Maxime Cremel
NexGen Leader Award NomineeNominated for: Championing Technology Innovation - NexGen Leader
Title: Manager, EHS Governance and Corporate Legal
Company: Netflix Inc.
Years in Profession: 6
Nominator: Dolores Salman, Director, EHS Governance and Assurance; Netflix, Inc. - Manager
Title: Manager, EHS Governance and Corporate Legal
Company: Netflix Inc.
Years in Profession: 6
Nominator: Dolores Salman, Director, EHS Governance and Assurance; Netflix, Inc. - Manager
Describe a situation in which the Nominee exhibited effective influence within your organization. Further define any technical expertise, business acumen, and/or emotional intelligence that contributed to the Nominee's effectiveness. (500 word max.)*
In Q2 2025, Maxime led the redefinition of the Global EHS Governance and Assurance data and tech strategy, focusing on strategy and implementation. This was not a mandate he could simply issue: Netflix's EHS program spans regional workplace directors across every major geography, along with venue, studio, production, HR and legal stakeholders who each had their own expectations of what “governance” meant. Maxime built consensus by proposing and socializing an EHS Data Governance Policy and a clear accountability model: operations own and are accountable for EHS outcomes in their region, while EHS Governance partners closely with those directors, rather than reaching past them to individual managers, to advise and align. That framing let regional leaders keep ownership while giving the central team a mandate to set enterprise standards, and it was adopted across the organization with minimal friction.
That same influence extends to his work as EHS representative for Netflix's offices in Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels, where he led training for the works council in France, oversaw office inspections in Brussels, and built the region's Emergency Response Team (ERT) training strategy — each requiring him to align local stakeholders around a shared standard rather than dictate one. He also served as EHS point of contact for Netflix's 2024 EMEA All-Business Review, putting his consensus-building on display to a wider, more senior audience.
Maxime has shown the same influence muscle in a very different arena: Netflix's adoption of generative AI. Rather than waiting for a mandate, he ran a one-hour AI workshop with our Real Estate Legal partners during a team offsite, connecting EHS use cases such as regulatory-change forecasting and supplier risk scoring to problems Legal was also wrestling with. That session helped seed what has become his ongoing support of GenAI adoption for Corporate Legal, where he advises on how legal teams can responsibly apply the same tools he has piloted. His ability to translate a technical capability into terms a non-EHS legal audience found immediately useful was on display again when he was invited to discuss AI use cases directly at the executive staff level, a degree of visibility that is rare for someone at his stage of career.
What makes Maxime effective in these situations is the combination of technical expertise, he understands the tools well enough to have piloted them himself before asking anyone else to use them, business acumen, he ties every initiative back to cost, risk, or efficiency, and emotional intelligence, he consistently frames new structures as partnership rather than control, which is why stakeholders with no reporting relationship to him have repeatedly chosen to work with him rather than around him. I have watched him earn credibility with people several levels senior to him not through title, but through preparation and follow-through.
That same influence extends to his work as EHS representative for Netflix's offices in Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels, where he led training for the works council in France, oversaw office inspections in Brussels, and built the region's Emergency Response Team (ERT) training strategy — each requiring him to align local stakeholders around a shared standard rather than dictate one. He also served as EHS point of contact for Netflix's 2024 EMEA All-Business Review, putting his consensus-building on display to a wider, more senior audience.
Maxime has shown the same influence muscle in a very different arena: Netflix's adoption of generative AI. Rather than waiting for a mandate, he ran a one-hour AI workshop with our Real Estate Legal partners during a team offsite, connecting EHS use cases such as regulatory-change forecasting and supplier risk scoring to problems Legal was also wrestling with. That session helped seed what has become his ongoing support of GenAI adoption for Corporate Legal, where he advises on how legal teams can responsibly apply the same tools he has piloted. His ability to translate a technical capability into terms a non-EHS legal audience found immediately useful was on display again when he was invited to discuss AI use cases directly at the executive staff level, a degree of visibility that is rare for someone at his stage of career.
