely] only happened because it was enforced. For me, allowing me to work from home some time every month would allow me to be closer to my family.

In a recent survey of our Teams customers, we learned that 78% of people working in the games industry and 92% of people working in animation or computer graphics are satisfied with their experience working from home. The most common things shared by those folks was that they’re saving time by eliminating their commute to the office and living happier because of increased opportunities to spend time with families.

There are still challenges with working from home, like taking care of kids, finding a suitable and quiet enough workspace, and making sure people are still finding ways to collaborate and socialize with colleagues.

It was overwhelming balancing children and family life a first, but it has helped me develop a more sustainable work/life balance, and with Parsec there has been virtually no difference in my work capabilities. I have definitely been more productive than expected, and it has brought a valuable change to our work culture.

We’re proud to be a solution for our customers and help empower them to have a more sustainable work/life balance without sacrificing their productivity.

With the help of Parsec, we have approximately 300 people from my site working from home. Without Parsec, this transition would have been much more difficult if not impossible.