No matter how honest, though, we treat people with respect. Picking up the trash is the metaphor for taking care of problems, small and large, and never thinking “that’s not my job.” We don’t have rules about picking up the real or metaphoric trash. A sports team with a losing record still pays top of personal market for the players they hope will get them back into a winning position. As companies grow, they often become highly centralized and inflexible. Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility 2. The lesson is you don’t need policies for everything. Getting cut from our team is very disappointing, but there is no shame. In fact, more than half of our employees work under this modality and this has innumerable benefits. On rare occasions, freedom is abused. Netflix’s approach to culture and talent is unique because (1) it has worked – they are very successful and (2) it is based on common sense. Company culture HR Netflix termination We hear a ton of great things about Netflix’s benefits and corporate culture, such as unlimited parental leave and an overall good pay/perks package. But these are edge cases. We also have to foster collaboration, embrace a diversity of viewpoints, support information sharing, and discourage politics. We celebrate the people who are very candid, especially to those in more powerful positions. If we succeed, there is more laughter, more empathy, and more joy. To ensure all their employees were on the same page, Netflix created a culture deck back in 2005 and updated it quarterly. We do not think of these as “raises” and there is no raise pool to divide up. A family is about unconditional love, despite, say, your siblings’ bad behavior. 2 We generally offer a minimum of four months of full pay as a severance package, giving our ex-teammates time to find a new company. Company leaders must be able to make decisions that anticipate at least six months into the future and push the limits of their productivity. To get there, we have an amazing and unusual employee culture. Powerful is a triumphant testament to the power of HR to harness employee potential and shape organizational culture. The culture is one of high performance, focusing on selflessness and self-improvement, asking employees to always “act in Netflix’s best interest.” People who work at Netflix are typically seeking EXCELLENCE, and the Netflix culture is focused around helping them achieve these highest levels of excellence. Our view is that brilliant people are also capable of decent human interactions, and we insist upon that. We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support. More specifically, we have great people working together as a dream team. It’s easy to write admirable values; it’s harder to live them. We do not emulate these top-down models because we believe we are most effective and innovative when employees throughout the company make and own decisions. Most people understand the benefits of wearing clothes at work. There are some minor exceptions to “context not control,” such as an urgent situation in which there is no time to think about proper context and principles, or when a new team member hasn’t yet absorbed enough context to be confident, or when it’s recognized that the wrong person is in a decision-making role (temporarily, no doubt). Seven Aspects of our Culture • Values are what we Value • High Performance • Freedom & Responsibility • Context, not Control • Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled • Pay Top of Market • Promotions & Development But we also don’t have a clothing policy, yet no one has come to work naked. Through this corporate structure, the company is able to continually evolve to offer original entertainment content and on-demand media streaming service that attract target customers around the world. Our version of the great workplace is not great gyms, fancy offices, or frequent parties. But those are the exceptions, and we avoid over-correcting. We want managers to create conditions where people love being here, for the great work and great pay. At Netflix, on the other hand, the dynamics has more to do with forming highly efficient workgroups that once they meet their objective they dissolve, join into new groups and dissolve again. Many times, groups will meet about topics and debate them, but then afterwards someone needs to make a decision and be that “captain”. Hastings, co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix, and Meyer, a professor at the business school INSEAD and author of The Culture Map, take turns narrating this book about how Netflix’s unique organizational culture evolved and how it works. 4 Sadly, a few countries’ tax laws do not support employee choice (Singapore, Japan, France, Korea, Taiwan), You make wise decisions despite ambiguity, You identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms, You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do, You are good at using data to inform your intuition, You make decisions based on the long term, not near term, You are concise and articulate in speech and writing, You listen well and seek to understand before reacting, You maintain calm poise in stressful situations to draw out the clearest thinking, You adapt your communication style to work well with people from around the world who may not share your native language, You provide candid, helpful, timely feedback to colleagues, You contribute effectively outside of your specialty, You seek to understand our members around the world, and how we entertain them, You say what you think, when it’s in the best interest of Netflix, even