Permanent Vacation

If you’re looking for a new template for your employee handbook, check out the “Reference Guide on our Freedom and Responsibility Culture” from Netflix. You might think that a huge, public company has some pretty tight controls on its people. But a 128-slide presentation at www.techcrunch.com shows how little top-down management the company practices.

Take the Netflix vacation policy – there isn’t one. In 2004, Netflix eliminated its traditional vacation policy. An employee pointed out that managers’ time worked wasn’t tracked, so why track time off? Upper management realized it should focus on what people get done, not how many hours they log at their desk.

There also is no dress code. One company executive is quoted as saying “no one has come to work naked lately, either.”

The company says it doesn’t put a lot of stock in fancy value statements ensconced in board rooms. What it wants in its employees are nine attributes: judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty and selflessness.

An “adequate performance gets a generous severance package.” In other words, if you’re here to do just OK work, you’re in the wrong place and thank you very much for stopping by.

Netflix operates like a pro sports team, hiring – and cutting – smartly. Managers use this so-called “keeper test”: Which one of your employees, if they told you they were leaving in two months for a job at a competitor, would I fight hard to keep?

Have some names? Good. Get rid of everyone else, they say.

But what about someone who just comes in every day and works hard? That’s great, but working 80 hours a week doesn’t make you the best at what you do. What matters is that you do great work fast.

To be fair, these rules and regs apply to the company’s salaried – not hourly – employees. But lawn and landscape companies would do well to at least consider how their own people would operate if given a little more wiggle room. If you hire the right people, you can give them a lot of freedom and responsibility. And they probably won’t show up to work naked.