Employee Feedback: How Do Netflix and Pixar Deliver It?

Learn the exact methods Netflix and Pixar use for delivering feedback to their employees!

Employee feedback: A key to successful employee performance

Providing feedback to employees is an essential component of every successful and productive company culture. Delivering feedback regularly helps to make sure that employees are on the right track and achieving their goals as targeted.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t utilize this powerful management tool. The Globoforce study found that 65 percent of employees say they’d like to receive more feedback than they currently get.

Recent Gallup research finds that only about one in four employees "strongly agree" that their manager provides meaningful feedback to them - or that the feedback they receive helps them do better work.

So how can you ensure providing regular and useful feedback to employees in your company? Learn from the leading companies! Let’s examine the methods Netflix and Pixar use for delivering feedback to their employees.

Pixar’s method for delivering employee feedback

Plussing is Pixar's magic formula for giving feedback. Plussing has played a game-changing role at the film company Pixar. The general guideline is that you may only criticize an idea if you also add a constructive suggestion. Hence the name plussing.

Here’s an example:

An animator working on “Toy Story 3” shares her rough sketches and ideas with the director. Instead of criticizing the sketch, the director will build on the starting point by saying something like: “I like Woody’s eyes, and what if his eyes rolled left?”

Netflix’s method for delivering employee feedback

Stop-Start-Continue is another employee feedback model that was popularized by Netflix. In this drill, each person tells a colleague one thing they should start doing, one thing they should stop doing, and one thing they're doing really well and should keep doing.

Netflix also created a system for sending "Stop, Start, Continue" feedback to anyone at the company once a year. The company picked an annual feedback day and asked that everybody send their comments, in "Stop, Start, Continue" format to everyone they had feedback for.