Employee handbooks, also known as procedure or workers’ manuals, are vital assets for employers and staff. The documents give individuals, especially newly recruits, an overview of policies specific to a company and routines, procedures, benefits, or guidelines. Generally, companies’ field guides set expectations for employees while stating legal requirements and defining rights. The manuals can help protect a business against worker lawsuits, harassment, wrongful terminations, and discrimination. Moreover, the handbooks are useful to newly hired staffs to give insights to understand missions or core values better (Gilani & Cunningham, 2017). The purpose of this paper is to provide a report about the culture encouraged by the employee handbook.
Describing Netflix Culture
Netflix’s culture is about people and their values, as it focuses on the essential things that are fundamental to human needs. Like friendship, entertainment is a basic human want since it changes how individuals feel, providing a common ground. Netflix aims to entertain the world to induce laughter, empathy, and joy. The company establishes an amazing culture through key components, practices, behaviors, and routines to get there.
For example, similar to other organizations, Netflix strives to recruit the best workers, valuing integrity, excellence, inclusion, respect, and teamwork. What makes the company unique is how it encourages independent decision-making by staff, sharing data broadly, openly, and deliberately, avoids rules, and maintains effective people. The company’s core philosophy is about people over processes, and more specifically, there are great individuals working together as a team (Netflix, 2021). With that approach, the company is flexible, creative, stimulating, collaborative, and successful.
Netflix culture establishes a focus on real values, which are shown by those who get rewarded. Usually, there are particular skills, practices, and behaviors that the organization cares most about. The more they are embraced by workers, the better the chance to thrive at the company. Examples of values that make up the company’s culture are judgment, communication, courage, curiosity, selflessness, innovation, passion, impact, and integrity. The company stipulates that employees should be precise in communication and avoid saying bad things about others. Such an attribute is challenging to the new staff to believe as well as learning to practice it.
Otherwise, employees with gossip behaviors would be acting against the company social norms and should be banished. The company believes in hard work while availing feedback across the organization. Leaders are pillars to demonstrate people at Netflix are fallible and open to information. Furthermore, Netflix culture is built by vital aspects of freedom, responsibility, dream team, informed people, disagreeing openly, high alignments, and seeking excellence.
Current Employee Handbook and Findings
Netflix employee handbook supports the culture by providing guidelines for workers, especially new staff, to follow and familiarize themselves with the company’s key expectations. At the beginning of the manual document, the company stipulates what gives Netflix the best chance of thriving for many generations of people and technology. With that, it is straightforward for new hires to understand what must be emulated and be part of continued success (Kumar & Pandey, 2017). The handbook provides key aspects that make up the organization’s culture, and they include values, high performance, freedom and responsibility, context and not control, promotions as well as developments. Therefore, the document supports the findings that key ingredients make up Netflix culture, and individuals familiarize themselves as they integrate.
Furthermore, the Netflix employee handbook supports the culture by pointing values statements that most organizations establish on their premises. On the contrary, as opposed to the commonly known ideals of excellence, respect, integrity, and communication, the document contract by noting other standards that make up a culture. They include behaviors or skills that are particularly envied in fellow people during promotion, getting rewards, and letting go. Particularly, employees assert value to certain behaviors exhibited by other staff, including judgment, communication, curiosity, impact, passion, courage, and innovation. Incredibly, the Netflix worker handbook supports the idea that organizational culture is built by key elements as aforementioned.
Summary of Netflix Current Employee Handbook
Netflix employee handbook is one of the most viewed documents on the website; perhaps this is due to organizational culture’s popularity. What is interesting about the manual is its straightforward information on the elements of culture. Most organizations have such resources for workers but serve an unintended purpose, for instance, codifying a fantasy view of the organization that might not be real. Netflix makes the handbook interesting by showing the values statements. For instance, the company rightfully points out that culture is what one does but not what is said to be (Netflix. 2021). Real company values are portrayed by people who get rewards, promotions, or let go. The guide informs that effectiveness is crucial than the effort itself, and though this is gold, it is difficult to practice since efforts are easily measurable than effusiveness. For example, the effort can be assessed in terms of the number of hours worked, people who stay late, or the amount of work accomplished per specified period.
