About the office
The Kevuru Games office is located in Kyiv, near the Vasylkivska metro station, in a small business center. Before the quarantine, there were several rooms of up to 400 m2. During the quarantine, everyone switched to working remotely, so the company now just has one room, which offers a functional open space and which serves as an office.
Now there are very few people working in the office on a flexible schedule, and there are no strict conditions in place for spending time in the office. Before the war, about 10% of employees were office-based on a permanent basis. Our team is “scattered” across different cities and countries.
The Kevuru Games management team believes there will be more people willing to and wanting to work in the Kyiv office in the future. The HR department has received feedback that people want offline events and meetings. During the quarantine and the war, people have really missed being able to communicate in person.
We have always been a friendly company especially back in the days of the offline office.
When you are in the office, you will find a cozy kitchen with coffee and cookies, board games in the evenings in the recreation room, and a comfortable orthopedic chair, etc.
And when you have a virtual office: what kind of bun can you offer an employee?
We have an attitude! We create emotional comfort.
About processes and communications
Since 2020, the company has been operating remotely. All communication, onboarding, and feedback processes take place online. Our teams use Google Calendar, Google Meet, Zoom, and Skype for calls.
The HR team works with newcomers from their very first day. Depending on the duration of the trial period, one-on-one calls are organized two, three, or more times. We do it to keep our finger on the pulse and ensure that expectations and reality coincide for both the employee and the company. It is vital to sync as often as possible. In case of mixed impressions, HR specialists react quickly and do everything possible to support the new employee to feel comfortable and capable in their new position.
In addition to HRs input into the new employees integration into the workplace, team and department leads are engaged in the onboarding process. It looks like a reasonably standard mentoring system. Each team has mentors – senior and middle specialists who are delighted to take on the onboarding of new people. The HR department carefully monitors the coaching process and recognizes that potential leaders may be growing in the teams.
As for communication, in addition to regular calls within the team or with the HR department, Kevuru Games has a Friday call. In these calls we discuss official issues, and colleagues can chat on these calls and listen to ideas and suggestions. A few months ago, the HR department launched an anonymous feedback form where anyone can leave questions or suggestions. Every few weeks on these Friday calls, the HR team and the CEO answer these anonymous questions. So that people who are too shy to ask something directly know there is a safe place to come with your feedback.
The company is growing very fast, but we still have a very family atmosphere. We are always open to helping each other with both professional and personal needs. The company’s tradition is weekly calls on Fridays, where we all get together, meet new employees, share news, and our RMV team often presents the results of completed projects there, so each of us knows what the other teams are working on.
In remote work, it is a little more challenging to maintain the so-called Team Spirit, so we organize informal calls twice a week, where we get together as a team to talk about non-work topics and share news. This helps a lot to maintain a cool atmosphere in the team. Also, a few weeks ago, we organized calls and invited the other department leads to share their knowledge with us on the technical aspects of game development. All this takes place to ensure that the PM team is as deeply familiar with the processes that help us in our work as possible.
About the social package, development, and training
We have a great social package for employees, which includes both standard options (for example, health insurance, paid leave, sick leave) and more exclusive ones. For example, the possibility of a sabbatical: an employee who feels that they need a break can take an extended vacation and retain their workplace.
We have allocated a specific budget for each employee, which they can use for their training and development. A learning and development specialist is working on the implementation of educational projects. There is also an idea to organize an internal school with a basic package of courses for leads. This will be training for both C-level specialists and the main staff. This practice often works as a good motivational tool, so people can gain interesting knowledge not only in the foreign market but also in the domestic one.
We have created regular internal courses where artists with extensive expertise in a narrow specialty (for example, sculptors) share their knowledge and experience with the team. Such lessons are worked out in detail in advance and have a structure of lectures, homework, analysis of works, and feedback – that is, it turns out to be a fully-fledged school.
With the outbreak of war, the focus shifted from more entertaining activities to supportive ones — for example, access to a therapist to maintain employee morale during wartime. HR professionals try to add more slots every month because requests are growing. And now, they are pleased they have managed to implement this initiative quickly, just a week after the start of the war.
Kevuru’s main priority is satisfying customers and employees. The company is constantly growing, developing, and discovering new directions, and all employees are growing together with the company.
