Last week, Jack Daly was in Brisbane and he shared a few stories about culture. The first was Zappos.com – a 10 year old company that was just bought by Amazon for $1.2 billion. They started selling shoes online and have expanded into selling other apparel, but what makes them remarkable is their culture.
People actually go on tours around the Zappos headquarters, just 30 minutes from Las Vegas, to see first hand what it’s really like.
“It’s about giving employees permission and encouraging them to just be themselves,” says Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh.
Zappos staff genuinely love their work.
Apparently it’s such a happy and fun place to work that once a new recruit completes their induction, they are offered a $2,000 cheque if they wish to leave the company. And only 3 people have taken the cheque!
The second story was of Netflix.com – an online movie rental service. Netflix staff:
– get to take holidays ‘whenever they need them,’
– have no start or finish time
– and they can charge anything they want to the company as long as they feel it’s reasonable!
Empowerment is the name of the game & the “rule book” is simple:
1. Is it right for the customer?
2. Is it right for our company?
3. Is it ethical?
4. Am I willing to be accountable?
5. Is it consistent with our core values?
If you can answer YES to all 5 questions, then you can go ahead & do whatever you want!
I’m keen to find out more, so I’ve wishlisted the Zappos book called Delivering Happiness
We’ve started to implement some of the ideas at Bluewire and I’ll let you know we they go! Stay tuned for plenty more ideas from Jack Daly’s workshop. And thanks to Business Connect for organising Jack’s trip.