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Netflix Culture Manual
Netflix Culture Manual
Netflix Culture Manual
MANUAL
We seek excellence
Our culture focuses on
help us achieve
excellence
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Aspects of our culture
1
We value the values
2
High performance
3
Freedom & responsibility
4
Context, NOT control
5
Highly aligned, loosely coupled
6
We pay the best salaries
7
Promotions & development
Many companies have
statements of values that
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Translated by: Picc
They sound good at the entrance,
such
as:
Trust
Effectiveness
Reputation
Service
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ODEBRECHT
*In said scandal, they were involved in
corrupt practices to more than 10 governments of
Latin America. At the time, they exhibited
these values in your input:
Trust
Efficiency
Reputation
Service
(However, these values were not what was actually
valued at Odebrecht)
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The real values of the company
are the behaviors and
skills that are valued in
coworkers
At Netflix, we especially value
the following 9 behaviors and
skills in our colleagues...
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We promote people who
show
1) Criterion
• You make good decisions despite ambiguity.
• You identify the root causes and go beyond
treating the symptoms.
• You think strategically and can articulate
what you are and what you are not.
• You intelligently separate what needs to be
done now and what can wait for later.
2) Communication
• You listen well, instead of reacting quickly, so
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you can understand better.
• You are concise and articulate when
speaking and writing.
• You treat people with respect, regardless of
their status or disagreement with you.
• You remain calm in stressful situations.
3) Impact
• You do amazing amounts of important work.
• You consistently demonstrate excellent
performance, so your colleagues can trust
you.
• You focus on getting great results instead of
the process.
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• You show a bias towards action and avoid
analysis paralysis.
4) Curiosity
• You learn quickly and with enthusiasm.
• You seek to understand our strategy, market,
clients and suppliers.
• You have extensive knowledge of business,
technology and entertainment.
• You contribute effectively outside your
specialty.
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5) Innovation
• You re-conceptualize problems to discover
practical solutions to difficult problems.
• You challenge assumptions when warranted
and suggest better approaches.
• You create new ideas that prove to be useful.
• You keep us agile by minimizing complexity
and finding time to simplify.
6) Courage
• You say what you think, even if it's
controversial.
• You make difficult decisions without
agonizing.
• You take smart risks.
• You question actions inconsistent with our
values.
7) Passion
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• You are tenacious.
8) Honesty
• You are known for your directness and
direct style
• You are not political when you disagree with
others.
• You only say things about coworkers that
you will say to their face.
• You are quick to admit mistakes.
9) Selfless
• You're looking for what's best for Netflix,
rather than what's best for you or your
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group.
• You have no ego when you look for the best
ideas.
• You make time to help your colleagues.
• You share information openly and
proactively.
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6
We pay the best salaries
7
Promotions & development
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Imagine if every person in
Netflix is someone who
respect and learn from...
A great workplace has
Awesome Colleagues
A great workplace is not coffee, benefits
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luxurious, sushi lunches, grand parties
or nice offices
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Like all companies,
we try to hire well
Unlike many companies,
we practice:
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generous severance package
We are a team , not a family
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we have stars in every position
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Would you fight to keep it on Netflix?
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People who fail the test should
get generous compensation now, to
that we can open a space to find a
star for that role
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Honesty ALWAYS
As a leader, no one on your work team
You should be surprised by your views.
Honesty ALWAYS
Candor is not just the responsibility of a
leader. Periodically you should ask your
manager: "If I told you I was leaving, how hard would it
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be
Would you work to change my opinion?"
We are all responsible for
ensure that we live
Our values
"Question actions incompatible with our
values" is part of Courage
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they do it"
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Corporate team
The more talent we have,
more we can achieve, so our people
they help each other all the time
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Isn't loyalty good?
What about people
workers?
What about idiots
bright?
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Loyalty is good
• Loyalty is good as a stabilizer
• People who have been stars for us and who have
had a bad run get a short pass because we think
they are likely to shine for us again.
• We want the same thing: if Netflix has a bad streak,
we want people to stay with us
• But unlimited loyalty to a shrinking company, or an
ineffective employee, is not what it's about.
Hard work: not relevant
• We don't measure people by the number of hours
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they work
• We care about doing great work
• Sustained performance at an acceptable level,
despite much effort, generates a generous
compensation package
• Sustained excellent performance, despite minimal
effort, is rewarded with more responsibility and
excellent pay.