What makes Maxime effective in these situations is the combination of technical expertise, he understands the tools well enough to have piloted them himself before asking anyone else to use them, business acumen, he ties every initiative back to cost, risk, or efficiency, and emotional intelligence, he consistently frames new structures as partnership rather than control, which is why stakeholders with no reporting relationship to him have repeatedly chosen to work with him rather than around him. I have watched him earn credibility with people several levels senior to him not through title, but through preparation and follow-through.
Explain a situation where the Nominee achieved exceptional results within their area of responsibility. Include relevant metrics or KPIs as proof of impact. (500 word max.)*
Over the past two years, Maxime has led a modernization of Netflix's EHS technology and vendor ecosystem that has produced measurable, bottom-line results. His EHS incident and risk-management technology strategy, built in partnership with our vendor, is projected to deliver $80,000 per year in cost savings over a twelve-month implementation window, achieved by rationalizing overlapping tools and renegotiating vendor scope rather than simply adding new spend.
On the data and reporting side, Maxime co-built a dashboard and API integration with our incident-management sytem that reached 90% completion, giving EHS and business stakeholders real-time visibility into enterprise incident trends. In adition he drove the implementation of a new global ergonomics program. The rollout itself provides some of the clearest before-and-after evidence of his impact: compared to the highest-activity period of our prior ergonomics platform's 2020 launch, our new first two weeks saw 1.5x more platform access, 4x more self-assessments completed, and 3x more virtual assessments booked.
Regional e-learning completion reached 97% in APAC, EMEA, and LATAM and 70% in UCAN, and response SLAs held at under 6 hours with reports delivered within 24 hours — metrics Maxime put in place to track adoption, not just launch a tool.
In parallel, he drove Netflix's transition of regulatory compliance content from an external vendor to an in-house model, a significant strategic and financial decision. He managed the phased rollout carefully, tracking regional facility coverage to 80% completion before making the call to fully decommission the external subscription, a decision that reduced recurring vendor cost while improving the accuracy of the underlying facility data.
Maxime also brought metric discipline to a program that had none. For Workplace EHS, covering our regional offices outside the studio and corporate footprint, he led the effort to define the 10 KPIs the organization now uses to track program health globally, replacing a patchwork of regional, informal reporting with a single enterprise-wide scorecard.
On the supplier side, he stood up Netflix's EHS supplier risk assessment program from scratch, completing or progressing 12 supplier assessments and building the risk-mitigation recommendation framework the team now uses to triage vendor risk going forward.
Taken together, these results reflect a leader who does not treat digital transformation as a slogan: every initiative above shipped a working system, a completed vendor negotiation, or a defined metric, not just a plan. The financial savings are already reflected in our vendor budget, the dashboards are in active use by stakeholders outside EHS, and the KPI framework has become the basis for how I report program health to my own leadership.
On the data and reporting side, Maxime co-built a dashboard and API integration with our incident-management sytem that reached 90% completion, giving EHS and business stakeholders real-time visibility into enterprise incident trends. In adition he drove the implementation of a new global ergonomics program. The rollout itself provides some of the clearest before-and-after evidence of his impact: compared to the highest-activity period of our prior ergonomics platform's 2020 launch, our new first two weeks saw 1.5x more platform access, 4x more self-assessments completed, and 3x more virtual assessments booked.
Regional e-learning completion reached 97% in APAC, EMEA, and LATAM and 70% in UCAN, and response SLAs held at under 6 hours with reports delivered within 24 hours — metrics Maxime put in place to track adoption, not just launch a tool.
In parallel, he drove Netflix's transition of regulatory compliance content from an external vendor to an in-house model, a significant strategic and financial decision. He managed the phased rollout carefully, tracking regional facility coverage to 80% completion before making the call to fully decommission the external subscription, a decision that reduced recurring vendor cost while improving the accuracy of the underlying facility data.
Maxime also brought metric discipline to a program that had none. For Workplace EHS, covering our regional offices outside the studio and corporate footprint, he led the effort to define the 10 KPIs the organization now uses to track program health globally, replacing a patchwork of regional, informal reporting with a single enterprise-wide scorecard.
