Entertainment, like friendship, is a basic human need; it changes our feelings and provides us with common ground. We want to entertain the world. If we succeed, there will be more laughter, more empathy, and more joy.

To achieve this goal, we have an amazing and unusual employee culture. This document is about this culture.

Like all great companies, we strive to recruit the best talent. We value integrity, excellence, respect, tolerance and collaboration. However, what makes Netflix special is that we:

1. Encourage employees to make independent decisions

2. Share information openly, widely and consciously

3. Very honest with each other

4. Only keep us high-performance people

5. Circumvent the rules

Our core philosophy is that people are better than processes. More specifically, we have excellent people working together as a dream team. In this way, we are a more flexible, more interesting, more exciting, more creative, more collaborative and more successful organization.

True value

The true value of a company lies in who gets rewards or lets go. The following are our values, the specific behaviors and skills we care about most. The more these values sound like you and describe the people you want to work with, the more likely you are to thrive on Netflix.

judge

• Despite the ambiguity, you will still make an informed decision

• You determine the root cause and go beyond treating the symptoms

• You think strategically and can clearly express what you are and are not trying to do

• You are good at using data to inform your intuition

• You make decisions based on the long-term rather than the short-term

communication

• You are concise and clear in your speech and writing

• You are good at listening and seek understanding before reacting

• You stay calm and calm under stressful situations, eliciting the clearest thinking

• You adjusted your communication style to work with people around the world who may not speak your native language

• You provide frank, useful and timely feedback to colleagues

curiosity

• You learn fast and hot

• You have made effective contributions outside of your profession

• You make connections that others have missed

• You try to understand our members around the world and how we entertain them

• You seek a different perspective

courage

• You speak your thoughts when it’s in Netflix’s best interests, even if it’s uncomfortable

• You make difficult decisions without suffering

• You take wise risks and are open to possible failure

• You question behavior that does not conform to our values

• You can become vulnerable and find the truth

enthusiasm

• You motivate others with your desire for excellence

• You care about our membership and the success of Netflix

• You are tenacious and optimistic

• You are quiet and confident, openly humble

Selfless

• What you seek is best for Netflix, not for yourself or your team

• You are open-minded, seeking great ideas

• You make time to help colleagues

Innovation

• You create new ideas that prove useful

• You reconceptualize the problem to find the solution to the problem

• You challenge common assumptions and come up with better methods

• You keep us agile by minimizing complexity and taking time to simplify

• You thrive in change

tolerate

• You work effectively with people of different backgrounds and cultures

• You cultivate and accept different perspectives to make better decisions

• You realize that we all have prejudices and work hard to overcome them

• If others are marginalized, you will intervene

• You are curious about how our different backgrounds affect our work, instead of pretending that they don’t affect us

Upright

• You are known for being candid, truthful, transparent and apolitical

• You only talk about the things you talked about in person about your colleagues

• You admit your mistakes freely and publicly

• You respect others, regardless of their status or disagreement with you

• You always share relevant information, even if it is worrying

Influence

• You have done an amazing amount of important work

• You have demonstrated consistently excellent performance, so colleagues can trust you

• You make your colleagues better

• You focus on the result rather than the process

It is easy to write admirable values; it is even harder to live in them. When describing courage, we said: "You question behaviors that are inconsistent with our values." We hope that everyone will help each other, practice values, and let each other take on the responsibility of being role models. This is an ongoing extension of ambition.

When describing integrity, we say: "You only speak the words of a colleague you speak in person." This attribute is one of the most difficult attributes for newcomers to believe and learn to practice. In most cases, whether it is social or work, those who consistently speak their true thoughts will quickly be isolated and expelled. We strive to allow people to provide professional and constructive feedback to each other on a continuous basis—both in the upper and lower levels or the entire organization. Leaders show that we are all prone to mistakes and are willing to accept feedback. People often ask others: "Can I do better?" and themselves, "What feedback have I not shared yet?"

