We'd all like to work with people who operate with the same understanding, ethos, sense of humor, etc. It makes the day better, right? No office drama, no awkward meetings. But I would contend doing this tends to put you at a genetic disadvantage, and that some types of confrontation are essential for growth. Introducing only like-minded people will produce linear results.
What codified HR rules do is put some workplace guidelines around humanity - that allows a dissonant group of varied people to, you know, be themselves without necessarily worrying about conforming to avoid ruffling feathers.
Perhaps it's more nuanced than that, but it sounds more like "hire people you like" expressed somewhat condescendingly as it is.
Expressing competing professional views is indeed healthy, and it's part of our culture deck: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
slide 13: "You challenge prevailing assumptions when warranted, and suggest better approaches"
slide 14: "You say what you think even if it is controversial"
An obvious example is about how you use your computer. In my old job, it was highly regulated. Want to install Firefox on your machine? Sorry, that's against IT policy, we only support IE. Your machine is locked down to prevent unauthorised installs, and even if it weren't, you'd be up for a warning for violating the policy.
In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.
Or another - alcohol. In the government, alcohol at work was banned. A beer at lunch could get you fired. When we had Christmas parties, alcohol was provided, but on a token-per-drink basis. Everyone got two tokens. My current company, the beer fridge is a treasured perk. There are no rules about how much beer you can drink, or when you can drink it. So far, no raging alcoholism has impeded work.
What I really notice is that when you treat people like adults, they respond like adults, and when you treat them like children, they respond like children.
Sorry, but as someone who works in IT security, this sounds like an absolute nightmare. Even if you have a small company comprised only of intelligent developers, those developers do not necessarily understand the latest malware threats or what sorts of software can introduce risks. Wide-open FTP servers and Tomcat servers with default passwords are a major issue. I would actually say developers probably introduce more threats into our environment than any other demographic.
Whitelisting software installs from specific domains (google.com, mozilla.org) is okay, but a carte blanche policy is usually a very bad idea.
Fully formed adults have confrontations all the time. The difference is that the result of the confrontation is not threats, backstabbing or whining later. We've all worked with the engineer who thinks they are the smartest thing around and acts like a 2 year old every time they are challenged. That's the person I assume Netflix says they will not tolerate, and I agree with them.
I have heated discussions with co-workers all the time and at the end of the day we are all still respectful of each other and our ability to get the job done.
Sure. But without some HR codifications the line between "fully-formed" and "childish jerk nymph" becomes wholly subjective, and controlled by the majority. The end result is an organic uniformity.
Nobody gets along all the time. But how you define "fully-formed adult" can vary from one person to the next. Essentially you're defining "good and bad" or "right or wrong" by a feeling. I can understand the appeal of that, but it would worry me quite a bit as even a loose policy for behavior and interaction.
"Fully-formed adults" are people who I would expect to know how to mediate themselves. If people aren't able to successfully mediate their own disputes, then your failure in hiring came long before your latest addition.
Examples of people likely to be fully-formed adults: a mother with multiple children. A schoolteacher. A military sergeant. A nurse. A bartender. In general, people who have been exposed to enough pointless complaining and dispute that the object-level arguments don't matter to them any more, relative to the issue of figuring out what will allow everyone to continue working together optimally.
Note how most of those jobs are service jobs. People with natural talents rarely have to grow up in this way, and the people with the most natural talent are frequently the least grown-up (rock stars, career academics, startup founders). You only see this "fully-formed adult" trait re-emerge at the highest levels of accomplishment: astronauts are frequently fully-formed adults, for example.
I hate to be the one who says this, but that's not what those guidelines do. They don't allow varied people to be themselves. They make everyone be a self-similar group of other people. Other people who are not themselves.
Even when we account for HR being an organ doing the bidding for the parent org.
