Working Environment of More Freedom and No Rules

I never liked the ‘law of office rules’ that I’ve always considered as highly diminishing one’s creativity.Hence, instead, of creating endless rules and processes, which is how most companies deal with major growth, you may consider to focus on two things:
1. Invest in hiring high-performance employees;
2. Build and maintain a culture that rewards high-performers, and weeds out continuous, unimproved low performers.

I was impressed with an article wrote by Patty McCord, Netflix former employee who wrote to Harvard Business Review this:
‘‘If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.”

Hence, assume as an employer that responsible people are not only worthy of freedom, they thrive on it. Creating an environment where these individuals are not inhibited by myriads of rules allow them to become the best version of themselves.

Taking this belief to its literal meaning has produced a series of HR innovations that were previously unheard of. For example, you may also consider to introduce as one of novelty in the HR domain “unlimited vacation policy,” whereby instead of establishing a formally tracked vacation policy, your employees may be allowed to take as much vacation time as they liked. In this case, certain rules can not be avoided meaning that employees dealing with finance or accounting supposed to be on duty during the give period of the year.

You may say, sure, OK, but how can I apply this principle to my work environment? I think you may consider to ask yourself the following questions:
1.How are your managers being evaluated? For building great teams or whether they are compliant with rules and get all their reports submitted on time?
2.How much more can you invest into the hiring process?
3.If you’ll be spending less on enforcement, can you raise the compensation you offer (resulting in higher quality candidates)?
4.What type of culture are you producing? Is it designed so high performers will thrive, or to protect against low performers?
5. Are managers reluctant to let go low performers? Why?
6. The higher the quality of your workforce the less likely it is that you’ll need rules.