Netflix Company Culture Slides Provide Key Take-Aways for Entrepreneurs

This past week I was very interested to read the "leaked" 128-slide Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) culture presentation. It is great to see large companies taking culture seriously and it is obvious this presentation was not leaked since it was embedded on the company's jobs page. Although the presentation is a quick read, it gives you a good idea of the culture they are trying to create at Netflix. What is most surprising is that this is from a public company, many of which never enter into a process of trying to really grow a strong company culture. As an entrepreneur and co-founder of a company that prides itself on providing a flexible and innovative work culture, I was also surprised to see Netflix discuss core values and vacation policy. Their vacation policy is particularly unique: they do not track time off. At Grasshopper, we give 4 weeks' paid time off, which is a lot. Netflix's approach to vacation policy is not just unusual, it raises a couple of questions in my mind, such as: How does the company manage a vacation policy where employees can take off as much time as possible? Does it reduce the usage of time off, and does it reduce the liability when they terminate someone? I'm not asking these questions because I think it's a bad policy, but interested to understand the impact.

After thinking about the vacation policy, I focused on the core values section of the presentation. Netflix gives an excellent introduction to why core values must be authentic, but not all Netflix's core values are not unique to their company, which makes me question whether they're genuine about having real core values. They stayed away from the common mantra of "trust and respect," for the most part, but do have 'honesty' in there as part of the nine values. I would argue that these are ground rules, not core values--they're the bare minimum necessary to even "play the game" and should not be called out as a company's unique core values. To be clear, core values are what differentiate a work culture, define how people fit into the culture and answer the difficult decisions. Why would any good company hire someone that was not honest? You don't list "honesty" as a core value because every good company wants honest employees--this doesn't make Netflix unique. Calling out Enron and others is great, there are many people that have written about making core values mean something and I am sure many would agree 'honesty' is not a unique core value.

Whether you agree with everything in the presentation or not, every entrepreneur, senior manager, and HR person should check out the presentation. There are some great concepts to inspire you and get you thinking about your workplace. It's true, not all will work in every person's work environment, but you should pick and choose which ideas fit and could make your work culture vastly superior to others'.

Netflix Culture Presentation