Rémi Racine, CEO and executive producer at Behaviour Interactive, creators of games like Dead by Daylight, recently published a blog post with the title “Why I Abolished Crunch Time and Never Looked Back”. In it he explains the 10-year journey that changed Behaviour from a company where “dishevelled employees groggy from another all-nighter” were a common sight to one where “crunch time is but a vague memory, where employees can always pick up their kids at school or daycare.”
Racine explains that step one was to ban employees staying overnight and sleeping in the office, followed by no longer encouraging them to work on weekends. The end result, he explains was this: “In 2018, 0.25% of all hours worked at Behaviour were in overtime; that is not even enough hours to warrant a full-time position. That same year we launched 100 updates, collaborated to the creation of 15 new games, and gained 20,763,454 new players worldwide.”
The results seem to speak for themselves. Though nobody’s forced to work longer than their allotted hours, the company’s seen no ill effects. “Since I enforced the no crunch time policy,” Racine writes, “I’ve never lost a contract or a client; never missed a deadline; never gone over budget and, most importantly, never stopped growing.”