On the supplier side, he stood up Netflix's EHS supplier risk assessment program from scratch, completing or progressing 12 supplier assessments and building the risk-mitigation recommendation framework the team now uses to triage vendor risk going forward.
Taken together, these results reflect a leader who does not treat digital transformation as a slogan: every initiative above shipped a working system, a completed vendor negotiation, or a defined metric, not just a plan. The financial savings are already reflected in our vendor budget, the dashboards are in active use by stakeholders outside EHS, and the KPI framework has become the basis for how I report program health to my own leadership.
Provide an example of how the Nominee's decision-making skills and/or problem-solving approach supported a positive outcome. (500 word max.)*
One of the clearest examples of Maxime's problem-solving approach was his work to fix Netflix's fragmented incident-reporting process. Before he took this on, incident reports were captured through multiple disconnected forms across different parts of the business - each with its own fields and logic - which made it difficult to get a consistent picture of incident trends enterprise-wide and created unnecessary friction for people reporting incidents in the moment. Rather than patching individual forms, Maxime diagnosed the root cause as structural: too many parallel forms with inconsistent fields and no shared logic. He proposed consolidating them into a single unified form built around conditional dependencies, so the right fields appear based on incident type and location rather than forcing every reporter through every field. He then sequenced the change properly, defining the new fields and workflows first, preparing communication material for the teams affected, and organizing training before rollout, recognizing that a technically correct form change would fail without change management behind it.
Maxime showed similar judgment on the vendor side. While reviewing a vendor contract renewal, he caught that a proposed 5% price increase exceeded the 2% cap specified in the existing contract, a detail that could easily have been missed in a routine renewal review. Rather than raising it as a compliance complaint, he brought it directly to our vendor management and legal partners as a data point to renegotiate from, which contributed to Netflix ultimately securing that renewal with no cost increase.
This diagnose-the-structure-not-the-symptom pattern goes back to the start of his career: as Health & Safety Project Leader at the Plansee Group in 2020, he led implementation of a company-wide Global Ergonomics Policy rather than resolving ergonomic complaints one at a time, and he later supported the same kind of systemic rollout for Danone's global safety strategy.
Across each of these examples, Maxime's pattern is the same: he looks past the immediate symptom to the structural cause, he designs a solution scoped to that cause rather than the easiest fix, and he builds in the operational steps, training, communication, negotiation leverage, needed to make the fix stick rather than declaring victory at the design stage. That combination of diagnostic rigor and follow-through is why his fixes tend to hold up rather than needing to be revisited.
Maxime showed similar judgment on the vendor side. While reviewing a vendor contract renewal, he caught that a proposed 5% price increase exceeded the 2% cap specified in the existing contract, a detail that could easily have been missed in a routine renewal review. Rather than raising it as a compliance complaint, he brought it directly to our vendor management and legal partners as a data point to renegotiate from, which contributed to Netflix ultimately securing that renewal with no cost increase.
This diagnose-the-structure-not-the-symptom pattern goes back to the start of his career: as Health & Safety Project Leader at the Plansee Group in 2020, he led implementation of a company-wide Global Ergonomics Policy rather than resolving ergonomic complaints one at a time, and he later supported the same kind of systemic rollout for Danone's global safety strategy.
Across each of these examples, Maxime's pattern is the same: he looks past the immediate symptom to the structural cause, he designs a solution scoped to that cause rather than the easiest fix, and he builds in the operational steps, training, communication, negotiation leverage, needed to make the fix stick rather than declaring victory at the design stage. That combination of diagnostic rigor and follow-through is why his fixes tend to hold up rather than needing to be revisited.
Offer examples to illustrate the Nominee's dedication to lifelong learning and professional development. (500 word max.)*
Maxime treats his own professional development as inseparable from the value he brings to Netflix, and he has been consistent about it for years rather than treating it as a box to check. He guest lectures at his alma mater, Universite Paris I: Pantheon-Sorbonne, teaching a course on digital transformation with a dedicated module on how digital tools are reshaping health and safety management, a commitment that requires him to stay current on the field well beyond what his day job strictly requires, since he has to be able to teach it. He has also published in this space, authoring pieces including “Digital Transformation: Towards a R(e)volution of Health and Safety Management” and “The Place of Ergonomics in Business: Interests and Recommendations,” and has continued to pursue additional external publishing opportunities with major business outlets, seeking our internal guidance on how to do so appropriately as a Netflix employee. That same appetite for staying current led him to conduct research on digital transformation together with a senior lecturer at MIT, work that feeds directly back into how he advises Netflix's own EHS technology strategy.
