Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said Netflix is facing internal backlash over updating its famous culture memo. Speaking at the conference, Sarandos defended the move and said the company’s culture needs to change. Netflix’s core values prioritize responsibility as much as freedom, Sarandos said. .
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After 12 months and 1,500 employee comments, Netflix updated its famous culture deck in June.
On Tuesday, co-CEO Ted Sarandos defended the move after receiving backlash for the update in an interview at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference. “We’re always working on improving our culture,” Sarandos said. “So someone says, ‘Hey, the culture is changing.’ Yes, of course we need to change the culture. We want to reflect the way we work, not dictate how we work. That’s what I thought.
In a June update, Netflix is doing away with the Freedom and Responsibility section of the Culture Deck and replacing it with a new one called “People Over Process” that focuses on hiring “unusually responsible people” who value openness and freedom. Added section.
It also added items to the infamous “Keeper’s Test.” Managers decide when to fire an employee by asking themselves whether they would fight to keep the employee if he or she wanted to leave. The new version includes a disclaimer encouraging everyone to regularly talk to their managers about what’s going well.
Netflix’s “Keeper’s Test” was introduced to the public in a 100-plus page memo published in 2009. Sarandos said Netflix founder Reed Hastings created the culture memo when the company had fewer than 300 employees and said it was a “perfect fit” for the company’s environment. needs at that time. But then Netflix added staff and became the world’s largest streaming platform.
“I think this was one of the things that we didn’t discount the evolution of the document,” Sarandos said. “But it’s actually more reflective of the business culture of today’s 14,000 employees.”
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Sarandos said the original version was probably “more about freedom than responsibility.”
“And I think we need to have both: a way to rebuild some of those things,” Sarandos said. “But all the core values of the new document are in the old document, right?”
The memo, which Meta’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg once referred to as potentially “the most important document ever to come out of the valley,” was created by a top internal team. The aim is to maintain a culture that attracts talent and an environment that attracts top talent.
The company has previously updated its memo, including a 2022 rewrite that celebrates “expression” and “artistic expression” while maintaining the document’s focus on meritocracy. Netflix suggested in its 2022 update that employees can quit if they don’t want to work on content they don’t agree with.
Representatives for Netflix did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
