Life Meets Work Blog

Apparently, people have known for a while now about the Netflix vacation policy: “There is no policy.” Cool, right?

But the recent release of an internal presentation on company values has put renewed focus on the company’s workforce management.

Netflix seems to be manic about attracting and retaining high performance people. And by that they mean the very best of the best. And by that they mean that if someone ‘adequate’ is standing in the way of someone really good, they have the balls to say goodbye to the former and keep the latter.

The slide deck is inspiring really. Show it to your employees and see if you don’t see a quick spike in energy and all-around responsibility. (Is that a piece of trash on the floor? Well of course I’ll pick it up.)  Show it to your managers and see if they ‘get it’ enough to act on it.

Netflix management is called upon to make the hard choices.

Slide 26: Adequate performance gets generous severance.

Netflix understands it’s hard to be a results-based organization, but they’re trying away.

Slide 33: It’s about effectiveness – not effort – even though effectiveness is harder to assess. We don’t measure people by how many evenings or weekends they are in their cube. We do try to measure people by how much, how quickly and how well they get their work done – especially under deadline.

Netflix treats its employees like responsible adults.

Slide 39: Responsible People Thrive on Freedom and are Worthy of Freedom

Slide 106: Give people big salaries and the freedom to spend as they think best. (e.g. no bonuses, no free stock, no charity match, high health co-pays)

Netflix recognizes its value in an employee’s career—wherever it takes them.

Slide 117: An individual’s economic security is based upon their skills and reputation. We try hard to consistently provide opportunity to grow both.

Hell yeah.

Posted by Jaime Leick

New survey results released by the Society for Human Resource Management says 70+% of American workers work through lunch, work overtime and take work home on the weekends.

And the motivation for logging all these hours doesn’t appear to be the result of some top-down mandate, but rather our own internal sense of what it takes to succeed. Only 21% said they worked extra hours because of pressure from an immediate supervisor, and only 12% attributed it to upper management.

So how do we rate our productivity? That’s what I’d like to hear from this 70% group. Are we generating all sorts of results during these 50+ hour weeks? Do we feel energized and creative at 2:00 after skipping our lunch break? Are we healthy and happy and stress free?

Or, are we marking time at our desks because the employee in the office the longest “must be” the most dedicated (a la George Costanza)? Are we wasting hours away in idle chat or non-productive tasks because we really do need those mental breaks?

Are we ravaging our free time, by dragging out our work day, accomplishing the same amount of work in more time thanks to the sheer inefficiency of exhaustion? And if so, why?

Perhaps, it’s a tragic case of escalation. Silent peer pressure, if you will. And if that’s the case, managers must take the lead and model a better way.

Posted by Jaime