Zappos.com has become the poster child for creating a great workplace culture. Is that intimidating at all?
I hadn’t really thought about it. For us, it’s really just focusing on what works for our customers and our employees. I think part of [the notoriety] is that we’re happy to share information with reporters and other companies that want to learn how we do things. One of our core values is all about being transparent, so we share as much as possible.
In your book Delivering Happiness, you recall celebrating successes by taking employees on extravagant trips. Are you a believer in noncash incentives?
I wouldn’t call them incentives because that implies that if you do X then we’ll give you Y. Rather than focusing on how to motivate employees, we try to focus on how to inspire employees. If you can inspire employees through a vision that has a higher purpose beyond just profits or being No. 1 in the market, if you can inspire employees by creating a culture where the company’s core values match their own personal values, then you can accomplish so much more.
So you view inspiring and motivating as distinctively different?
Yes. Inspiring is all about employees wanting to do things themselves, whereas motivating is a carrot-and-stick mentality.
How do you measure the return on investment of some of the things you do to establish the culture you’re talking about?
We don’t measure. If a friend calls and asks you for a favor, you don’t immediately start calculating, “How much will this help our friendship?” It’s hard to measure any one thing — hard to assign a metric to any individual aspect.
Are there common mistakes that other companies make that prevent them from enjoying the positive employee culture that Zappos has?
A lot of people think of culture as a menu of things that need to be checked off. We get asked a lot about what benefits we offer employees or what activities we do with employees. They think by just doing those activities then suddenly employees will be happier. It’s not so much about what the company provides externally, it’s what the employees ultimately feel internally. So many companies need metrics to justify their decisions. It’s hard to say what the ROI is if you let a call center employee talk with a customer for an hour. Not everything is easily measurable, but just because it can’t be measured doesn’t mean there aren’t benefits to it.
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