Pros
Working at Bungie was like no other studio, all employees were built as a family and not as a typical workplace. Tension between employees was often rare and many employees often we happy of current positions and often shared a high morale for what they were currently working on. Due to being employed as a Human Resource Manager I had very little focus on the "Destiny" franchise, I focused on making sure employees were focused in their respected areas of work and ensuring the continuation of the standard high morale many employees strive themselves on. I worked with a small team (most of the time 2 other managers) who would manage employees. To maintain this high morale of employees, management allowed for small incentives for employees, these included coffee bars, workplace activities, bonuses and health care plans. Job security was almost guaranteed if you did what was required of you. Although there was little promotion of employees. Often many would stay in a role for 3-5 years with increasing yearly salaries. We used a small rung system to determine an employees salary based on how many years had been contributed to the current role the employee was in. Although confusing at times many employees enjoyed this structure as they knew when a rise in salary was in the near future and how much the increase in salary was.
Cons
Although management aloud HR to make small incentives such as health plans and coffee bars for employees. Often when things needing shifting or something was not working between employees that HR could see was having a negative impact and downfall on the productivity of employees senior management would not allow for this change to happen and would over rule. Yes, naturally no one likes change but when it was drastically needed, making no change at all lead to further problems down the line of production. Once full production of the "Destiny" franchise started in 2010, many employees has already or begun to exit the studio to continue work on the "Halo" franchise. We decreased from about 250 employees to roughly 175. As production carried on, in HR we spend roughly a year bringing in new talent to work on "Destiny" and slowly integrate these new employees as part of already existing groups in production. Once 2011 had rolled around the studio was at roughly 400 employees. Management had set a goal to have an employee base of around 350-450. Although we in HR quickly learnt the studio expanded and grew in size to quickly. This resulted in a loss of the high standards we had built and the "Bungie culture" started to go. This lead to a somewhat rupture within the employee base that HR slowly needed to go though and fix, due to this production was drastically hindered. During this time senior management were persistent on no change whatsoever. Senior Management. Although I had been friends with many of them for years during my time at Bungie, it was clear the lack of managerial skills. Some of senior management was excellent but while many lacked behind resulting in many times a clash of senior management while employees would watch on. In late 2015 this came to clash of heads as of then current studio president Harold Ryan was pushing and overruling other senior management to have the "Destiny" sequel released in 2016 although many in the studio knew it was not possible to do. Due to this Harold Ryan was stood down and Pete Parsons was going to be taking his place. A major wrap to Pete Parsons was his ability to bring back the "Bungie Culture" and this drastically showed within the studio.