The Kevuru team is the best team I’ve ever worked for. Here you feel that you are all working towards the same goal. As a PM, I understand that the atmosphere in the team is very important for good, high-quality work. Therefore, together with our leads, we always make sure that all team members are comfortable working and create a favorable atmosphere. We make sure that projects are planned so that artists and developers work without the need for overtime or overloading.
About company’s support during the war
Because of the coronavirus, people felt they needed more offline events and team building. Before the war, the company had a dedicated HR and marketing calendar to help rebuild teams and communications post pandemic. The war changed those plans. If possible, the team holds certain events; for example, there was an embroidery contest with prizes recently. There is a desire to continue initiatives with competitions and activities.
For example, the company combines the useful with the pleasant – a charity auction with master classes from employees. Someone talks about cryptocurrency; someone shares their experience of making bouquets. For participation in the master class, employees donate funds to the armed forces of Ukraine and the “Come Back Alive” Foundation.
It has been important to the company not to cut employees during the war. Even those who cannot work now continue to receive a salary and keep their jobs. Some employees of Kevuru Games serve in the army and receive the necessary financial support.
The company also covered the financial costs associated with evacuating hot spots. Those employees who had to evacuate from hot areas urgently were provided with their transportation costs and compensated for purchasing new equipment. All the time people needed to move to safe places was also counted as working time and was paid.
Find out more details about the Kevuru Games on InGame Job.
Check out the vacancies! Maybe they’re looking for you!
Who are the best candidates for Kevuru Games
Everything is important to recruiters. They can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that a person is great at hard skills, but there are questions around their soft skills. And vice versa. Ideally, you need to find a balance.
The company is very carefully researching the soft skills of all candidates. The goal is to build a team with no toxicity so that team spirit is high and any questions quickly find competent answers from knowledgeable people. But do not forget about hard skills. Our candidates should be experienced and skilled.
If a person is invited to an interview, it means that they are considered to be suitable for the company with the right competencies. As for the soft skills of the candidates, they try to select them so that they are maximally consistent with the company’s values – there are six of them in the company.
- Diversity
The company is equally happy to see people of all genders, ages, races, orientations, and religions. Offensive or humiliating jokes, hints, and memes on such topics are unacceptable.
- Spirit of cooperation
All departments work together for a collective result and are always ready to help each other if difficulties arise. No one is left alone with their question: the team adheres to the principle of “all for one” and “one for all”.
- Creative passion
All specialists are fully dedicated to their work, so each project is supported by exceptional involvement and creative enthusiasm.
- Transparency
The company strives to make all decision-making processes and procedures as clear and transparent as possible. Open communication in the team is maintained, and decisions and expectations are always discussed together.
- Confidence
The work is based on mutual trust. The company trusts employees as true professionals who are responsible for their own work, and employees are absolutely confident that the company will fulfill all its obligations to them.
- Open-door policy
The company has a well-developed open-door culture, where any request or suggestion can be addressed to any director or the CEO. New ideas and their implementation are welcome if they help optimize workflows and achieve results.
Thanks to a competent selection, our employee outflow rate is the lowest in the market, only 4%.
The most valuable thing in our company is, of course, our people. In particular, in the 3D environment department, the department’s leaders and I devote a lot of time to how artists feel, whether they have everything they need to work with, whether they have unjustified loads or concerns about technical support.
As head of the department, I concluded that there could be no high-quality results without working comfort. Therefore, we are as democratic as possible regarding freedom of speech, initiatives, and expression. This also applies to estimates, which concern many applicants at the interview stage because I have repeatedly heard stories about inhumane deadlines for completing tasks and penalties and overtime for their inevitable delay.
In the Kevuru team, we try to rule out such situations. When evaluating a particular task, we rely not only on the many years of experience our leads have, but also on the experience of our artists, discussing these tasks with them, and analyzing each stage in detail to get a comfortable and healthy assessment.
All this makes Kevuru a unique studio with a healthy working atmosphere, where you want not only to earn money but also to develop, learn, make friends, and maybe even fall in love. Working in our company ceases to be a job and turns into a hobby that remains with us for life.
