16 December,2020 06:18 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
If there was no one literally breathing down your neck, looking over your shoulder all the time, would you work the same? Representation pic/Getty Images
How? So long as his employees kept the camera of their computers on all through, pointed to the chair, so everybody knew they were on it. Eh? What kinda highly distrustful douche would say that about colleagues he chose to voluntarily work with?
This notion is still in line with face plus desk-based work cultures/economies, that care far more for the numbers of hours you put in. Rather than what you eventually accomplish from it.
The cover of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Netflix founder Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Netflix founder Reed Hastings argues in his latest book No Rules Rules that while the working world and its creative demands have changed dramatically, "most companies are still following paradigms of the Industrial Revolution that have dominated wealth creation for the last 300 years!"
What's Hastings' contribution to corporate culture as a work-life solution? Pretty much since the turn of the millennium, he's been running a company that has no vacation policy - employees take one as and when they like, and for however long they want; no records kept. There is no travel and expense policy - you spend what you believe is right; no questions asked.
Likewise, no pay grades, performance improvement plans, or bonuses. No hierarchical decision-approvals; lower management signs off on major deals/contracts - they're often encouraged to override their superior's opinions, based on personal instinct/hunch/experience...
How does all of this work? While it still may have been okay when Netflix had 80 employees in 2003, it has 7,000 across the world now? In the book, Hastings neatly organises his thoughts in the traditional debating style of - 'tell them (the reader), what you want to tell them; tell them; tell them, what you've told them'. He drills in his key points again and again.
The most telling aspect of it being, quite simply, that freedom automatically equals responsibility, and vice versa. As long as you're surrounded by top talents, who're therefore self-driven. And nobody takes their job for granted. They can't. But they're encouraged to take risks, and bet big. They're also in a feedback loop, from across an apparently transparent, organisational food chain. It is considered disloyal to disagree, and not express it.
The sense I get is Hastings likens work environment to an individual sport - with the rock-star in the middle, allowed to swing at highest potential, without worries - as much as a collective/team sport, where everybody is equally mindful of their individual positions on the field. Cricket seems like the fairest analogy to me. Although I'm pretty sure he hasn't played it.
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, co-authored by Erin Meyer - who tests all of the founder's theories in practice, inside the company - is in effect an HR handbook. Hardly of earth-shattering interest to those in the larger media/entertainment industries, which for the most part veer toward independent gig economies anyway.
But Netflix is a tech company, before an entertainment conglomerate. Like Amazon Prime, or YouTube, why even Facebook. They thrive on innovation. You can tell that first from the user experience on their apps - compared to third-rate ones by content companies, say Sony Liv, Disney+Hotstar, Zee5, etc.
2020 was probably that year when most companies were forced to work a little like Netflix, or at least how Hastings puts it in his book. By which I mean, slightly away from the usual "rules and process approach (punch in, punch out; long committee meetings), that has been the primary way of coordinating group behaviour for centuries."
Would people, for instance, take more holidays/leaves, just because they could? Would they fly short-haul first class, because nobody checks why they did? Does Hastings, by his own admission frugal with expenses, have a strong 'reed ki haddi' (spine) to trust his lot so much?
Well, he has what he calls a 'Keeper Test', where employees are regularly checked for whether they're still the best at what they do - if not, they can be replaced, right away; that's it. Yet the attrition rate at Netflix, according to his book, is on par with the industry average. So it's not even about losing/saving your job, by not getting caught napping, is it?
Here's a question that millions of employees, even employers, working from home (WFH), which effectively means Work From Anywhere (WFA), must've asked in 2020: If there was no one literally breathing down your neck, looking over your shoulder all the time, would you work the same (because you do it for yourself, first)? Surely there will be research on people's productivity levels, when the dust settles.
I was just drawn to Hastings and his theories, because in a year when the economy couldn't have been hit harder, Netflix had around frickin' 30 local/desi releases (films, series, specials). Hits or not, that's like the combined output of a film industry - forget a major studio's. And I'm just talking about India - alone. Coming from a company headquartered half a world away (in Silicon Valley). Whether anybody checks, surely nobody just chills. Good to know why!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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