How to support individuals who have different needs

Today we’re talking about accommodating one person’s needs and how that might have knock on effects for the rest of the team.

We’ll be talking specifically about an art team, but the discussion is relevant to other teams too. Particularly teams that end up field requests from people in other disciplines.

Introduction

As Star Trek movies taught me, usually the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. But sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.

This issue is a very sensitive one since it sounds like one team member is neuro-divergent (which is common with the games industry). That person is likely is great at their job, but not within the same environment that works for others on the team.

We don’t want this one person to be called out explicitly to the entire team and made to feel “other” and like they’re a hassle. But we also don’t want to group them as though they’re the same as everyone else and ignore their needs and continue with a system that doesn’t work for them.

Note that as a producer you can’t just ask your team members: “are you neuro-divergent?”. Since doing so would possibly make them uncomfortable and invade their personal privacy. You can ask people: “what do you want me to know so I can support you and accommodate your needs better?”. Then people can choose to share or not. And it also allows people to share all different types of needs.

Whether intentionally or unwittingly, it sounds like the art director has implemented a solution that seemed the best initially. That is, seclude the art team so that they can manage what comes in and out for the team. It sounds like there are unintentional consequences and this solution isn’t working as well as it could be.

Talk About the Problem

So to get started on tackling this problem, we start by talking to everyone to find out what they think of the current situation.

• I’d start with the art director since they’ve tried solving the problem already.
  • Are they conscious of what’s going on and realise the effect of their actions? Do they think the art team is being more or less effective now? Do they feel it’s negative for the art team to be more secluded?
• Talk with the person having issues to find out more about their needs.
• Talk to rest of team especially the artists. Do people actually like the current situation? If they don’t, what parts of it are hard? It might be that the situation is actually great for some people to get more things done.

How to talk about the Problem

• In all these conversations, don’t be judgmental in how you ask questions. Be Jennuinely curious.
• With all that talking your team might have already naturally solved the issue themselves. Try not to problem solve on the spot since you’re not just solving for one person, you’re solving for the entire team.

Possible Solutions

If a solution hasn’t come up naturally, brainstorm some yourself. Here are some solutions I can see without knowing the full situation:

• If we assume that this is for an in-person team, so that noise from other people in the office might be part of the problem.
  • Then maybe the affected person could work at home some days every week.
• Block meetings so they’re all together. Or make no meeting hours or days that occur regularly in your schedule.
• You could also streamline requests to the art team and integrate that into your sprint cycle. The timeline for this could be:
  1. During sprints, team members can make art requests at any time by putting them in a dedicated space such as a document, database, email, Slack channel or whatever.
     • The art director and/or a producer will need to keep an eye on this space and do a basic filter to look for high priority issues.
     • If something high priority comes in, it needs to get approval from your decision makers (e.g. leads, producer, other key stakeholders) before you can put the art team onto it. All other requests stay on the list.
  2. Towards the end of the sprint: Art lead does preliminary pass to collate and triages requests.
  3. Have a meeting with leads and production to talk about priorities for the entire team before you do discipline-specific planning. The art lead brings up items they think are important from the list. Other leads bring up their needs (hopefully nothing new is added). Creative director makes final call on what needs to get done.
  4. In the art sprint planning meeting: Art lead talks through what they want the art team to achieve. They discuss and then commit to their plan.
  5. Loop back to #1 and continue to gather requests, removing all requests that have already been fulfilled.

Implementing a solution

Whatever solution you end up going with, when you think you’ve got a decent solution, go back to the most affected parties to see if they want to try the solution. If you don’t get agreement, iterate on your solution. When you do get agreement, let the entire team know what you’re doing. After the new solution has been in place for enough time for it to succeed or fail, talk to affected parties again and bring this up explicitly to see if things are better.

That’s all we have time for today! Thanks for listening.

Remember: This is general advice and it might not be right for you and your team, even if you’re the one who wrote in the question! For me to help better, it needs to be a dialog between me, and you, and your entire team. You can hire me to consult for you: jennsand.com