We believe that if we can reduce the pressure of giving and receiving feedback and make it a more normal part of our work life, we will learn faster and better. Compared with occasional formal practice, feedback is an ongoing part of the way we communicate with each other and work. We build trust by selflessly providing feedback to colleagues, even if doing so is uncomfortable. Feedback helps us avoid constant misunderstandings and the need for rules. If there is a strong underlying relationship and trust between people, it is easier to exchange feedback, which is part of the reason why we invest time in developing these professional relationships. We commend those who are very frank, especially those in important positions. We know that this level of frankness and feedback can be difficult for new employees in different parts of the world and people whose direct feedback is not common. We actively help people learn how to do this at Netflix by guiding and shaping the behaviors we want to see in each employee.

Dream team

In Dream Team 1, all your colleagues have performed well in their work and are effective collaborators. The value and satisfaction of joining the dream team is immense. Our view of great workplaces is not great gyms, luxurious offices or frequent gatherings. Our version of the great workplace is a dream team, they pursue ambitious common goals, for which we paid a heavy price. It is in such a team that you can learn the most things, complete the best work, increase the fastest speed and get the most fun.

Getting the entire company including the dream team (not just a few small groups) is challenging. There is no doubt that we must recruit well. We must also promote cooperation, accept diverse views, support information sharing, and block politics. The unusual part is that we provide generous 2 severance pay for enough performers so that we can find a star for the position. If you think of a professional sports team, the coach needs to make sure that every player on the field performs well in their position and plays very effectively with others. We model ourselves as a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love, despite the bad behavior of your brothers and sisters. The dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate, caring about your teammates, and knowing that you may not stay in the team forever.

We don’t have a bell curve, rankings, or quotas, such as “cutting the bottom 10% every year”. This is not conducive to promoting collaboration, and it is a simplistic, rules-based approach that we will never support. We focus on the manager’s judgment through the “goalkeeper test” for everyone: if a member of the team wants to leave another company, will the manager try to prevent them from leaving? Those who fail the goalkeeper test (that is, their manager will not fight to keep them) will give generous severance pay quickly and respectfully so that we can find someone suitable for the position and make us a better dream The team. Being cut from our team is very disappointing, but there is nothing shameful. Joining the dream team may be the thrill of a career.

In view of the positioning of our dream team, it is very important for managers to communicate with each team member about their position, so there are few surprises. In addition, any employee can ask their manager at any time, "If I want to leave, will you try to change my mind?" In the tension between honesty and kindness, we tend to be honest. However, no matter how honest we are, we will respect others.

One might think that if you focus on the dream team, people will be afraid of making mistakes. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite. We tried various things and made many mistakes in the process of seeking improvement. The goalkeeper test is used to judge someone's overall expected contribution.

In the coveted team, collaboration and trust work well because your colleagues are very good at what they do and are good at working with others. When describing selflessness, we say "You take time to help colleagues. You share information openly and proactively." We hope that new colleagues feel very welcome and get all the support they need to work effectively.

People like loyalty, it is a good stabilizer. If their performance drops temporarily, employees with a good track record at Netflix will have room for maneuver. Similarly, we require employees to stick to Netflix during any short-term decline. However, unconditional loyalty to a stagnant company, or loyalty only to well-performing employees, is not what we care about.

In the Dream Team, there are no "genius bastards". The cost of teamwork is too high. Our view is that talented people can also have decent interpersonal relationships, and we insist on this. When high-quality people work together in a collaborative environment, they will motivate each other to make the team more creative and efficient, and ultimately succeed as a team than as a group of people.

Success in a dream team is about being effective, not hard work. Continuous "B" grade performance, despite striving to get "A" grade, but will still get a decent severance pay. Continuous "A" performance will be rewarded even with moderate effort. Of course, to become great people, most of us have to put in considerable effort, but hard work and long hours are not how we measure or talk about a person’s contribution.

