A group of Copenhageners surprise their bus driver on his birthday:
Think that made him happy at work?
I wish you a very happy weekend.
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Friday Spoing: Mukthar’s Birthday
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Book review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
There are some companies that seem completely unafraid to do things differently. While others cling desperately to business as usual, I admire organizations who try alternative ideas and Zappos is one of these companies. For those outside of the US who have not yet heard of Zappos, they sell shoes and clothes online and they do so with huge success: Their sales for 2009 was $1 billion. That’s a lot of shoes and for a company that’s only 10 years old, that’s nice going.Zappos have about 800 employees in their HQ in Las Vegas and another 700 in the warehouse in Kentucky where all products are shipped from. And what truly separates them from many other organizations is how they treat their people. Zappos has committed itself to great service and has realized that the only way to consistently deliver great service is to have happy employees.
And that’s what “Delivering Happiness” is about. In the book, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh tells his own story – he co-founded an IT company that became worth millions and then felt he had to leave it when he discovered that he was no longer happy at work there. The company was sold to Microsoft for $265 million.
Tony ended up investing part of his money in a strange guy with a weird idea: Selling shoes online. After several false starts and slow growth in the beginning, Zappos found the winning formula and the rest is history.
So what is their winning formula? It’s culture! Zappos have defined their culture and spend a lot of time, money and energy on maintaining and developing it. And here it is:
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be HumbleThey hire people based on who will fit into the culture, and they’re quick to fire those who turn out not to fit. Their hiring mantra is “hire slowly, fire quickly”.
Typical interview questions include:
If you had a theme song, that played every time you walked into a room, what would it be?
On a scale from 1 to 10, how lucky are you?
To make sure that new hires join Zappos for the culture and not for the money, they will give all new people the offer. It’s simple: If you quit in the first 2 months, you get your salary plus an extra $2,000. Yes, you read that right: Zappos will pay people to quit. And since most new positions are in the call center or warehouse (jobs that don’t pay all that well) $2,000 is serious money.
Zappos have had to adjust that policy recently: Because of the financial crisis, less and less people took the offer, preferring to stay in a stable paying job even if they weren’t that thrilled about the workplace. So Zappos have now upped the amount to $3,000. In addition they also pay their people a salary that is above average and offer great perks like free food, free snacks, etc.
The result of this and more (like great parties, freedom to design your own workspace, etc.) is a happy workforce and excellent customer service.
It doesn’t stop with the culture – their business model is equally great. 1 year return policy on all products, free return shipping, their 1-800 number is right at the top of every web page (they actually want customers to call them) and when you do call in, a live rep is only one keypress away, not buried somewhere in a phone menu labyrinth. In fact, average wait times hover around 20 seconds – when other companies can easily take 20 minutes to reach on the phone.
All of this and more is described in Tony’s book and I highly recommend it. Not only is it a fun and easy read, it offers a great insight into the history and practices of Zappos and it’s always fun to hear from people and organizations who are not only unafraid of trying new ideas but who seem to revel in it. Zappos definitely do.
In that respect, this book reminds me of one of my all-time favorite business books, namely Ricardo Semler’s The Seven-Day Weekend.
It is, however, the first business book where the author spends a whole page on his undying love for Red Bull and a few more pages on how he’s been inspired by the community at techno raves :o)
The book is in three parts: Part 1 is Tony’s story from his childhood to founding Linkexchange and Zappos. The second part is about how they do things at Zappos and the final appendix is about the science of happiness, which Tony urges all businesses to study. I could not agree more.
The book will not only give you a peek into the mind of Tony Hsieh, it will also give you about a million ideas you could out into practice in your own business or work life. But most importantly, it will show you just how far out of the ordinary a business can go if it has the courage to do so – and just how much success can be found out there.
The book comes out on June 7 – read it!
Related
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Happy Birthday to me
Today is my Birthday – it’s fantastic to be 42 and fantastic to be me. Here’s what my desk looks like today:
In fact, the whole country is celebrating the occasion by flying the Danish flag… though that may have more to do with the fact that the Danish crown prince was born on the same day as me :o)
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Ssssshhhhh… part 2
MAN, it’s been quiet on this blog lately. I’ve been so busy giving presentations and workshops to new customers, that I haven’t gotten around to updating the blog much.
