In an email sent to Ubisoft teams the world over, recently appointed Chief People Officer Anika Grant shared the foundations for more flexible, tailored working arrangements at the company. In summary the future will be hybrid, offering the majority of Ubisoft team members the opportunity to balance home and office work. Read the full text of the message, below:
Hello everyone,
As you know, we’ve been preparing for a post-lockdown world in which we will be able to offer you more flexible ways of working. I am excited to share that we now have a framework in place for our Future of Work. This has been designed based on our learnings from the past year and from your feedback; this ‘test and learn’ approach is one we will continue to adopt moving forward.
First off, more important than where we work will be what we achieve, together. We will focus on outcomes – healthy and happy teams, striving for excellence, and maximizing our collective productivity to create and operate entertainment experiences of the highest quality that enrich players’ lives.
In the future we will embrace a hybrid and tailored approach to work arrangements. This means many of you will be able to balance in-office work with work from home. Jobs that are incompatible with working from home given their nature or due to technical constraints will remain fully office based. A small number of roles and individuals will be eligible for full remote work. This approach allows us to account for the variety of job families, locations, and preferences that make up our more than 20,000-person strong global company. We recognize that a production team about to ship a project versus a global IT support team or a digital marketing team, for example, all have very different needs. We will avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and empower local leaders to make the best decisions for their teams and their projects to drive productivity, quality and ensure happy and healthy teams.
In this hybrid world, the office will remain a core pillar of the Ubisoft experience. Many of you have expressed how much you value the office as a place for collaboration, learning, socialization and coming together as a team. We will continue to evolve our office spaces to make these in-person moments together the very best they can be.
Specifically, what does this mean for you:
Over the next few months, MDs will determine when their respective offices can start re-opening and how to manage this return safely and smoothly. You should expect more detailed communications from them soon. Leaders, including Production and Publishing MDs and HQ functions and HR, will determine which roles or individuals are required to be fully office based and those that have the possibility to be fully remote. People managers will work with their teams to define and implement these work arrangements. This may mean, for example, designating specific days where everyone must be in the office and other days where office presence is optional. We expect most Ubisoft entities will start transitioning to these new working arrangements in September 2021; however, some may start earlier and others later. In parallel, we are also exploring the idea of introducing a new Work from Anywhere benefit, which would enable team members to work in a place outside of their designated office location, for up to four weeks per year. As a next step, we’re launching a detailed immigration and tax assessment to identify locations where this may be possible.
We are at the start of a journey to define the Future of Work for Ubisoft. We will do this together - testing, learning, adjusting, and innovating so that we can meet our desired outcomes. Going forward, for updates on this topic please follow the internal hub.
I am very excited to be on this journey with you and sincerely looking forward to being able to meet with many of you in person soon!
Anika Chief People Officer