State of the Art

DreamWorks Animation’s Dan Satterthwaite tells HRM how the studio became the movie industry’s best workplace.

“What really got me excited about that was the magic that can be created when you bring very technical and very creative people together to build a business”
-Dan Satterthwaite, DreamWorks Animation

The relationship between the technical and the creative lies at the very heart of DreamWorks Animation’s success. The technology that brings life to Shrek and Kung Fu Panda wouldn’t look out of place in a NASA command center, yet it would be just so much machinery without the input of the writers, artists and designers who dream up characters and the worlds they inhabit. For Head of HR Dan Satterthwaite, maintaining the symbiotic relationship between art and science is a major spoke of his daily life at DreamWorks Animation. Happily, it is a task to which he is well suited.

In his previous role as global head of HR for movie rental company Blockbuster, Satterthwaite tackled challenges that ably prepared him for his current position. “In the last three years or so of my time at Blockbuster we began growing a very strong internet selling and renting videos online to compete with Netflix,” he tells us when we speak with him from DreamWorks Animation’s Glendale, California HQ. “When we were building the online business we built it from scratch and we kept it away from the larger core business. What really got me excited about that was the magic that can be created when you bring very technical and very creative people together to build a business. In that context, it was web developers and engineers and business people coming together in a very entrepreneurial way to create a new business and try to compete in the market. That kind of marriage of very technical and very creative folks was really, really interesting to me. I was involved in developing that business there for a little bit more than two years. And then I got a phone call from a recruiter that was doing a search for the head of human resources at DreamWorks Animation.” Seeing the potential for this new role to build on his work at Blockbuster and impressed by the working environment at the studio, Satterthwaite jumped at the chance.

Since he came on board in 2007, DreamWorks Animation’s reputation as a good place to work has been steadily building. With its high pressure, 24/7 requirements and frequently hyper-competitive atmosphere, the movie industry rarely troubles the upper reaches of the job satisfaction charts. This makes the animator’s entry into the 2009 edition of Fortune’s Best Places to Work list, the only movie studio to crack the top 100, particularly impressive.

Quizzed on the connection between DreamWorks Animation’s recent chart success and his involvement with the organization, Satterthwaite steadfastly refuses to take too much credit. “I think probably first and foremost it’s the work,” he says. “There are some incredibly exciting projects going on right now, and quite honestly whether people are working directly on one of our films or they are supporting people who work on those things, we share work in progress across the whole studio. There’s a chance for people to kind of see what’s going on, and there’s a level of excitement associated with that. Plus, we stand for cool, fun, family entertainment. Lots of our employees have family of their own and friends who have kids, so there’s a certain pride that comes along with being a company that really stands for family and family entertainment. The content that we put out there is unlike any other studio, and there’s a certain amount of pride associated with that.” Satterthwaite also points to an extensive range of perks and benefits and the pleasure of working on the absurdly photogenic DreamWorks Animation campus. “Even Jeffrey (Katzenberg, CEO) still talks about the fact that he kind of pinches himself when he drives in the gate,” he continues. “It’s just a truly amazing place to spend your time.”

Satterthwaite is clear that collaboration right across the organization is one of the most important factors in the studio’s success. “It also really goes back to the creative work that’s done here and the innovation that’s done here,” he says. “Filmmaking is a very, very collaborative process, and to really collaborate effectively people need to be able to interact fluidly and visually with each other.” Providing employees with the opportunity to take meals and socialize together is a great help in building close relationships, but it doesn’t stop there. DreamWorks Animation has also partnered with HP to build a state-of-the-art telepresence system linking the campus in Glendale with its sister facility in Redwood City. These communication systems don’t come cheap, a fact that underlines the genuine value the organization places on collaboration.