Joining the dream team is not for everyone, it doesn't matter. Many people attach great importance to job security and are more willing to work in a company that is more focused on stability, qualifications, and resolving inconsistent employee efficiency. Our model is best for people who value the consistent excellence of their colleagues.

In order to help us attract and retain outstanding colleagues, we pay salaries according to the highest level of the employee’s personal market. We have sincerely estimated the highest salary that each employee can get in the peer company and paid them the highest salary. Usually, we calibrate the market once a year. We do not consider these to be "raises" and there are no allocable raising pools. This is how the talent market is. We avoided the "appropriate salary increase of 2%, excellent salary increase of 4%" model. The market value of some employees will rise rapidly (due to their performance and the shortage of talent in their field), while other employees may be flat year after year despite their outstanding work. At any time, our goal is to pay all our employees the highest salary in their personal market.

Please note that if our company encounters financial difficulties, we will not require our employees to accept lower wages. A sports team with a record of failure still pays the highest individual market fees for players they want to return to winning positions. On the other hand, if the company does a good job, our widely distributed stock options will become very valuable.

In the final analysis, your financial security depends on your skills and reputation, not your seniority in a company. At Netflix, you can learn a lot in the process of solving problems with great colleagues, and what you learn will increase your market value. It is comforting to know that if you leave Netflix, other companies will hire you soon. We believe that occasional external interviews are beneficial and encourage employees to talk to their managers about what they have learned in the process.

Although our teammates are great and we work well together, we know we can always do better. We strive to have calm confidence while eager to make progress. Compared to how great we want to be, we are terrible.

Freedom and responsibility

In some companies, people ignore the trash on the office floor and let others pick it up. In some companies, people in the office leaned over and picked up the trash they saw, just like at home. We strive to be the latter, making everyone responsible for doing the right thing and helping the company at every critical moment. Picking up rubbish is a metaphor for dealing with large and small problems. I never think that "that's not my job." We have no rules about picking up real or metaphorical garbage. We try to create a sense of ownership and make this behavior happen naturally.

Our goal is to motivate people, not to manage them. We believe that our team will do what they think is best for Netflix-giving them a lot of freedom, power, and information to support their decisions. In turn, this creates a sense of responsibility and self-discipline, which drives us to do great work that is beneficial to the company.

We believe that people thrive by being trusted, free and able to make a difference. Therefore, we promote freedom and empowerment as much as possible.

In many organizations, there is too much emphasis on process rather than freedom. These organizations didn't start in this way, but every time there was a problem, the python of the process would tighten even more. Specifically, many organizations have freedom and responsibility at an early age. Everyone knows each other, and everyone picks up rubbish. However, as they grow, the business becomes more and more complex, and sometimes the average talent and enthusiasm level will drop. As informal, smoothly functioning organizations began to collapse, there was some chaos. The general protest was to "grow" and add traditional management and processes to reduce chaos. With the proliferation of rules and procedures, the value system evolved to follow the rules (that is, this is how you get rewarded). If this standard management method is done well, then the company becomes very efficient in its business model-the system is anti-counterfeit and tells creative thinkers to stop questioning the status quo. This organization is very professional and well adapted to its business model. However, in the end, in 10 to 100 years, business models will inevitably change, and most of these companies cannot adapt.

In order to avoid the rigidity of over-specialization, to avoid the chaos of growth, while retaining freedom, we strive to make our business as simple as possible, to make our growth ambitions high, and to continuously improve the level of excellence of our employees. We strive to have a company of self-disciplined people who find and solve problems without being told.

We are committed to increasing the freedom of employees 3 to fight process pythons. Some examples of how we operate with unusual degrees of freedom are:

• We share files extensively and systematically internally. Almost every document is completely open for anyone to read and comment, and all content is cross-linked. Memos about the performance of each game, each strategic decision, each competitor, and each product feature test are open to all employees. There are some leaks, but the value of highly informed employees is well worth it.

