So, I’m getting ready to register for any one of about 15 HR Conferences in the next 3 months, and I’ve yet to find an agenda where they don’t have someone from Zappos speaking about how great it is to work at Zappos. Now, I don’t want to be a hater, but can’t someone get back to the Poop Deck and do some work around there? In case any of the Deckhands forgot to read anything in HR literature over the past 25 years or so, I’m pretty sure HR got its reputation of not adding value, because it was probably attending conferences talking about how it was adding value. So, get the Skipper, Ginger and MaryAnn – get back to work.
We get it already – you pay people to leave, you empower people to stay, and all the while you come up with cute little names to call yourself – so when you do go to conferences, people feel crappy about their own titles and companies. You know what would be nice, how about Zappos just holds their own HR Conference. They could invite everyone out to Las Vegas, charge people to learn the “Zappos” way, do the whole drinks, dinks and wieners cocktail party, etc. It would really be a win-win for both the HR Community as a whole, and to Zappos corporate. I mean, just imagine how much time the Zappos HR Department would save with having their HR Staff actually being in the office throughout the year – bar this one 3-day event – versus them constantly on the road, in airports, walking around expo halls collecting pens from HR vendors. Wow, the productivity increases alone might add a point of margin back to the bottom-line.
So, please someone call the CEO, or Captain, skipper, whatever, and pass along this idea. I would just hate to see that culture fall apart because we as an HR community are requiring so much time of the Zappos HR staff that they won’t be able to maintain the greatness they’ve achieved. Oh wait, I just got a call from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, he says scratch the Zappalouza HR Fest, he needs the Zappolites to get back to work and sell more shoes – the payment on his $928 Million purchase is coming due.
Sorry Skipper – there goes the culture…
Hi Tim -
Thanks for the great suggestion of holding a Zappos HR conference. We actually considered the idea of doing so (including doing the whole drinks & wieners cocktail party thing) awhile back.
We spent 7 weeks doing an extensive survey of our HR staff (it would have normally taken a day, but it was really hard coordinating because all of our HR staff was either out at a conference or busy filling out other important surveys). Also, there was that one awkward week when we accidentally offered everyone in the company a baby goat if they quit their jobs, and to our surprise, everyone took the offer.
Fortunately for us, there was actually a shortage of live baby goats in the Las Vegas area, so most of our employees unhappily came back to their jobs when we retroactively told them there was a limit of 1 goat per family. Since we think of ourselves as one big family, really that meant only 1 employee could take the live baby goat offer.
But I digress. Anyway, back to the survey results. We were a bit surprised by the results: While many of our HR staff enjoy eating hot dogs, there was a strong aversion to cocktail wieners (or “mini” hot dogs) because they are “just a little too weird and creepy”, as one of our anonymous survey respondents put it.
Therefore, we felt we could not in good conscience hold our own HR conference as you suggested and will instead continue crashing other organizations’ HR conferences.
Thanks again for your suggestion, please keep the feedback and ideas coming!
PS: The baby goat petting zoo will no longer be a part of our tours at Zappos:
http://tours.zappos.com/
Tony!
You can laugh at yourself, and ultimately that makes you human – and adds to the culture.
Thanks for the response – that’s why you guys have a great organization
Ok – I’ll buy a pair of damn shoes!
Tim
Even without their entire HR department there, they still get visitors to drink the Kool-Aide. We drank it hard but have been happy with the results: http://grasshopper.com/blog/team/2009/09/14/grasshopper-goes-to-zappos/
Just saying… maybe they aren’t that far off after all.
Tony -
Kris Dunn here, I’m the VP of People at DAXKO, where Jamie was kind enough to come to our user meeting and talk about the Zappos Culture. I’m also the founder of Fistful, so obviously once you’re a contributor at FOT, you have freedom to express opinion. Or Sackett never gets this in.
I’ll post a rebuttal later today…
Thanks – KD
Great post Tim! I want to know who has some incriminating pictures of KD so that this post could see the light of day. Zappos is Teflon no doubt. I remember they even got praised for how they handled a layoff. It is good while it lasts…
I am all for culture (if you know my day job you know why). But the real test is longevity. Start-ups and high-growth companies have more autonomy and less legal pressure when it comes to People-based decisions. So Tony, if you can make it stick through the merger, and your people are still riding the keynote-carousel five years from now, I’ll go from admiration to hugely impressed. Until then, I’ll admit, I love me some pigs in a blanket.
BTW, culture is so much more that titles and staying versus going. You have to tie it to the customer. Engaged employees = engaged customers.
Fantastic… up yours Zappos!
There needs to be a balance between talking, reading, writing, blogging, speaking, conferencing about what we do, and actually DOING what we do. I really appreciate this post.
I work for a startup called KODA that is basically a social media platform for recruiting, where people and companies can create profiles and connect. The time that HR folks take in hedging, assessing, weighing, delaying, escalating, etc etc always far, FAR outweighs the time it takes to create a profile on KODA to begin with.
Thanks to Tim for giving us all a reality check!
that’s hilarious! i wonder how zappos hr will be now that amzn pwns them
Jer
Great! Love the snark, if nothing else because it makes business content more interesting. Yes, I too am a little tired of the Zappos train. But like your comments say, the proof is in the longevity. The more the PR, the less tolerant the world will be of any foibles we hear about at Zappos. And they are innevitable.
I appreciate your comment also Tim.You are right. Don’t believe the hype surrounding Zappos. When it boils down to it, Zappos is not that different from any other company. You have the same problems, politics,etc. Some of the Zanchurian Zapponians have been what I would like to call brainswashed or enzlaved. It is almost like convincing someone of something for so long that eventually they start to believe it even if it is not true. Great companies can be great, but it is never really the company–it is always the people that work for the company. I will never shop or ever patronize Zappos Zippocrites again. Live by the word, die by the word.
I had got a dream to start my own commerce, but I did not earn enough amount of money to do this. Thank goodness my close friend proposed to take the home loans. Therefore I used the student loan and made real my old dream.