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The 5,400 Netflix employees are encouraged to share their feedback, online, in person … and on occasion, during a dinner.
Shalini Ramachandran and Joe Flit of The Wall Street Journal have spoken to over 70 current and past Netflix employees for a report on the company's radically transparent work culture.
Not much is kept secret for the company. Senior Netflix executives, like directors and officers, have access to each employee's salary and compensation history. To give their opinion, employees use software called "360" for an annual review of any employee of the company, including its managing director, Reed Hastings. Some leaders choose to share 360 feedback with their teams.
And sometimes teams make a version of these reviews in person.
Ramachandran and Flit report that some Netflix teams organize dinners or luncheons where colleagues take turns giving comments or criticisms to other people at the table. Leaders call this "360 real-time".
"It can be intense and embarrassing," Wall Street Journal Brandon Welch, a former talent executive, told The Wall Street Journal.
Employees are encouraged to be as responsive as possible and managers are required to honestly indicate the required skills. One of the most intense examples of this transparent culture is the "guardian's test". In the memo about Netflix's online culture, the company writes, "We focus on the judgment of managers by means of the" guardian's test "for each of their employees: if any of the members of was planning to leave for another company, would the director try to stop them from leaving? "
Nathan McAlone of Business Insider has previously reported that people who fail the test receive severance pay and are fired. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hastings had even used the guardian's test to decide to fire his product manager and his friend after 18 years in the company.
Some directors revealed to the Journal that they felt obliged to dismiss people or risk being "soft" to other executives. In 2017, Netflix had a redundancy rate of 8%, which is above the average of 6%. However, Netflix had a turnover rate of 11%, lower than the average of 13% of technology companies, the newspaper reported. Netflix disagrees on the fact that his culture is hard, noting to the Journal that he ranks second in the list of the 2018 list of the happiest employees of Comparably.
In response to the Wall Street Journal article, Netflix told Travis Clark of Business Insider:
"We firmly believe that it is important to maintain a high-level culture and give people the freedom to do their best.Less controls and greater accountability allow our employees to thrive, by taking smarter and more creative decisions, which means even more entertainment for our members.believe that some parts of this article do not reflect the way most employees experience the Netflix experience, we are constantly working to learn and we improve. "
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