• There is almost no expenditure control and contract signing control. Every employee should seek advice and opinions as appropriate. "Use good judgment" is our core philosophy.

• Our travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expense policies are only 5 words: "act in Netflix's best interest."

• Our holiday policy is "vacation". We do not have any rules or tables on how many weeks per year. Frankly speaking, we mix work and personal time together, send emails at strange times, take a break in the afternoon on weekdays, and so on. Our leaders ensure that they come back often with new ideas through vacations and encourage the rest to set good examples. The team did the same.

• Our parental leave policy is: "Take care of your baby and yourself." New parents generally need 4-8 months.

• Every employee chooses the salary and stock options they want every year. You can choose all cash, all options, or any combination that suits you4. You can choose the risk and upside you want. These 10-year stock options are fully vested, and you can keep them even if you leave Netflix.

• No compensation handcuffs (attribution) require you to stay and withdraw money. People can leave at any time without losing money, but most people choose to stay. We hope that managers will create conditions so that people like to work here, enjoy excellent work and generous remuneration.

You might think that such freedom will lead to chaos. But we also have no clothing policy, but no one goes to work naked. The lesson is that you don't need all policies. Most people understand the benefits of wearing clothes at work.

There are some important exceptions to our anti-rule, pro-free concept. We are very strict on ethics and safety issues. For example, harassing employees or using inside information to conduct transactions is a zero tolerance issue. Some information security issues, such as keeping the payment information of our members safe, have strict control over access. There are strict controls on transferring large amounts of cash from our company's bank account. But these are edge cases.

Generally speaking, free and fast recovery is better than trying to prevent mistakes. We are in a creative business, not a safety-critical business. Over time, the biggest threat we face is the lack of innovation, so we should be relatively fault-tolerant. If people have good judgment, then a quick recovery is possible. The tempting thing is that error prevention sounds good, even though it is usually ineffective. If too much error prevention hinders creative work, we always remain vigilant.

In rare cases, freedom is abused. For example, we have a senior employee responsible for organizing rebates for IT contracts. But these are exceptions, and we avoid excessive corrections. Just because a few people abuse freedom does not mean that our employees are not worthy of high trust.

Some processes are about increasing productivity rather than avoiding mistakes. We like processes that help us accomplish more. One such process that we are good at is effectively scheduling meetings. We hold many types of meetings on a regular basis; we start and end on time, and have a well-prepared agenda. We use these meetings to learn from each other and do more work, not to prevent mistakes or approve decisions.

Informed captain

For every major decision, a responsible captain makes a judgment after sharing and digesting the opinions of others. We avoid the committee’s decision, because that would slow us down and spread responsibility and accountability. We support dissent; dissent is not natural or easy, which is why we work together to inspire it. Many times, the group will meet and debate on the topic, but then someone needs to make a decision and become the "captain". Small decisions may only be shared via email, large decisions require a memo to discuss various positions and why the captain made such a decision. The larger the decision, the greater the scope of objection/consent collection, usually in a publicly shared file. However, we are very clear that the decision is not made by a majority vote or a committee vote. We will not wait for a consensus, nor will we rush to make quick, uninformed decisions. When the person responsible for any particular decision has reasonable confidence in the correct bet we are taking, they will make the decision and we will take that bet. Later, as the impact becomes clearer, we will reflect on this decision to see if we can do better in the future.

Disagree publicly

If you have a disagreement on a major issue, it is your responsibility to explain why you disagree, preferably through discussion and in writing. The back and forth of the discussion can clarify different points of view, and the concise writing of the core issues helps people reflect on what is wise, and it also facilitates the wide sharing of your views. The informed captain who made the decision has the responsibility to welcome, understand and consider your opinions, but may disagree. Once the captain makes a decision, we hope everyone can help it to be as successful as possible. Later, if important new information is available, you can ask the captain to re-discuss the topic. Silent differences are unacceptable and futile.

