People’s Insights: Volume 2, Issue 33

Reputation | Employee Engagement | Citizenship

ZapposDelivering Happy Employees

What makes Zappos, Zappos?

Source: happymonday.biz

Zappos.com is an online shoe and clothing shop which has fostered an employee-centric culture and has been named in the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for five years in a row.

7 ways to deliver happy employees

Source: money.cnn.com

Zappos believes in delivering happiness, both to customers and employees, and has built a culture of delivering happiness internally through its core values. Here are 7 things Zappos has introduced to deliver happy employees.

Happiness Culture Explicit Core Values

Celebration Bell

Parades

Culture Book

The “offer”Great customer service

1. Happiness Culture

Source: jessicamah.com

Zappos encourages employees to "create fun and a little weirdness" in the workplace and build personal connections with co-workers.

Zappos celebrates its people's successes with parties, carnivals, employee bonuses, and thank-you gifts, for every employee.

2. Explicit Core Values

Source: about.zappos.com

Zappos culture is guided by a set of core values which aims to empower employees, create a sense of community in the workplace, and serve a higher purpose beyond bottom-line metrics.

3. Celebration Bells

Source: money.cnn.com

Many departments in Zappos have a bell hanging in their area that can be used by all to make announcements. Managers use this to announce promotions or goals being met, and employees use it to thank others or announce a project completion.

4. Parades

Source: blogs.zappos.com

Zappos has parades all the time, but when something big happens - like a million-dollar sales record - it calls for a special parade. The department in question gets together and parades through the building with music and costumes and lots of candy.

5. Culture Book

Source: mullen.com

Zappos has a culture book which is written by employees every year. It details how people feel about the Zappos culture and how they reinforce and develop the culture every day.

6. “Zappos pays you to quit”

After four weeks of extensive, new hires receive “the offer”: if the new hires wish to quit, Zappos pays for the amount of time they have worked for and also offers them a bonus. In 2008 the bonus was $1,000. Today, it is $4,000.

If you’re willing to take the company up on The Offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture–which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick–and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later.

Bill TaylorCo-founder, Fast Company

Source: blogs.hbr.org

7. Extraordinary customer service

Source: blogs.zappos.com

Every new employee irrespective of their position starts out by answering phones in the call center. The key to Zappos customer service? The company doesn't have a script directing how call employees should interact with customers on the calls.The result? 75% of all orders come from repeat customers.

A competitive differentiator

Happy employees are integral to the success of any organization, especially those in the service sector. As Zappos demonstrates, good employee engagement can actually be a competitive differentiator.

In service-oriented organisations, employees are not only the hands and legs, but also the heart and soul of the organisation. Everything else becomes secondary. So if organisations want to succeed and grow, they must have a passionate set of inspired individuals. If your employees are not happy, chances are they’ll be less passionate about work. Passionate, Happy Employees - that’s vital. It’s not a skill set that can be taught.

Alethea FernandesSenior Account Manager, MSLGROUP India

*BONUS* 8. Effective use of Twitter

Source: dev.twitter.com

Zappos streams Twitter conversations to showcase people’s experience with customer service (and to show employees how people are responding).

Zappos’ culture and employee empowerment benefits it's performance on social media - 1,200 conversations take place on Twitter every month.

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