Brilliant Idiots
• Some companies tolerate them
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• Diverse styles are fine, as long as the person
embodies our 9 values
Why are we so
insistent on the high
performance?
In procedural work, the best
They are 2 times better than average
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which are a great advantage in creating
the best effective teams
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Why are we so
insistent on the high
performance?
A great workplace has
Awesome Colleagues
Our high performance culture
not suitable for everyone
• Many people love our culture and stay a long time
– They thrive on excellence, sincerity and change
– Others will be disappointed if we have to let them go, but
they will still retain warmth and mutual respect for the
company
• Some people value job security and stability over
performance, and they don't like our culture
– They feel afraid on Netflix
– They become bitter if we let them go, and feel that we are a
political place to work
• We're getting better at attracting only the former and helping
the latter realize we're not right for them.
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4
Context, NOT control
5
Highly aligned, loosely coupled
6
We pay the best salaries
7
Promotions & development
The rare responsible person
• Enthusiastic
• Self conscious
• Disciplined
• In search of continuous improvement
• Act like a leader
• Does not wait to be told what to do
• Pick up trash from the floor
Responsible people
They thrive in freedom and are
worthy of freedom
Our model is to increase the freedom of
employees as we grow,
instead of limiting it...
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...to continue attracting and nurturing
innovative people, so that we have
more chances to sustain our success
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Most companies
They restrict freedom as
they get bigger
Freedom of
Equipment
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Why do most companies
restrict freedom
and become bureaucratic as
do they grow?
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The desire for greater impact
positive creates growth
Complexity
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Growth is also often
reduces talent density
performance
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Chaos emerges
% Employees
High
performance
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The process emerges to stop the
chaos
No one likes
process, but it
feels good
Procedures
compared to the pain of
chaos
"Time to grow" becomes the
mantra of professional
management
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% High employees
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Then the market changes
• Changes in the market due to new technologies or
competitors or business models
• The company cannot adapt quickly -Employees are
extremely good at following existing processes,
and adherence to the process is in the value
system
• The company usually dies painfully in irrelevance
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talent faster than
complexity grows
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Increase talent density
high
performance culture
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• Few big products versus many small ones
• Eliminate Distracting Complexity
• Beware of efficiency optimizations that increase complexity and rigidity
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With the right people,
Rather
a culture of adherence to the process,
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Is it absolute freedom?
Are all rules and processes bad?
Freedom is not absolute
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limited exceptions to
"freedom at work"
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Two Types of Necessary Rules
1.Prevent irrevocable disasters
- Accounting is bad
- Hackers steal our customers' credit card
information
2. Moral, ethical and legal issues
- Dishonesty, harassment are intolerable
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- High performing people make very few mistakes
• We are in a creative and inventive market, not a
safety-critical market like medicine or nuclear energy
• You may have heard that preventing the error is
cheaper than fixing it
- Yes, in manufacturing or medicine, but...
- Not so in creative environments
"Good" versus "bad" process
- The "good" process helps talented people do more things:
- Inform others when you are updating code.
- Spend within budget so you don't have to coordinate all
spending decisions between departments.
- Periodic strategy and context meetings scheduled.
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- Permission required to hang a poster on a wall. - Multi-level
approval process for projects.
- Get 10 people to interview each candidate.
Slip Rule
• "Bad" processes tend to slip:
-Error prevention sounds great
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of N days per year
Meanwhile…
We all work online some
nights and weekends, responding
emails at odd hours,
spending some afternoons in time
staff and taking good vacations
An employee pointed out...
We do not record hours worked by
day or week, so why
we are tracking the days of
holidays per year?
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We realized…
We should focus on what the
people, not how many days they worked
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Policy and monitoring
Netflix vacation
"There is no politics or follow-up here"
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No vacation policy
does not mean
No Vacation
Netflix leaders set good examples by
take a big vacation - and come back
inspired to find great ideas
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Another example of freedom and
responsibility ...
Most companies have policies
complex about what you can spend, how
he travels, what gifts he can accept, etc.
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Netflix Policies
for expenses, entertainment, gifts
and trips:
"Act in the best interest of
Netflix"
(7 words long)
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"Acting in the best interests of
Netflix" generally means .