if it is uncomfortable, You make tough decisions without agonizing, You take smart risks and are open to possible failure, You question actions inconsistent with our values, You are able to be vulnerable, in search of truth, You inspire others with your thirst for excellence, You care intensely about our members and Netflix's success, You are quietly confident and openly humble, You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group, You are open-minded in search of great ideas, You re-conceptualize issues to discover solutions to hard problems, You challenge prevailing assumptions, and suggest better approaches, You keep us nimble by minimizing complexity and finding time to simplify, You collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures, You nurture and embrace differing perspectives to make better decisions, You recognize we all have biases, and work to grow past them, You intervene if someone else is being marginalized, You are curious about how our different backgrounds affect us at work, rather than pretending they don’t affect us, You are known for candor, authenticity, transparency, and being non-political, You only say things about fellow employees that you say to their face, You treat people with respect regardless of their status or disagreement with you, You always share relevant information, even when worrisome to do so, You accomplish amazing amounts of important work, You demonstrate consistently strong performance so colleagues can rely upon you. It’s OK to say to your manager, “I know you disagree, but I’m going to do X because I think it is a better solution. In companies like Google, which take pride in being a “big family”, we see how the lack of concise criteria and the subjectivity of hierarchical relationships cause unusual delays in projects that should be simple. When shaping their culture, Netflix not only sought to build a strong company culture, but they defined the culture in a way that would motivate high performance at the same time. Netflix has put all that aside. To have an entire company comprise the dream team (rather than just a few small groups) is challenging. We are dedicated to increasing employee3 freedom to fight the python of process. Check out our exclusive remote freelance talent service for companies. You will also provide two examples from the two articles and the presentation on … The unusual part is that we give adequate performers a generous2 severance package so that we can find a star for that position. Eventually, however, over 10 to 100 years, the business model inevitably has to change, and most of these companies are unable to adapt. Being fired from this company doesn’t mean that an employee is bad, it just means that he or she isn’t a spectacular employee. Just because a few people abuse freedom doesn’t mean that our employees are not worthy of great trust. One description of the espoused Netflix organizational culture is stated in Slide 6 of the slide deck Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility that you viewed in Module One. Knowing that other companies would quickly hire you if you left Netflix is comforting. One such process we do well is effective scheduled meetings. Our policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses is 5 words long: “act in Netflix’s best interest.”. We trust our teams to do what they think is best for Netflix — giving them lots of freedom, power, and information in support of their decisions. But unlike many, they are also committed to keeping only the best talent, so if an employee’s skills or talents are no longer growing the company, the company lets them go. Every employee who comes to Netflix must read a document that contains his or her positions regarding the work culture, which includes in a perfectly clear way the ten criteria that make an employee stay in the company or not, since these are the true values of an organization: Good judgment; Communication; Curiosity; Courage; Passion; Loyalty; Innovation Although the rise of its international visibility is relatively recent, Netflix has been operating since 1997. Our model works best for people who highly value consistent excellence in their colleagues. Most companies seek to consolidate a stable work team. We try hard to be the latter, a company where everyone feels a sense of responsibility to do the right thing to help the company at every juncture. Everyone knows each other, and everyone picks up the trash. As you work on this assignment, refer to the Module Two overview in regards to the four categories of an organization’s culture: observable artifacts, espoused values, enacted values, and basic assumptions. As they grow, however, the business gets more complex, and sometimes the average talent and passion level goes down. With this approach, we are a more flexible, fun, stimulating, creative, collaborative and successful organization. In many organizations, there is an unhealthy emphasis on process and not much freedom. Every few years we can feel a real difference in how much more effectively we are operating than in the past. There are companies where people ignore trash on the floor in the office, leaving it for someone else to pick it up, and there are companies where people in the office lean down to pick up the trash they see, as they would at home. We Seek Excellence Our culture focuses on helping us achieve excellence 3. A dream team.css-1l7hytn{vertical-align:super;font-size:75%;margin-left:2px;}1 is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and are highly effective collaborators. In general, freedom and rapid recovery is better