Moreover, the manual informs about employee freedom that increases with growth. It is an exciting statement to support culture in the company as it describes a variant of innovators issues, how they affect culture, and intends to avoid traps of success of growth. The message is to increase talent density faster than complications. However, the challenge is that even if the company fires less talented employees, the talented match their expertise and protect their jobs as much as ungifted employees. As time pass by, such people will defend the old ideas. In the document, another element pointed is good versus bad processes. The idea communicated is that processes or rules must help talented employees to work faster. However, a flawed process will protect or limit an individual’s behavior to deter things from occurring.
Netflix employee handbook supports the practice of honesty gained from reading human resource development materials about being truthful. To avoid being caught by surprises, the manual requires employees to periodically ask leaders or managers for information (Netflix, 2021). The guide advocates the state of loyalty to brilliant hard workers. From studies, honesty is a vital characteristic in business since it sets the tone for the type of culture a company wants to establish (Nwokolo et al., 2016). Furthermore, honesty provides consistency in workplace behaviors, builds trust in clients and prospects. According to (Nwokolo et al., 2016), being honest is not about telling the truth but being authentic to oneself and other people about what one wants. In addition, alongside the value of honesty, there is loyalty.
Netflix employee handbook points out that loyalty is a good stabilizer, and this supports work performance, retention, and motivation from human resource development concepts. The manual defines that if Netflix hits a bad patch, it wishes individuals to stick and disregard unlimited loyalty to ineffective staff. Loyalty in workers encourages people to do their best and perform to the highest standards (Netflix, 2021). Once a business has loyal people, then there are rewards in terms of productivity. The loyalty of staff lowers the rate of turnover that can be experienced within an entity (Pradhan & Jena, 2017).
Moreover, the workers’ guide support high performance within an organization as best practice in human resource. A high-performance individual will do their best once they understand contexts or what needs to be done. From readings, organizations are looking to cultivate a corporate culture to perfection and that ay no worker leaves dissatisfied. A high-performing corporate culture is crucial because employees look forward to going to their jobs. As such, individuals are likely to enjoy when working without spending a day doing anything.
Corporate culture is the main point when individuals are job hunting, which is becoming vital with the modern workplace’s evolution. Employees want to know a company’s culture, which is primarily a decision-making factor when recruiters evaluate prospective workers. According to Mostafa (2017), qualities of a high-performing culture include embracing a change mindset, team backup, low turnover, sense of accountability. Individual empowerment to make the right decisions and display of good leadership at all levels are feature of a positive culture as well.
Actionable Recommendations for Improving the Handbook
A well-drafted employee handbook should serve a vital role in the company by outlining policies, providing ground rules for behaviors, and establishing a positive workplace. Moreover, the documents can serve as a policy to protect an entity from legal questions rising from consistent treatments. A poorly written guide, on the contrary, will subject an organization like Netflix to legal battles. Employees-handbook should pinpoint common scenarios occurring in the workplace. Most importantly, a company should keep the resource updated with local regulations. In the Netflix employee manual, there are significant changes that should be made to improve the guidelines. An example of this is stipulating the company’s crucial policies that people ought to be familiar with. Notably, the Netflix employee culture guide has failed to high key principles that every employee should know about. Instead, it stipulates that there is no need to detail policies for everything and emphasize freedom and responsibility.
First, the company’s employee handbook should involve important policies to sharpen operations, activities, or duties and overcome unnecessary issues. An employee manual must be a go-to resource for all of the organization’s policies and operating procedures. Everything must be noted in the documents o that workers do not have to search in other resources such as online or old mails to trace policy statements. Alongside this suggestion, updates must be made to the guide each time new programs are introduced or when new laws are enforced. For instance, as a technology company, Netflix can adopt a new resource that changes the way particular requests from workers are made, and this should be included in the manual.
