Netflix Yanks Back Senior Managers’ Ability to See Their Coworkers’ Pay

upstart writes:

Netflix yanks back senior managers' ability to see their coworkers' pay:

The streaming giant's director-level executives-senior managers who are neither C-suite execs nor vice presidents-have long had the ability to see their colleagues' salaries. Now they're in the same boat as the rest of us, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

According to the Journal's sources at Netflix, the walkback stemmed from the vast expansion of director-level hires in recent years, some of whom demanded explanations for their pay discrepancies. Despite rounds of layoffs, Netflix employed 11,300 full-time workers at the end of 2021, representing a nearly 60% headcount growth from 2018.

The move comes as an embattled Netflix attempts to tighten its belt after hemorrhaging subscribers in the first half of 2022. The revoke of access, instituted late last year, is a contradictory move by a company that, as the Journal puts it, has heretofore "offered a rare degree of transparency to its workforce." That was mainly thanks to its co-CEO Reed Hastings, who has said transparency is vital to a healthy company culture.

"Transparency has become [our employees'] biggest symbol of how much we trust them to act responsibly," Hastings wrote in his 2020 book, No Rules Rules. Netflix has historically relied on a laissez-faire approach to leadership and management, he wrote, which necessitated "increasing organizational transparency and eliminating company secrets."

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