1 .Spend only what is necessary, and it is worth the
work
2 .Travel as if you were traveling with your own
money
3 .Disclose non-trivial gifts from suppliers
4 .Take Netflix only when it is inefficient not to take it,
and inconsequential
- "take" means, for example, printing personal documents at
work or making personal calls on the work phone:
inconsequential and inefficient to avoid it
Summary of
Freedom and Responsibility:
As we grow,
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We minimize the Rules
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3
Freedom & responsibility
4
Context, NOT control
5
Highly aligned, loosely coupled
6
We pay the best salaries
7
Promotions & development
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If you want to build a boat,
you won't get the people
to collect wood, divide the
work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to long for
vast and endless sea
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Author of The Little Prince
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The best managers discover how to get
excellent results establishing the context
appropriate, instead of trying to control his people
Context, not control
Provide the insight and understanding to enable decisions
correct
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• Goals
• Clearly defined roles
• Knowledge of the challenges
• Transparency in decision
making
Control (avoid)
• Top-down decision making
• Management approval
• Committees
• Planning and process valued
more than results
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Good context
• Link to company/functional objectives
• Relative priority (how important/how time sensitive)
- Critical (must happen now), or...
- Good to have (when you can get to it)
- Level of precision and refinement
- No errors (debt management, etc.), or...
- Pretty good/can fix bugs (website), or...
- Crashed (experimental)
• Key stakeholders
• Key metrics/definition of success
Managers: when one of your talented people
does something stupid
don't blame him
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Instead,
ask yourself what context
you failed to establish
Managers: When you are tempted to "control"
to your people, ask yourself what context they might
set in place
Why manage
through context?
High-performing people will make a
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better job if you understand the context
Invest in context
This is why we invest in training
of new employees, we hold meetings
department frequenters, and why we are so
open internally about strategies and results.
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Exceptions to "Context, not
control"
• Control can be important in an emergency
- There is no time to adopt a long-term capacity
development vision
• Control can be important when someone is still
learning their area
- It takes time to grasp the necessary context
• Control can be important when you have the wrong
person in a role
- Temporarily, without a doubt
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3. Highly aligned, loosely coupled
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1. Monolith closely
coupled
• Senior management closely reviews all tactics
• Lots of n-department purchasing meetings
• Keeping other internal groups happy has the same
precedence as happy customers
• Rebels exhaust themselves trying to innovate
• Highly coordinated through centralization, but very
slow, and the slowness increases with size
2. Independent silos
• Each group executes its objectives with little
coordination
-Everyone does their own thing
• Work requiring coordination decreases
• Disconnection and suspicions between different
departments
• It only works well when the areas are independent
- For example, General Electric aircraft engines and
blenders
#3 is Netflix's choice
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3. Highly aligned, slightly
coupled
• Highly aligned:
- Strategies and objectives are clear, specific and widely understood
- Team interactions focused on strategy and objectives, rather than
tactics
- Requires a large investment in management time to be transparent,
articulate and perceptive
• Loosely coupled:
- Minimal cross-functional meetings, except to align with objectives
and strategy
- Trust between groups in tactics without anticipating/approving each
of them, so that groups can move quickly
- Leaders who proactively approach coordination and ad-hoc
perspective, as appropriate
- Late Tactics Needed to Increase Lineup
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The effectiveness of highly teamwork
aligned and loosely coupled depends on the
high performance of people and
the good context
The goal is to be
Big, Fast and Flexible
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Aspects of our culture
1
We value the values
2
High performance
3
Freedom & responsibility
4
Context, NOT control
5
Highly aligned, loosely coupled
6
We pay the best salaries
7
Promotions & development
Pay the best salaries on the market
is the core of the
High Performance Culture
An exceptional employee does more and costs
less than two suitable employees
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We strive to have only employees
exceptional
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cost
- Pay them as much as we would pay to keep
them if they had a higher offer from somewhere
else
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Titles are not very useful
• Many people have the title of "Major League
Pitcher" but not all are equally effective
• Likewise, all people with the title "Senior
Marketing Manager" or "Director of Engineering"
are not equally effective.
• So, the art of compensation answers the Three
Tests for Every Employee
No fixed budgets
• There are no centrally managed "surge
groups" each year
• Instead, each manager aligns his people to the
top of each year's market: the market will be
different in different areas.