With a number of different projects underway at any given moment, there could be a risk that DreamWorks Animation could break down into virtual silos, a series of teams that rarely interacted. Recognizing that such a situation would not be good for the organization, special care is taken to ensure that everybody knows what the entire company is doing. “It’s incredibly important for artists on a particular film, to see what another project is working on,” Satterthwaite explains. “For example, an artist who is working on How to Train Your Dragon isn’t going have a whole lot of exposure to how the story is developing or how the visuals are developing on Shrek Forever After. Getting everybody together in a room and being able to show How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek Forever After and Oobermind is very inspirational for them in their own work. Unless you organize that kind of opportunity, it won’t necessarily just happen because everybody is so intensely focused on getting their own stuff done. That’s why we always set up opportunities for people to see others’ work.”

Operating in such a specialized field presents the DreamWorks Animation with some different staffing issues compared to other, more everyday companies. “When you think specifically about people who are in CG animation, it’s not a huge community of people,” says Satterthwaite. “There are pockets in California, London, Vancouver, Australia, New Zealand – anywhere where you have large animation studios or digital effects houses. But if you compare us to more of a general industry there’s not a huge population of people with high-end CG animation skills. So it has been difficult to fill key roles at times because so many studios were ramping up their production slate. There are some really great schools out there that are graduating some exceptional talent, but prior to the recession it was very difficult to recruit.”

Now however, the global economic situation has made the process of finding qualified people a little different. As credit lines have been squeezed, studios which previously had very robust production slates have been forced to scale back or in some cases close their doors altogether. Though Satterthwaite takes no pleasure in the woes of the studio’s peers, he does acknowledge the impact they have had on recruitment. “There are a lot of very, very strong artists and technical people who are available right now,” he says. “One of the things that the DreamWorks Animation management team really asked of our CEO, was to take a long hard look at costs across the entire business, because what we wanted to do almost at all costs was to create and maintain a level of stability for the workforce here. We’ve been able to continue to hire while others unfortunately are having to let people go. We don’t think about that in an arrogant sort of way, but in a very humbly. We’re blessed to be able to be in a position where we have a very strong production schedule right now. In a number of departments we’re still staffing up, just to be able to handle our production schedule and our workflow.”

But with more available candidates comes the increased challenge of making the right hire. At DreamWorks Animation, the ability to cope with a workplace that throws up surprises on a daily basis is absolutely key. “It’s a very creative environment,” says Satterthwaite. “It’s a place that has been created for artists and for filmmakers, and so what comes with that is a level of excitement and enthusiasm, but what also comes with it is, you know, a tremendous amount of change and incredibly fast pace. You have to be sure that people can feel comfortable in this culture and deal with a level ambiguity that’s always going to come with the creative environment.”

With so much talk of creativity, you might be forgiven for thinking that DreamWorks Animation is some kind of artists commune, rather than a multi-billion dollar movie-making powerhouse. Obviously, when you’re dealing with the kind of money involved in a big Hollywood blockbuster, creativity has to be tempered with a good degree of training and structure. “Between our two locations in Glendale and Redwood City we have 1800 folks,” says Satterthwaite. “We focus quite a bit of attention on new people joining the company and making sure that they have all the resources and training that they need to really ramp up quickly on the production side. We’ve got a very robust training program that gets people production-ready in about six weeks, keeping in mind that almost all of our production tools are proprietary tools, and so even the most experienced artist or technician who joins the company needs to be trained them. Most pick it up pretty quickly, but it does require that kind of investment to get people up to speed.” Outside of simply training new arrivals in the technology, a great deal of focus is placed on getting them settled into the culture “We assign mentors to new folks to make sure that they have their own supervisor as well as a mentor to help them get familiar with the environment and meet the people that they need to meet with, and those kinds of things,” Satterthwaite continues. “There’s a lot organization and coordination around that kind of stuff.”

The treatment that new studio employees receive obviously stands them in very good stead to progress through the organization. A disproportionately large number of current senior staff began their career at the studio in a range of virtually entry-level jobs. Satterthwaite acknowledges both the possibilities for individuals at the company and the benefits that developing people from the inside brings. “The first word that actually comes to my mind is continuity,” he says. “That type of stability and people who really have grown their career here are certainly more likely to stay with us and contribute at a really, really high level. There are numerous benefits to people having a chance to grow their career here. I don’t want this to come across as constantly comparing ourselves to other studios, but lots of them have more of a hire-and-drop approach to managing things, and we have a real retention and career growth way of doing it, which has worked really well here. It doesn’t work well everywhere, but it’s certainly worked well for us.”

