Netflix Slack firings and the normalization of whining in creative agencies

The top trending topic on LinkedIn over the past 24 hours is about Netflix firing three of its marketing employees over messages they had sent over a public Slack group (perhaps they hadn't realized it was public) that were griping and whining about fellow employees.

There were two kinds of responses to this revelation. One group said employees should not be griping about fellow employees as it leads to a toxic workplace. Another group said this was an infringement on privacy and a witch hunt against a specific group of employees.

Here's my stand: Whining about fellow employees, bosses and clients has been normalized over the years, but that doesn't make it ok.

I got reminded of a lot of conversations (digital and in-person) that I've been part of in creative agencies over the years. Here are some examples.

Example 1: A client team secretly despised a client, and during audio calls with the client, some of the team could be seen pointing middle fingers at the phone while wearing a polite voice. All they had to do was to make sure that the video was turned off and that gave them the license to be hateful.

Example 2: A senior creative regularly used the c-word while referring to clients. It wasn't a coincidence that nearly every client he subjected to the c-word happened to be a woman. Soon, it spilled over to conversations about fellow employees within the agency as long as that employee was out of earshot.

Example 3: A rumor that a particular employee was on the verge of leaving the agency made its rounds within the agency, and it turned out to be untrue. The said employee outlasted a lot of the employees circulating the rumors.

My stand towards all this is the same: These things have been normalized, but that doesn't make it ok.

The actual work that led to all that friction has been long forgotten. But the people involved in these conversations never forgot how they felt when they came to know what was said about them.

This shows what's really the most important thing: the people you work with and how they feel. Even the work is only a close second. I know it's odd for a creative to be saying this. I know we need to break eggs to make an omelette. But when I look back at the agencies I've worked in, even the ones where I did fantastic work, what I remember the most is the people who put a smile on my face.

Getting up in the morning and working with people we can get along with is a great luxury and that alone can play the role of a huge pay raise when it comes to retaining employees. That's why some companies are gapingly better at employee retention than their direct competitors. This is the case for creative agencies too.

But beyond the practicalities of employee retention, the past year has reminded all of us of our mortality. Spending time with people we like being with, and working with people we like working with, have gotten much higher in our priorities now, and justifiably so.

Is workplace conflict inevitable? Of course. But there are ways to handle it, and ways not to handle it. Go and talk it out, face-to-face, and resolve it. Backbiting is the way of cowards and the root cause of many a toxic workplace.

Coming full circle to Netflix, its co-CEO Reed Hastings wrote a memo a few years ago that's still the definitive memo of company culture. One particular line in it stands out to me as what we all ought to follow:

You only say things about fellow employees you say to their face.