Freedom And Responsibility

The true enabler of “no rules” at Netflix, the true enabler of their high trust culture, was the fact that they did better hiring…

“If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.”

Instead of creating endless rules and processes, which is how most companies deal with major growth, Netflix asserted that a business should focus specifically on two things:

1. Invest in hiring high-performance employees. Train then and coach them well all the time.

2. Build and maintain a culture that rewards high-performers, and weeds out continuous, unimproved low performers.