Uncontrolled context

We want employees to be excellent independent decision makers and only consult their managers when they are unsure of the right decision. The job of leaders at each level is to set a clear background so that others have the correct information to make the usual major decisions.

We don’t believe in the legends of senior leaders. They pay so much attention to details that their products or services become amazing. The legend of Steve Jobs is that his micromanagement makes the iPhone a great product. Others took it to new extremes, proudly calling themselves nano-managers. The heads of major networks and studios sometimes make many decisions during the creation of their content. We will not imitate these top-down models, because we believe that we are the most effective and innovative when the entire company's employees make and independent decisions.

We strive to cultivate good decision-making skills throughout the company. We are proud of the small number of decisions made by senior management, not the number of them. However, we do not want non-interference management. The responsibility of each leader is to teach, set the background and fully understand what is actually happening. The only way to figure out how the context settings need to be improved is to explore detailed examples. But unlike micro-managers, the goal of understanding these details is not to change some small decisions, but to learn how to adjust the context in order to make more decisions.

There are some minor exceptions to "context cannot be controlled", such as when there is no time to consider the appropriate context and principles in an emergency, or when a new team member has not absorbed enough context to self-confidence, or when people realize that it is wrong People in decision-making roles (no doubt, for the time being).

We tell people not to try to please their boss. Instead, seek to serve the enterprise. It's okay to disagree with your manager. It is never good to hide anything. You can say to your manager, "I know you disagree, but I will do X because I think this is a better solution. If you want to overturn my decision in particular, please let me know." We don't want people Guess what their manager will do or want, and then execute according to the guess.

Highly aligned, loosely coupled

As companies grow, they tend to become highly concentrated and inflexible. Symptoms include:

• Senior management is involved in many small decisions

• There are many cross-departmental support meetings to socialize strategies

• Pleasing other internal groups takes precedence over pleasing customers

• The organization is highly coordinated, not prone to errors, but slow and frustrating

We avoid this situation through high alignment and loose coupling. We spent a lot of time discussing strategies together, and then trusting each other to execute tactics without prior approval. Usually, two groups working on the same goal will not know or approve their peer activities. If the event looks wrong later, we will have a frank discussion. We may find that the strategy is too vague or that the tactics are inconsistent with the agreed strategy. We generally discuss how to do better in the future.

The success of a "highly consistent and loosely coupled" work environment depends on the collaborative efforts of high-performing individuals and an effective environment. Ultimately, the ultimate goal is to grow the business to have a greater impact, while increasing flexibility and agility. We pursue big, fast and flexible.

Pursue excellence

New employees often commented in the months before joining that they were surprised by the accuracy of this cultural description and the actual culture they experienced. All over the world, we live and create our culture together. In fact, hundreds of our global employees have contributed to this document.

We do not seek to protect our culture-we seek to improve it. Everyone who joins us helps to further shape and develop culture. We look for new ways to do more work together. Every few years, we feel that our operational efficiency is truly different from the past. Our learning speed is faster than ever, because I​​ We have more dedicated people with different perspectives, and they are working hard to find better ways for our talented team to work together more unitedly, more flexibly, and more effectively.

Generalize

As we wrote at the beginning, what makes Netflix special is that we:

1. Encourage employees to make independent decisions

2. Share information openly, widely and consciously

3. Very honest with each other

4. Only keep us high-performance people

5. Circumvent the rules

finally

The author of "The Little Prince" Antoine de Saint-Exupéry showed us the way:

If you want to build a ship

Don't agitate the people

Collect wood, divide

Work, give orders.

Instead, teach them to desire

For the vast and boundless sea.

1We are referring to the team you dream of, not the 1992 US men's basketball team.

2 We usually provide at least four months' full salary as severance pay, so that our former teammates have time to find a new company.

3 Mainly for our salaried employees; due to legal requirements, our hourly workers have many restrictions in this regard.

4Unfortunately, the tax laws of some countries do not support employee choice (Singapore, Japan, France, South Korea, Taiwan)

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