Key to retaining people and developing them to their full potential, is allowing flexibility throughout the organization. If someone wants to make a change and experience another part of the company, that is option is open to them. “Whether that be somebody who works in layout and wants to get into animation, there are lots of training opportunities, both artistic development training as well as technical training for people who want to work in different areas of filmmaking,” Satterthwaite explains. “We also have a management development program to help people who want to get into a supervisory role and grow their career from a management standpoint too.”

Slightly unusually for such a prominent HR man, Satterthwaite’s career actually began in marketing. So does this early experience in the science of consumer psychology come in useful in his role today? “Without a doubt,” he states. “I think constantly. I’m driving into work in the morning and at home at night thinking about how employees are feeling about being here, and what do they think about when they’re driving to work and heading home for the day. Right now, people are worried. They’re worried about security. They’re worried about stability. They’re worried about their income. They’re worried about their livelihood. They’re worried about the viability of their company. There are a lot of things for people to worry about these days.”

Satterthwaite’s background in marketing actually ties in perfectly with whole DreamWorks Animation workplace ethos. It’s about building something where people are freed from some of the distractions and petty annoyances that everyday life can throw up. “What we’ve been trying to create here, and what’s been created over the last dozen years since DreamWorks Animation was founded, is an environment where people can come and really be inspired to do their best work,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re artists or engineers or programmers or human resources professionals or accountants or attorneys. Whatever role they play here it runs right through the organization; in terms of how the campus is designed, how benefits and morale are thought about and how training and development is handled and allowing people to explore different career opportunities. All of those things center around the psychology of someone’s career.”

Coming soon
The next big priorities for HR at DreamWorks Animation.
“We’ve got a large HR systems implementation and we’re automating a lot of manual processes today and streamlining a bunch of things on the HR front. We’ve grown so rapidly in terms of the size of the workforce, over 60 percent in the last four years. The infrastructure side just hasn’t kept up with that growth, and so a lot of processes remain somewhat manual in nature and so we’re auditing a lot of those. There’s a sizeable project going on right now that’ll be finished up this year to automate a range of things that we do.

We’re also building a new management development program to really grow the next phase of leadership here at the studio. Again, that’s sort of the outgrowth of our rapid expansion, needing to really make sure that we’ve got a solid foundation of leaders and managers in place, and we’re doing that both through a combination of hiring people from the outside as well as developing people internally. That’s a really big emphasis for us right now.

And strategically as a business we’re really growing and building our franchises. In the past we would release two theatrical films a year along with the DVD releases that would follow. Now we’ve built capacity to be able to issue five theatrical releases every two years, in addition to doing television specials things like the Broadway show. We need to help everybody think through and manage that change and understand that where they might’ve spent 18 months on one project and then spent the next 18 months on a second project, they might need to work on a number of projects simultaneously. From an HR standpoint that’s got a lot of challenges and takes up quite a bit of time to get through that kind of change. But it’s all change for the good; it’s about growth.”

Perk up
How food, fun and games keep DreamWorks Animation’s people productive
“We have a commissary, both at this studio and the one up north, and we serve free breakfast and lunch to all employees every day, so there’s almost unlimited access to free food. We have a Starbucks on campus here in Glendale, which is very helpful, especially for people who are coming in early and working late, which many of our folks do to get our projects out on time. We have a game room set up where people can go in and play pool or video games. We’ve got table-tennis tables and foosball tables on campus where people who are on a break or waiting for their shots to render, can go out and play a round of table-tennis.

We also do weekly screenings of current release films as well as a huge list of other weekly events just to get people reenergized for the afternoon. For example, today is Shrek: The Musical day. The show has been going strong for the last year plus, and recently won a Tony Award. Because it’s only playing in New York most of our employees haven’t had a chance to go and see the show. We encourage them to, but that’s a long trip for people. So we’re bringing people into the theater and showing them some footage from the show. It’ll be the first time that most people have seen these performances, so it’ll be really exciting.”