On the other hand, the blog spammers are friskier than ever and threaten to overload WordPress’ built-in spam detection. Consequently, I have activated comment moderation so I must manually approve all comments.
So if you write a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, that’s why.
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Ssssshhhhhhh…
Right now we’re having the busiest period of the year so far. Lots of exciting new projects, great new customers and of course lots of work on planning our conference about happiness at work on May 20.
So this is of course the perfect time for me to yank 3 days out of my busy schedule and go on a silent retreat.
It’s three days of yoga, meditation, nature walks and silence. As in no internet, no music, no talking, no reading, no distracting yourself from yourself in any way. I’ve done it before and I find it extremely challenging – but ultimately very worthwhile. It gives me a calm and a clarity that I can’t achieve in any other way.
See ya next week – and here’s an inspiring presentation on the value of taking time off:
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Well-read
I gave a presentation yesterday here in Copenhagen and one participant showed up with this:
It’s my first book (Happy Hour is 9 to 5) in Danish – and that’s what I call a well-read copy :o)
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Friday Spoing!
Improv Everywhere shows how you give 2,000 tired, grumpy New Yorkers a high-five:
Fantastic!
I wish you a very happy weekend!
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Well make up your damn mind – do rewards motivate or don’t they?
For a long time, rewards were the be-all and end-all of motivation. Everyone knew that the way to encourage people to achieve better results were to reward better results. Bonuses, incentive schemes and pay grades were created to implement this.Then science starts interfering and pointing out that, actually, rewards only motivate in a very narrow set of circumstances and that there is a huge gap between what science knows and what business does. That’s what Dan Pink talks about in his excellent TED presentation.
Now the effect of rewarding students for performance and good behavior in schools have been tested very rigorously and the results appear in this excellent Time article, according to which some rewards do lead to better performance.
So which is it? Do rewards motivate us to shine or don’t they? This is not only interesting for schools, the findings may apply to businesses as well.
Some background:
A Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. The results represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy.
The results were surprising:
The experiment ran in four cities: Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York. Each city had its own unique model of incentives, to see which would work best. Some kids were paid for good test scores, others for not fighting with one another. The results are fascinating and surprising. They remind us that kids, like grownups, are not puppets. They don’t always respond the way we expect.
In New York the study resulted in no improvement in test scores. Fryer called the results “as zero as zero gets.” New York was ironically the city where students were rewarded for better test scores.
The program that got the best results was in Dallas:
Schools in Dallas got the simplest scheme and the one targeting the youngest children: every time second-graders read a book and successfully completed a computerized quiz about it, they earned $2. Straightforward — and cheap. The average earning would turn out to be about $14 (for seven books read) per year.
So what might explain the difference? Why did one scheme fail while another got results?
I think the answer might lie in the fact that the NY scheme rewarded results while the Dallas scheme rewarded the process, ie. the actual steps towards the results.
I’m going out on a limb here, but I do think that this carries directly over to the business world. At work it is more motivating to reward effort rather than results because while results are rarely directly under your own control, your efforts are.
In other words, you can work your butt off on a project or a sale and still not get it because of factors completely outside of your influence. Or in the current crisis, you can work hard to meet your sales budget, but there’s no hope in hell you will, because the entire market is down 15%. Conversely, you might be a no-good, talentless slacker but due to a general increase in the market or one windfall client you still reach your goals for the year.
This is what Srikumar S. Rao talked about at our last conference, where he encouraged the audience to focus on the process, not the outcome.
Go read the whole article at Time.com – it’s fascinating stuff.
Your take
What do you think? Do rewards motivate you? How and when do you like to be rewarded? Are there any circumstances where rewards tend to demotivate you? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
Related posts
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Watch this video
My good buddy Srikumar S. Rao’s new book is now out and while I haven’t read it yet (my review copy is on the way) I know it will be good. Just the title alone is great: Happiness at Work – Be Resilient, Motivated, and Successful – No Matter What.
There’s also a whole series of 1-2 minute videos on Youtube where Srikumar talks about some of the themes from the book. My favorite is this one, where he explains how we learn to be unhappy.
And if you want to know more there’s the video of Srikumar’s smash-hit presentation from our conference in Copenhagen last year. This video has now been viewed more than 200,000 times and focuses specifically on the two traps we must avoid, that keep us from becoming happy. You can watch the entire speech here (18 minutes):