Second, I recommend the employee handbook to include business challenges. Primarily, the central idea of having an employee manual guide is to make people recognize the organization dynamics and be certain about expectations in the workplace. However, most companies fail to disclose their potential burdens on the guide and prepare workers less to anticipated situations. In the Netflix employee handbook, the policy mentions that the company develops individuals by providing them with opportunities to grow themselves. Further, it points out that people develop by familiarizing themselves with surrounding colleagues as well as challenges. For that, the document does not mention the sort of obstacles new workers will likely encounter on the way (Kumar & Pandey, 2017). Suggestively, the guide should cover business obstacles since every organization has its problems that workers should keep in mind.
Thirdly, I recommend the listing of a company’s special benefits packages that people must know about. Every organization has reward systems, privileges, and offers that define it in the eyes of workers. Including them on the employee tour guide will induce high morale compared to standards that often are or low utilization rates. Individuals love to work for companies with specialty, uniqueness, and according to studies, such people are more productive (Jaworski et al., 2018). Some companies such as Zappos, Google, or Dyn have built their workplaces around special identifies and are rewarded repeatedly as best employers.
Lastly, I suggest the Netflix employee handbook include important legal statements such as the equal opportunity for employment. In that way, the company’s document will give insight into organizational culture values towards the diverse population. Key federal or state employment laws should not be overlooked when formulating a handbook for workers. Some policies govern crucial practices and define clear paths for discrimination in the workforce based on race, sexuality, age, gender, disability, or genetic information. Having such information in the handbook will ensure employees, especially the recruits, know that the company values people and their differences.
Impacts of Changes on Corporate Culture
Changes in the employee handbook will positively promote an organizational culture by influencing employees’ expectations, behaviors, motivation, and productivity. For instance, changing the document to include the company’s benefits, legal issues on employments, and necessary policies will make individuals set the right tone in the workplace. Knowing the company’s available rewards systems is a great motivational factor for someone wishing to join the organization. Moreover, outline vital policies on the guide will prepare workers on essential things such as what to expect, know the organization’s history, and set employment relationship standards.
Workers’ performance is likely to improve once individuals know their roles, missions, duties, and expected values. For example, by changing the employee handbook to incorporate business challenges, benefits, and expected policies to be respected, people commit to giving their best. A worker will perform productively after knowing there are rewards for meeting specific duties, roles, or objectives. Alternatively, employees will work effectively observing their behaviors, which impacts performance through better collaboration and communication.
Organization goals and objectives are impacted positively by an updated employee handbook that stipulates roles, values, policies, or core elements of culture. Achieving the organization’s goals is possible effective communication strategies and updated manuals are examples of tools used to establish better relationships within the company. The document would be a valuable communication resource since policies and vital laws are outlines that govern people’s behaviors as well as performance
In summary, this paper has looked at the employee-handbook as a valuable tool to pace culture and practices within an organization. Notably, the most important thing about a worker manual is to help understand a company and its policies or procedures for better performance. Netflix employee handbook is among the most envied documents informing how to establish and shape organizational culture. Leaders should ensure employees’ guides are well updated to remain purposeful and promote strong cultures.
References
Gilani, H., & Cunningham, L. (2017). Employer branding and its influence on employee retention: A literature review. The Marketing Review, 17(2), 239-256. Web.
Jaworski, C., Ravichandran, S., Karpinski, A. C., & Singh, S. (2018). The effects of training satisfaction, employee benefits, and incentives on part-time employees’ commitment. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 74, 1-12. Web.
Kumar, N., & Pandey, S. (2017). New employee onboarding process in an organization. International Journal of Engineering Development and Research, 5(1), 198-206. Web.
Mostafa, A. M. S. (2017). High-performance HR practices, positive affect and employee outcomes. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 32(2), 163-176. Web.
Netflix. (2021). Netflix employee culture guide. Airmason. Web.
Nwokolo, E. E., Ifeanacho, N. C., & Anazodo, N. N. (2016). Perceived organizational justice and leadership styles as predictors of employee engagement in the organization. Nile Journal of Business and Economics, 2(4), 16-28. Web.
Pradhan, R. K., & Jena, L. K. (2017). Employee performance at workplace: Conceptual model and empirical validation. Business Perspectives and Research, 5(1), 69-85. Web.
