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Even though you generally like the people you work with, it’s only natural to complain about them. Perhaps you have a teammate who is used to harassing you when stressed, or the management of the company has embarked on a new strategy that doubles your workload. Whatever the scenario, there’s a good chance that you sometimes want to talk about your bosses and coworkers, and when you do, you’ll turn to the people most likely to understand your grievances: your coworkers. job.
But in the age of Slack, emails, and other electronic communications, there’s always a risk that your words will bite you back. That’s what appears to have happened to three senior Netflix film marketing executives, who were fired when company executives heard about their criticism of Slack.
Why did Netflix fire three marketing managers?
The Hollywood Reporter says the three Netflix executives believed they were exchanging private messages, but another employee discovered “several months of these messages” and reported them. The publication explains:
According to sources, their immediate boss, vp original marketing films Jonathan Helfgot, whom they also criticized, was extremely reluctant to fire the three for their comments, arguing that employees naturally let off steam and that such dire consequences were not justified. But sources say he succumbed to pressure from senior company officials.
The story goes on to say that the posts from marketing managers also criticized Marketing Director Bozoma St. John. Netflix, however, denies that the Slack posts were critical of St. John or Helfgot. A source close to the situation said the messages were about colleagues rather than company management.
There is a unique aspect to the apparent reasoning behind Netflix’s ousting the Three Executives. Sources told The Hollywood Reporter that the problem wasn’t that executives were complaining, but that they didn’t go directly to the people they were complaining about to discuss their issues. Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings has cultivated a culture of radical transparency, which asks employees to “only say to someone what you tell them to their face.” “If you evacuate [there], you do it very publicly, ”a source told The Hollywood Reporter.
Is radical transparency realistic?
One of the reasons Netflix emphasizes radical transparency is to make sure everyone in the business is performing at the highest level possible. In Hasting’s corporate memories No rules Rules, explains co-author Erin Meyer: “At Netflix, it comes down to being disloyal to the company if you can’t speak up when you don’t agree with a colleague or have comments that could be useful. After all, you could help the business, but you choose not to.
Hastings also writes that whenever a Netflix employee complains about someone else, they ask, “What did this person say when you spoke to them directly? This approach has the effect of toning down the cloak-and-dagger machinations in the office, he says.
But it may be too much to expect of human beings to think that companies can force all oxen to open up. On the one hand, when it comes to criticizing someone who is above you in the office hierarchy, the power dynamics involved will discourage some employees from speaking out.
Hastings recognizes the problem in No rules Rules, writing that “an employee who is brave enough to give his opinion openly is likely to worry: ‘Will my boss be mad at me?’ or “Is this going to hurt my career?” “He says the company is trying to respond to this hesitation by asking managers to actively solicit comments on their reports in regular one-on-one meetings, and use an appreciative tone of voice and thank employees for their frankness in the face. to critics.
These are good marks, but there’s no guarantee that every manager at Netflix (or anywhere else) will stick to them. And despite the company’s best efforts, some employees may still not feel safe speaking up.
The pros and cons of office gossip
Venting out your frustrations with your coworkers is a common way to deal with stress, receive validation, and bond with others. Of course, ventilation has its downsides – it can even end up making us feel worse. But it can also be a way for employees to process their emotions. They may express opinions about their co-workers that they don’t even necessarily really believe, or that they deemed too minor to merit a face-to-face conversation, but which would only get stronger if they kept them locked up.
At the same time, it’s easy to see how toxic letting off steam on a coworker can become. Writing about the function of gossip in a recent opinion column for the New York Times, writer Kelsey McKinney explains that there is “a distinction between negative gossip that alerts the community to an individual’s bad or dangerous behavior. and destructive gossip that aims to hurt or undermine. “If it becomes malicious,” anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar told McKinney, “it can actually cause communities to fragment into smaller, non-interacting subsets. “
Under this heading, if a group of coworkers is speaking out about a coworker who consistently takes credit for each other’s ideas, it can actually be helpful: they caution each other to be careful. to what they say around the colleague in question. , thus helping to protect each other. If, on the other hand, coworkers speculate whether the coworker is having an affair or complains about the person’s annoying but basically harmless tics, ventilation no longer has a productive purpose. It’s just vindictive.
Left unchecked, this latter type of gossip can lead to a team or an entire workplace overrun with cliques, paranoia, and pettiness.
When the ventilation crosses a line
It is not clear what the content of Netflix’s marketing executives was to blame, although a source familiar with the situation says there was nothing racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory about the posts. Without knowing more about the words or the circumstances that motivated them, it is difficult to get an outside opinion on the merits of the layoffs.
In general, however, companies need to understand that a certain amount of blaming coworkers is natural. (Think beleaguered human resources officer Toby Flenderson from the classic NBC sitcom Office, who handled most of the complaints from colleagues to each other by simply allowing them to let off steam, then put the documents away in a box, never responding to them.) But when colleagues are cruel to each other or are spreading rumors, this must be closed.
If you’re a reluctant participant in a coworker’s ventilation session, take inspiration from organizational psychology expert Liane Davey and try to channel the conversation into more constructive avenues. “Make it clear that you are happy to talk about the situation and the underlying emotions,” Davey writes in the Harvard Business Review, “but not people who are not there to defend themselves.”
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