The Foundations of Building a Good Team Culture in Your Music Studio
If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve established our team culture and how we make our hiring decisions at Outlier Studios, this is for you. Additionally, for those of you who decide to go out on your own and start a team, I hope this helps you on your journey!
Establishing a Healthy Team Culture
Establishing a team culture is important early in the process of hiring and collaborating, because that sets the tone for anyone that joins you in your music journey. But it’s never too late to take this step, even if you already have a team in place.
I’ve hired a lot of people in various roles in my 5 years of working full time in music production. More specifically, I’ve hired 23 teammates who’ve worked together every day for years. Of those 23, 10 have left us for one of two reasons:
After a few projects, they realized they wanted to pursue a different job/path, and we couldn’t offer them that kind of work at the time;
They found better opportunities through our team or because of their work with us.
Sometimes it was both, but the main point is they always left happy and with the full support of the team. (And they have that full support throughout the rest of their careers).
Having experienced all that—and having fielded so many applications—I’ve learned a lot about how to pick the right people for our team. The most important thing when figuring out who we want to work with is to establish a team culture. That is, what should it feel like to work on this team on a day-to-day basis? What are our team’s priorities? What are its values? What are the goals?
Whether there are two people or two hundred people, a decision has to be made on what the team culture is. And it’s up to the leadership to make that decision. If no decision is intentionally made, then that in itself will be a decision, because then the overarching moods and processes of the team will be determined by situations, rather than well-thought-out values.
Here are some important processes to follow once we’ve thought about our organizational culture…
THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE HIRING
Keep Priorities in Mind
Before hiring someone for a task, it's helpful to remember what's important to us—our priorities. It’s best to spend time and money on things that can bring us a great return on investment, specifically with our current and long-term goals in mind. (Return on investment, in this case, can be monetary or otherwise).
As an example, I work with a lot of people with sample development skills because they can help with designing sounds for scores, AND for making our own instruments to sell. In fact, a big part of our process is designing sounds for sample library companies like Output. In turn, Output sends us their completed products, which we then use in our scores, therefore elevating our production value.
Just with those few things, we’re able to make money three different ways with one sound designer:
Sell sounds to sample dev companies;
Develop and sell our own sample libraries;
Make sounds for music that will be licensed to trailers/ads and used in scores.
The additional benefit is each of those tasks reinforce our skills through experience, therefore making us—as individuals and as a team—even more valuable on the next projects.
Having teammates that have multifaceted skill sets allows us to pursue more diverse opportunities, which then maximizes the amount of time people are working. If I’m looking to hire someone to assist me on creating scores, they can just as easily work on a different project that could benefit us.
Ultimately, my priorities are to maximize long-term opportunities, rather than focus on short-term bursts towards specific projects. As an example, a music editor, score mixer, musician, or sound designer that only knows a specific style are short-term teammates, because we wouldn’t work together every single day. That’s why when I consider teammates, they’re most likely going to have a broad skill set, which will allow them to easily work in dynamic situations, across multiple projects.
In that same line of thought, I very rarely pick teammates based on them being specialists—not at this point, at least. Our income streams are too diverse to hire specialists. In our case, specialization comes from which projects we’re working on the most (as well as what we explore independently).
Get To Know Your Potential Teammates
This is where your established (or aspiring, if it’s early on) team culture comes in handy, because you can make sure your potential teammates hold the same values as you do.
The trickiest thing about collaborating with people is figuring out how they truly work. That is, what their motivations are, how fast they deliver, why they make certain creative decisions, etc.
The culture we’ve built is very "people first," and we're constantly looking for ways to bring people with the same values on board. (This doesn’t mean they act the same or have the same interests, it just means that their principles are the same).
Before anyone begins to fill out our application, we ask them to look through our team culture page, which is publicly available. It’s to make sure they actually do connect with who we are, what we do, and why we do it. But it’s also a way to give them work before they commit. I want their investment to be true, rather than surface-level. The more work they do upfront, the more they’ll feel invested. And if they don’t do the work early on, we’ll both know that we’re not the right fit for each other.
After this initial step, I ask generic application questions about who they are and their past experiences. That said, I’ve found the most insightful questions are about how they learn, what they hope to offer the team, and what they hope to achieve through the team—what they want to get out of our relationship.
An average answer for “how do you learn?” are things like “I watch a lot of YouTube videos on orchestration and read theory books.”
A great answer is, “I re-orchestrated and programmed a piece by my favorite composer. You can find it at this link. The process was interesting because I first condensed the full orchestration from a piano sketch, then blew it back up and redid everything from scratch. This is something I do regularly.”
An average answer for “what do you hope to gain from working with us?” is “I want to be part of a team and make a living while I help on film scores.”
A great answer is, “I noticed that you work on a lot of trailers in addition to film scores. I’ve been wanting to improve my production knowledge, and I believe working on trailers is the way to do it. I especially like the sound design aspects, so working with your sample dev team would also greatly benefit me. The ultimate goal is to build on the foundation I already have, then apply it to projects that I want to work on, which I’m hoping to pitch for with your help.
There’s a huge difference between those answers. One answer speaks to both of us, while the other average answer only speaks to their needs. A great teammate always has their future partner in mind. The people that have stuck around for the past 5 years (and the ones that grew out of their positions with us) are always thinking of the big picture—of how everyone around them falls into their plans, and how they affect the goals of others.
Closing Thoughts
Developing a great workplace should be an active role, rather than a one-time or passive exercise. And it bears repeating:
If no decision is intentionally made, then that in itself will be a decision, because then the overarching moods and processes of the team will be determined by situations, rather than well-thought-out values.
No amount of creative or financial success can fix a weak team culture. It takes work, but it's worth it if you want to build a lasting (and fun) organization. One that can grow without us having to micromanage, and especially one that can continue to serve the community long after we're gone.