Netflix updates its company culture deck, gets pushback, Co-CEO explains it

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos defended the company's move to update its culture deck by ditching the freedom and responsibility section

Netflix updated its famous culture deck in June after 12 months and getting 1,500 employee comments, but still received pushback for it, according to a Business Insider report which added that the company's co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the original version put “more emphasis on freedom than responsibility.”

A man stands next to a logo of Netflix during an event in Mumbai, India, February 29, 2024. (Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters)

What are the details of the new culture deck update at Netflix?

In the update, the streaming platform ditched the freedom and responsibility section of the culture deck and added a new one called “People Over Process.”

This new section focuses on hiring "unusually responsible people" who thrive on openness and freedom, according to the report.

Apart from this, it also added a line to its "Keeper's Test." This test, introduced in 2009 is used to determine when its time to let an employee go if they wanted to leave.

The line includes a disclaimer which says everyone is encouraged to talk to their managers regularly about what is going well.

What did Netflix's Co-CEO say about the culture change?

“When anyone says, 'Hey, the culture is changing.' Yes, of course it needs to. We definitely change the culture,” Sarandos said during an interview at The Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference. “We wanted to reflect how we work, not dictate how we work.”

The culture memo was referred to by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg as being "the most important document ever to come out of the valley," and was previously updated in 2022 where Netflix suggested employees could quit if they didn't want to work on content they disagreed with.