Netflix文化甲板
Netflix Culture & Values Reference Guide
Core Values
- Netflix's culture is built around nine core values that define the behaviors and skills the company values most:
- Judgment: Making wise decisions despite ambiguity.
- Communication: Listening well, being concise, treating people with respect, and maintaining calmness under pressure.
- Impact: Accomplishing significant work, demonstrating strong performance, focusing on results, and exhibiting bias-to-action.
- Curiosity: Learning rapidly, understanding the company's strategy and market, and contributing effectively outside of one's specialty.
- Innovation: Reconceptualizing issues, challenging assumptions, creating new ideas, and keeping the company nimble.
- Courage: Saying what you think, making tough decisions, taking smart risks, and questioning actions inconsistent with values.
- Passion: Inspiring others, caring intensely about Netflix's success, celebrating wins, and being tenacious.
- Honesty: Being candid, direct, non-political, and quick to admit mistakes.
- Selflessness: Seeking what is best for Netflix, being ego-less in searching for the best ideas, helping colleagues, and sharing information openly.
Hiring and Employee Management
- Netflix practices "adequate performance gets a generous severance package," focusing on hiring well and developing stars rather than treating employees like family.
- The "Keeper Test" helps managers identify valuable employees they would fight to keep if they were considering leaving.
- Netflix values loyalty but also recognizes the importance of high performance and avoids tolerating "brilliant jerks."
- The company is intense about high performance because the best employees in procedural and creative work are significantly more effective than the average.
Freedom and Responsibility
- Netflix believes responsible people thrive on freedom and are worthy of it.
- The company increases employee freedom as it grows to attract and nourish innovative people, unlike most companies that curtail freedom with size.
- Netflix avoids chaos by increasing talent density faster than complexity grows, rather than relying on rules and processes.
- The company distinguishes between "good" processes that help talented people get more done and "bad" processes that try to prevent recoverable mistakes.
- Examples of Netflix's approach to freedom and responsibility include its vacation policy ("there is no policy or tracking") and its simple expense policy ("Act in Netflix's Best Interests").
Context, Not Control
- Netflix believes the best managers create the right context for employees to succeed, rather than trying to control them.
- The company provides clear strategy, metrics, objectives, roles, knowledge of the stakes, and transparency around decision-making.
- Managers are encouraged to ask what context they failed to set when an employee does something dumb.
Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled Teamwork
- Netflix favors a "highly aligned, loosely coupled" model of teamwork, where strategy and goals are clear, broadly understood, and interactions are on strategy rather than tactics.
- This model requires minimal cross-functional meetings, trust between groups on tactics, and proactive outreach for ad-hoc coordination.
- This approach is effective because it relies on high-performance people and good context.
Pay Top of Market
- Netflix believes paying top of market is core to its high-performance culture, as one outstanding employee is more valuable than two adequate employees.
- The company uses three tests to determine top of market compensation: what the person could get elsewhere, what they would cost to replace, and what they would cost to keep if they had a higher offer elsewhere.
- Netflix conducts annual comp reviews based on market value, with no fixed budgets and compensation not dependent on Netflix's success.
- The company offers optional stock options and provides a high-efficiency compensation model with a focus on big salaries.
Promotions and Development
- Netflix believes individuals should manage their own career paths and that their economic security is based on their skills and reputation.
- The company provides opportunities for growth and development by surrounding employees with "stunning colleagues" and giving them big challenges.
- Formalized development programs are rarely effective, as high-performance people generally improve through experience, observation, introspection, reading, and discussion.
- The company believes in promoting employees who are "superstars" in their current role and whose promotion is necessary because the job is too big for them.
Conclusion
- Netflix's culture is designed to support continuous growth in revenue, profits, and reputation by fostering rapid innovation and excellent execution.
- The company's values, hiring practices, emphasis on freedom and responsibility, focus on context rather than control, and commitment to paying top of market are all aligned to attract and retain high-performance employees who can work effectively together.
- Netflix's culture is a work in progress, and the company continuously refines its approach to maximize its likelihood of long-term success.
