Ex-Netflix HR Director: Cuting Low Performing is good for morale

• The debate recently turned into technology around the reduction of “weak performers”.
• A former Netflix HR director says proactive layoffs can improve morale among high performance.
• He also explained the cultivation of netflix feedback and transparency.

From Meta to Microsoft, technological companies recently brought an ax to “weak performers” – and their actions have caused a certain debate on the potentially harmful nickname.

Netflix has never been shy about its high performance culture, embodied by its famous culture memo which made its debut in 2009 and has been revised since.

“We only aim to have high performance,” said the note. Like a professional sports team, the streamer focuses on “choosing the right person for each position, even when it means exchanging someone he loves with a better player”.

Cheick Soumaré, a former director of Netflix HR, said that this culture was essential to keep the performance very happy.

If very efficient employees Seeing colleagues who have not managed to gain their weight and this is not controlled, “their morale decreases, and that creates other problems,” Soumaré at Business Insider.

Soumaré supported several teams from 2020 to 2022, including legal affairs and affairs as well as government relations.

“We want to be very clear that we think that excellence in colleagues around you is super important,” said the Netflix co-PDG, Greg Peters, on the Podcast Decoder last year. “Insofar as the company evolves or moves and we think that there is a change that must be made, we will.”

Netflix has a high level of feedback and transparency

Regarding the management of performance problems, Soumaré said that he admired the cultivation of Netflix transparent feedback.

Netflix’s culture note says that “the extraordinary franchise” is a key value to assemble a “dream team”. And rather than quarterly or annually, comments should occur daily, “as brushing your teeth”.

Soumaré said that these tenants reflect practices on the ground – so much so that when he started, transparency surprised him.

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Weeks after his mandate, he said he received an email across the company’s company level from Netflix, describing an employee who had been replaced after meeting expectations.

“I said to myself:” Wow, speaks of transparency “,” said Soumaré.

A spokesperson for Netflix said he was no longer sending emails on a business level explaining why someone had been released, but refused to specify when the practice stopped.

Soumaré said that the culture of Netflix was not unjustly cute. He said that anyone with performance problems had received “several feedback cycles” before being released.

“ Garden test ” from Netflix

Netflix is ​​known for its distinctive culture, which includes its “guardian test”, another practice used to eliminate sub-performants.

The company updated its culture note last year, including a slight adjustment of the “goalkeeper test”. This part of the note says that if a manager did not fight to keep an employee or rehir them with hindsight, “we think it is fairer for everyone to separate quickly”.

In 2017, the former CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings – currently its executive president – used the test to dismiss a close friend, former product manager Neil Hunt.

“You have to separate the emotion from logic,” said Hunt at the time.

And Hastings said he was also applying vanity to his last adventure: Utah Ski Resort Powder Mountain.