- Debate has swirled in tech recently around cutting “low performers.”
- A former Netflix HR director says proactive firings can improve morale among high achievers.
- He also explained Netflix’s culture of feedback and transparency.
From Meta to Microsoft, tech companies have recently been taking an ax to “low performers” — and their actions have caused some debate about the potentially damaging moniker.
Netflix has never been shy about its high-performance culture, embodied by its famous culture memo that debuted in 2009 and has been revised since.
“We aim only to have high performers,” the memo says. Like a professional sports team, the streamer focuses on “picking the right person for every position, even when that means swapping out someone they love for a better player.”
Cheick Soumaré, a former Netflix HR director, said this culture was key to keeping high performers happy.
If high-achieving employees see colleagues failing to pull their weight and it goes unchecked, “their morale goes down, and that creates other problems,” Soumaré told Business Insider.
Soumaré supported several teams from 2020 to 2022, including business and legal affairs as well as government relations.
“We want to be very clear that we do think excellence in having the colleagues around you is super important,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said on the Decoder podcast last year. “To the degree the business evolves or moves and we think there’s a change that needs to be made, we will make it.”
Netflix has a high level of feedback and transparency
When it came to handling performance issues, Soumaré said he admired Netflix’s culture of transparent feedback.
Netflix’s culture memo says “extraordinary candor” is a key value in assembling a “dream team.” And rather than quarterly or annually, feedback should happen daily, “like brushing your teeth.”
Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Soumaré said those tenants mirror practices on the ground — so much so that when he first started, the transparency took him aback.
Weeks into his tenure, he said he received a companywide email from one of Netflix’s co-CEOs describing an employee who’d been replaced after not meeting expectations.
“I was like, ‘Wow, talk about transparency,'” Soumaré said.
A Netflix spokesperson said it no longer sends companywide emails explaining why someone was let go, but declined to specify when the practice stopped.
Soumaré said Netflix’s culture wasn’t unjustly cutthroat. He said anyone with performance issues received “several rounds of feedback” before being let go.
Netflix’s ‘keeper test’
Netflix is known for its distinctive culture, which includes its “keeper test,” another practice used to weed out underperformers.
The company updated its culture memo last year, including a slight tweak to the “keeper test.” That part of the memo says if a manager would not fight to keep an employee or rehire them in hindsight, “we believe it’s fairer to everyone to part ways quickly.”
In 2017, former Netflix CEO Reed Hastings — currently its executive chairman — used the test to fire a close friend, former chief product officer Neil Hunt.
“You have to separate the emotion from the logic,” Hunt said at the time.
And Hastings has said he’s also applying the conceit to his latest venture: the Utah ski resort Powder Mountain.
