- Everyone wants to be nice to others and look happy.
- Everyone wants Bungie to succeed and become a better place to work.
- We want people to feel comfortable being silly, authentic, and unattended at work. We want people to feel that they can bring their whole being to work and express themselves freely, feeling psychologically secure.
By default, the number three opens up an incredibly wide space of acceptable behavior, while the combination of one and two gives us a safety margin when something in three inadvertently offends (for any number of reasons, not limited to ID-related scenarios). and E).
However, we don’t rely on that safety buffer for everything: we’re not building a culture where you can say whatever you want and everyone has to put up with it. This is explicitly different from the broader US legal system (guaranteed free speech in public spaces, etc.). Bungie’s explicit intent is to pursue shared goals with high cohesion and trust, so we want to be a more cohesive and less combative group than the country at large, so we design and develop our culture to support that goal. So we go back to that wide open space of personal expression and add some safety measures to reduce the potential for conflict and hopefully increase overall psychological safety. For example:
- At Bungie it’s No It’s okay to be unwelcoming in ways that are widely recognized as such in American culture.
- For example, you are expected to know that it is not okay to use any racist slurs.
- At Bungie it’s No It’s okay to be unwelcoming to people in ways we know matter. to themeven in ways that seem more accepted by American culture in general.
- If someone at Bungie tells us “I personally find this unwelcoming,” we take it incredibly seriously.
- This is closely related to the platinum ruler: we treat others as they would like to be treated, rather than as us I would like to be treated.
- It’s not just about traditional ID&E and URG scenarios, it is also about following patterns that support a collaborative culture with high psychological safety, a culture that is deeply welcoming of human beings and their talents, and where it feels safe to be vulnerable and make mistakes. Here are some examples of restrictions we place on the freedom of naive expression to achieve that goal:
- It’s not okay to bring down the morale and alignment of the people around you with cynicism. There is a lot of subtlety on the line between cynicism and honest criticism, which we want!
- Honest criticism is encouraged, even in groups, as long as it is direct, respectful, constructive, and does not attribute ill intent or incompetence to others. If criticizing someone’s work helps improve it, that’s great, but remember that you want them to be happy. Make sure your critique style reflects that intent. Of course, it’s possible to take the delicacy of criticism too far here: We don’t want to be a culture where we all speak in deeply expressed euphemisms about how the emperor might be a little underdressed for the weather. You’ll want to adjust your bar as you work with people – the typical cycle is to try out what you think is a friendly critique style for the situation, and then ask for feedback afterwards! Sometimes the person will say, “Yeah, that hurt my feelings a bit, I wish you had done X,” and other times they’ll say, “You spent a lot more time than you needed to on the disclaimers, you can be more direct.” . ! “
- If you believe that a leader’s decision is wrong and spread cynicism and FUD about it among your peers instead of escalating it to that leader in a professional way, that’s not right.
- If you catch someone in a mistake and reprimand them in a hurtful way, that’s not okay; We don’t want people to fear that negative emotional experiences will result from any mistakes, because that results in (a) excessive caution and (b) hiding mistakes instead of learning from them.
- Demagogic punctuation in groups is not okay (leveling a rhetorical attack that sounds convincing but is actually oversimplified or misleading).
- In virtually all cases, hitting down is worse than hitting up in these areas: Leaders have more responsibility for consistently creating psychological safety because of their relative power and safety. However, these guidelines still apply to any two people in the company: It would be far worse for the CEO to personally insult an associate engineer than vice versa, but that’s not okay either.
- There are many more examples like this in our Values Manual.
With those kinds of guardrails restricting the space for acceptable personal expression, our initial broad space for tolerance for expression is now a bit smaller, but we think this strengthens our culture, especially for the purpose of combining our strengths to make great games. !”
Excerpt from Bungie’s Tone and Inclusivity Guidelines for Engineering and Testing
