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Higher education professionals can look to Netflix for inspiration about how to develop their careers and find the right cultural fit. Instead of watching “The Chair” or other shows and movies set on college campuses, try reading Netflix’s memo about culture for the company’s 13,000 employees.
The memo gained attention when it was first published in 2009 for its “keeper test,” and, after it was met with some criticism from employees and business bloggers, Netflix has since revised the document four times.
There are other aspects of the memo that can inform the way higher education professionals approach their work, but first, let’s take a look at the keeper test.
Keeper Test
As part of their talent development and employee retention strategy, Netflix has managers ask themselves, “If your employee wanted to leave, would you fight to keep them?” Or “Knowing everything I know today, would I hire this employee again?” If the answer is no, they believe it’s fairer to everyone to part ways quickly, along with a “generous severance.”
The updated versions of the memo have a softened description of this keeper test. In an interview earlier this year with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Netflix’s co-CEO Greg Peters explained that the original articulation incorrectly communicated a sense that the company was a “harsh” or “cutthroat” workplace. The revised memo still has the keeper test questions but acknowledges that the company will stick with employees through “short-term bumps.”
“We encourage everyone to speak to their managers about what’s going well and what’s not on a regular basis. This helps avoid surprises,” the memo reads. “Managers also evaluate team members on their whole record, rather than focusing on the mistakes or bets that didn’t pay off.”
The keeper test is intended to maintain a “high performance culture” that functions more like a professional sports team than a family. Their “Dream Team” concept is about picking the right person for every position, even when that means swapping out someone they love for a better player. It places performance over seniority, tenure, or unconditional loyalty.
Tenure Test
Netflix’s emphasis on optimizing performance might seem too aggressive or capitalistic for academia. But higher education has its own keeper test. It’s called tenure. And it’s not all about time served or services rendered.
“Tenure is a hire, not a reward,” wrote Michael Munger in “Scaling the Ivory Tower: The Pursuit of an Academic Career.” “Your contract as an assistant professor is expiring, after six years. Your 50 colleagues have to decide whether to offer you a new, lifetime contract. This may sound like a cruel, calculating business, but that is only because it is. Make them need you, make them need your contributions to the educational and intellectual life of the department. Otherwise, nothing personal, but they will fire you.”
Netflix’s keeper test description was modified to give employees space to be creative without fear of losing their job. The tenure test in higher education puts productivity before risk-taking.
“To get tenure, assistant professors have to prove they can hit,” wrote Jason Brennan in his book about succeeding in academia, titled “Good Work If You Can Get It.” “Tenured faculty are now encouraged to hit home runs, to shoot for highrisk, big ideas.”
Brennan goes on to provide evidence that tenured faculty often don’t begin swinging for the fences after earning tenure. Many become complacent. Perhaps their work needs to be more what Netflix calls “uncomfortably exciting.”
Run Experiments
Netflix has enjoyed unprecedented success as a company that creates programming for more than a half a billion people, but to sustain success and stay relevant, they challenge workers to “be bold and ambitious, to think differently, experiment and adapt (often quickly).” Remember, Netflix no longer mails DVDs to subscribers. They evolved. They had to.
You might be happy settling into your tenured job or have secured an administrative position. After all, you’ve earned it. But if a company like Netflix sees a need to constantly change, then what’s that say about those who work in an unstable industry like higher education that’s ripe for disruption?
As the memo says, “Netflix works best if you value experimentation, enjoy the uncomfortable excitement of a new or challenging project and have the resilience to thrive in this environment.”
Put People Over Process
One of the ways that companies stifle creativity is through rigid processes intended to dummy-proof their organizations. Netflix gives employees the freedom to exercise their judgment by laxed vacation and expense policies.
While colleges and universities are known to afford employees relative autonomy, with an emphasis on shared governance and working across disciplines and units, higher education is still very hierarchical, and faculty and staff sometimes prefer to work in silos or rely on decisions by committee.
“We aim to inspire and empower more than just manage, because people can have a greater impact when they’re free to make decisions about their own work,” the Netflix memo reads. “While we’ve had our fair share of failures — and a few people have taken advantage of our culture in bad ways — our emphasis on individual autonomy has created an extremely successful business, with many opportunities for employees to develop and grow.”
The lesson here is to be responsible with your freedoms in higher education and use them for good. And if you feel like your institution has become too process-driven, seek ways to break down barriers or decide to grow elsewhere.
Strive Toward a Better Future
Finally, don’t succumb to the belief that there was some golden era of higher education that has passed you by in your career. Enrollments or government funding might not be what they used to be, but your predecessors had to deal with issues or find solutions to problems.
You might be part of a generation of higher education professionals who must push the envelope to succeed — or, as Netflix did with their red envelopes, get rid of them altogether and try something different.
“We often say Netflix sucks today compared to where we can be tomorrow,” to quote the company’s great-and-always-better principle. “We need the self-awareness to understand what should be better, and the discipline and resilience to get there.”
In Conclusion
Netflix and higher education might be worlds apart when it comes to mission and workplaces, but with the keeper tests and the need to constantly improve the culture for employees to thrive, they are, to borrow from a binge watcher’s experience, based on similar interests. That makes the memo recommended reading.
