Netflix insiders describe the internal 'postmortem' emails that break down why employees were fired — and what it's like to write one
. As such, firings happen regularly, and are followed by the postmortem emails or meetings.
When an employee is fired at Netflix, a postmortem email explaining the person's departure is written by that person's manager, in collaboration with human resources, according to the Netflix insiders, who included three former employees who said they had drafted postmortems during their time at the company. It may say something like, "X was let go today because of communication issues," or, "We had to let X go.
"Being part of Netflix is like being part of an Olympic team," Netflix said in a written statement to the Wall Street Journal,. "Getting cut, when it happens, is very disappointing but there is no shame at all." How did that happen? Generally it happened because of an overlap between different kinds of departure emails at Netflix, the insiders said.
"There are several people who made the mistake of sending the postmortem out with the farewell emails," another former employee said.While Netflix's postmortem emails are meant to stay true to company values like "authenticity" and "transparency," the explanations for why employees were fired tend to be rather vague, the Netflix insiders said.
"He put a surrogate reason," the former employee said. "Usually, they don't want to get into too much detail."Don't include anything that you wouldn't want the fired employee to read about themselves."When we part ways with an employee, we always want to be respectful and gracious for what they've contributed," Netflix said in a statement to Business Insider. "And we've become much more mindful of how this information is shared as we grow.
Despite the debate around how to describe an outgoing employee's shortcomings, Netflix insiders largely seem to accept the postmortems. The former employees that Business Insider spoke with also said that the postmortems — though "not exactly preferable" for the person being fired, as one insider put it — do help employees keep tabs on who is coming and going within the roughly 6,800-person organization, and feel secure in their own roles. Two of the people, in hindsight, said they wished they'd weighed in on what went into their own postmortems and that the emails were distributed more consistently.
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