than trying to prevent error. In addition, Netflix’s work policies are specifically oriented to avoid the most common vices that reduce the productivity of work teams. Some examples of how we operate with unusual amounts of freedom are: You might think that such freedom would lead to chaos. “Use good judgment” is our core precept. The informed captain on that decision has the responsibility to welcome, understand, and consider your opinions, but may not agree. We know this level of candor and feedback can be difficult for new hires and people in different parts of the world where direct feedback is uncommon. Entertainment, like friendship, is a fundamental human need; it changes how we feel and gives us common ground. In addition to a very clear value proposition, Netflix has opted for a unique organizational culture and talent approach. Subscribe to the Workana newsletter and keep updated, © 2012 - 2019 | Workana LLC - Todos los derechos reservados. Summary Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix Inc. manages two-thirds of the company's employees Works with algorithms that power the recommendations as well as relationships with internet providers In January, Netflix launched in more than 130 countries-making Hunt's job In turn, this generates a sense of responsibility and self-discipline that drives us to do great work that benefits the company. We focus on managers’ judgment through the “keeper test” for each of their people: if one of the members of the team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would the manager try hard to keep them from leaving? Rapid recovery is possible if people have great judgment. Workana is the largest freelance hiring platform in Latin America. In describing courage we say, “.css-1u9shfo{font-style:italic;font-weight:300;}You question actions inconsistent with our values.” We want everyone to help each other live the values and hold each other responsible for being role models. We model ourselves on being a team, not a family. To do this, you will write a one-page paper, in which you identify examples of each of the four variables of the organizational culture at Netflix, which are defined in the prompt below. The real values of a firm are shown by who gets rewarded or let go. The emphasis is on results and people, not processes. Four variables How Netflix Reinvented HR The Woman Behind the Netflix Culture Doc Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility Observable Artifacts Netflix has changed the environment culture by changing how they viewed the people and policies. If someone gets amazing results with little effort, they will be rewarded above anyone else who gets good results with hard work. The model of organisational structure that Netflix follow is “The mechanistic model “ . Once the captain makes a decision, we expect everyone to help make it as successful as possible. If you think of a professional sports team, it is up to the coach to ensure that every player on the field is amazing at their position, and plays very effectively with the others. The company offers its employees generous benefits like unlimited holidays and an expense policy that simply requires people to “act in Netflix’s best interests”. We have a regular cadence of many types of meetings; we start and end on time, and have well-prepared agendas. The corporation addresses the needs of its human resources to ensure that its online business processes are effective and profitable. Specifically, many organizations have freedom and responsibility when they are small. Learn how to grow your business by using our team of on-demand talent. It’s never OK to hide anything. Each employee is expected to seek advice and perspective as appropriate. Just like the other tech companies, Netflix strives to hire only the best employees. that is how you get rewarded). Feedback is a continuous part of how we communicate and work with one another versus an occasional formal exercise. The firm fights for net neutrality, and people want to work there more than at … Our parental leave policy is: “take care of your baby and yourself.” New parents generally take 4-8 months. Frankly, we intermix work and personal time quite a bit, doing email at odd hours, taking off a weekday afternoon, etc. In describing selflessness we say “You make time to help colleagues. We also believe that a strong and consistent organizational culture can be formed with remote teams and freelancers. And we discuss generally how we can do better in the future. The seduction is that error prevention just sounds so good, even if it is often ineffective. So we foster freedom and empowerment wherever we can. 3-1 Discussion: Netflix Organizational Culture For your ultimate device you are promotive furnish Sharon Slade, the highest ethnical media conductor of Netflix, for a thoughtful act argument after a while Alice Jones, who may be at endanger of entity terminated. Its employees must become familiar with an, with its policy of responsibility and freedom has caused a stir among Silicon Valley companies, Being fired from this company doesn’t mean that an employee is bad, it just means that he or she isn’t a spectacular employee. Every employee who comes to Netflix must read a document that contains his or her positions regarding the work culture, which includes in a perfectly clear way the ten criteria that make an employee stay in the company or not, since these are the true values of an organization: This documentwith its policy of responsibility and freedom has caused a stir among Silicon Valley companies. 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