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Compensation throughout
time
• Some people will move up quickly because
their value in the market is rising rapidly, due
to strengthening of their skills and/or high
demand in their area.
• Some people will stay in the same role
because their market value has remained
constant:
- Depends partly on inflation and the economy
- We will always guarantee that it is at the top of the
market in which it operates.
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• The manager gives everyone a 4% raise
- Very unlikely to reflect the market
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Versus traditional model
• The traditional model is good the previous year
earns a raise, independent of the market - The
problem is that employees can be underpaid or overpaid
relative to the market, over time
- When wages are underpaid, employees change
companies to take advantage of the market
- When overpaid too much, employees become trapped in
their current company.
• Consistent market-based payment is a better
model
Employee success
• It is quite ingrained in our society that the size
of the salary increase is the indicator of how
well one did the previous year - But for us the
other factor is the external market
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compensation.
- Please be aware of confidential company information.
Efficiency
• A large salary is the most efficient form of compensation
- The most motivating for any given spending level
- No bonuses, no free stock options, no philanthropic match
- Instead, put all that spending into big salaries and give people the
freedom to spend their salaries however they think best
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Optional options
• Employees get the best salary on the market,
and can then request to exchange the salary
for stock options
• Some people take all the cash, others ask for
half of their compensation options
- They are both fine
• This is consistent with freedom and
responsibility, and allows employees to decide
how much risk/reward they are comfortable
with.
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• These fully vested options vest monthly at the current stock price, so
employees get an average price of their exercise price
• These options cost employees less than half of what those options
would cost on the open market, and they come from a pre-tax salary,
so it's a great deal.
No irrevocability or
deferred compensation
• We don't want managers to "own" their team - all
compensation is fully set centrally.
• We want managers to be accountable for creating a great
place to work and pay at the top of the market
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• Employees are free to leave us at any time, without
penalty, but almost all stay
• Employees stay because they are passionate about their
jobs and are well paid, not because of a deferred
compensation system.
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Aspects of our culture
1
We value the values
2
High performance
3
Freedom & responsibility
4
Context, NOT control
5
Highly aligned, loosely coupled
6
We pay the best salaries
7
Promotions & development
In some periods of time, in some groups,
there will be many opportunities and growth in
Netflix
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Some people, both luckily
as for talent, they will have a
extraordinary professional growth
Baseball Analogy: Passing
minor to major leagues
• Very talented people tend to get promoted,
but it's only true for very talented people.
• A little luck in terms of what positions open
up and what the competition is
• Some people move to other teams to get the
opportunity they want
• Great teams keep their best talent
• Some minor league players continue to play
even if they don't get promoted because they
love the game.
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Netflix doesn't have to be for
everyone
life
• At some times, in some groups, there may not
be enough growth opportunities for everyone
• In which case, we should celebrate someone
leaving Netflix for a bigger job we didn't have
available to offer them
-If that is what the person prefers
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2. He has to be a superstar in his current position:
-You could get the next level of job here if you apply from
abroad and we know your talents well
-You could get the next level of work at a company that knows
your talents well
Synchronization
• If a manager would promote a person to
prevent them from leaving, the manager
should promote them immediately instead of
waiting.
• Both tests still need to be passed
1. Big enough job
2. Superstar in current position
Development
• We develop people by giving them the
opportunity to develop, surrounding them
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with amazing colleagues and giving them
great challenges to work on
- Mediocre colleagues or unchallenging work
is what kills the progress of a person's skills
Professional "planning"
it's not for us
• Formalized development is rarely effective,
and we don't try to do it
- for example, assigning mentors, rotating
around a firm, multi-year career path, etc.
We support improvement
staff
- High performers generally improve
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themselves through experience, observation,
introspection, reading, and discussion.
- As long as they have awesome colleagues and great
challenges to work on
- We all try to help each other grow
- We are very honest with each other
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We want people
manage your own
professional growth and
don't trust a corporation
to "plan" their careers
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Your economic security is based
on your skills and reputation
We strive to provide a
constant opportunity to grow
surrounding yourself with great talent
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3
Freedom & responsibility
4
Context, NOT control
5
Highly aligned, loosely coupled
6
We pay the best salaries
7
Promotions & development
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We continue to improve our
culture as we grow
We try to improve in
pursuit of excellence
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If you want to recruit talent
100% online.
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