What stands out to me most is how Maxime approaches new technology: he insists on being a hands-on first user before asking anyone else on the team to adopt something new. Before generative AI tools were part of any team roadmap, he was personally testing large language models for supplier risk scoring and piloting AI note-taking tools for internal EHS content, essentially running his own proof-of-concept before recommending a rollout. Once he was confident in the tools, he turned that personal learning into a standing biweekly, thirty-minute optional AI training session for the broader Real Estate Legal and EHS Governance teams, building team-wide competency rather than keeping the skill to himself. That same learning mindset extends to his own growth plan, where he has explicitly named areas like AI applications for Corporate Legal and international occupational health and legal requirements as growth priorities he is actively building expertise in, ahead of Netflix needing it from him.
I have found that Maxime is one of the few people on my team I do not need to push toward professional growth. He consistently identifies the next capability gap before I do, closes it himself first, and then brings the rest of the team along.
What stands out to me most is how Maxime approaches new technology: he insists on being a hands-on first user before asking anyone else on the team to adopt something new. Before generative AI tools were part of any team roadmap, he was personally testing large language models for supplier risk scoring and piloting AI note-taking tools for internal EHS content, essentially running his own proof-of-concept before recommending a rollout. Once he was confident in the tools, he turned that personal learning into a standing biweekly, thirty-minute optional AI training session for the broader Real Estate Legal and EHS Governance teams, building team-wide competency rather than keeping the skill to himself. That same learning mindset extends to his own growth plan, where he has explicitly named areas like AI applications for Corporate Legal and international occupational health and legal requirements as growth priorities he is actively building expertise in, ahead of Netflix needing it from him.
I have found that Maxime is one of the few people on my team I do not need to push toward professional growth. He consistently identifies the next capability gap before I do, closes it himself first, and then brings the rest of the team along.
Provide evidence of the Nominee's commitment to the fields of EHS&S. Examples may include: serving on the organization's safety committee, volunteering for environmental / sustainable causes, or writing for industry publications. In addition, share any professional impressions of the Nominee's commitment to EHS&S. (500 word max.)*
Maxime's commitment to EHS&S goes beyond his day-to-day role at Netflix into active participation in the broader profession. He is a published author in the field — including a 100-page book on ergonomics that he has made freely available to the industry — and as mentioned he guest lectures at Universite Paris I: Pantheon-Sorbonne on digital transformation in health and safety, putting him in a position to shape how the next generation of practitioners think about the discipline, not just how Netflix practices it. He has also engaged directly with a leading EHS research and analyst firm, including attending their industry summit and contributing to their research submissions, which keeps our program, and his own thinking, benchmarked against where the industry is heading rather than only how Netflix has always done things. He has likewise engaged with the American Society of Safety Professionals, connecting our internal work to the broader professional safety community.
My professional impression, having worked directly with Maxime, is that his commitment to this field is not performative. He volunteers time to teaching and writing that has no direct bearing on his Netflix performance review, he pushes our team to benchmark against outside research rather than assume we already have the answers, and he treats industry engagement, conferences, publications, professional societies, as core to doing the job well rather than as an optional extra. That is exactly the kind of leader NAEM's NexGen Leader Award is designed to recognize: someone still early in their career who is already helping to define where the profession goes next.
My professional impression, having worked directly with Maxime, is that his commitment to this field is not performative. He volunteers time to teaching and writing that has no direct bearing on his Netflix performance review, he pushes our team to benchmark against outside research rather than assume we already have the answers, and he treats industry engagement, conferences, publications, professional societies, as core to doing the job well rather than as an optional extra. That is exactly the kind of leader NAEM's NexGen Leader Award is designed to recognize: someone still early in their career who is already helping to define where the profession goes next.
Biography
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