210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
businessinsider.com
210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
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Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#2So just the managers and supervisors left then?
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#3I look forward to seeing what happens. It's perfectly natural for people to feel apprehension about a major change like this, and offering 3 months salary as an incentive is quite generous.
My primary concern would be about the scale of the company: self-organizing over a thousand people is going to have some rough patches.
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#4> Hsieh sent a nearly 5,000-word company-wide memo...
> To get their severance, employees had to be in good standing with the company. They were also asked to indicate by email that they had read the management book "Reinventing Organizations" and disagreed with its manager-free vision or else state that they were not reading it.
Crazy.
I wonder how many more employees would have left if Zappos was based in a region where workers have greater mobility.
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#5I just finished Tony's book "Delivering Happiness". I admire how positive and optimistic he is. And I even agree with forcing self improvement on the employees.
But he also stresses running the company like a family aka cult. One of the advantages of moving to Vegas from SF was the employees were forced to spend more time together. He even said Zappos is his tribe. I wonder how these experiments would fare at a larger company.
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#6So just the managers and supervisors left then?
I can't even tell if this is being spun as a positive or a negative. That is a radical change and if anything it seems like a low number of people to take the severance.
Whether the new policy will work out in the long term remains to be seen. I believe I read that Google tried a flat hierarchy for a few months and found that it did not work quite how they wanted.
Also, what will Tony Hsieh be doing in the new managerless structure?
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#7Offering money for employees to leave is an interesting strategy. I worry about unintended consequences, though. One consequence is that the very best people (who have easy times finding jobs or striking out on their own) will be much more likely to leave than less competent people who may feel they would have a harder time on the open job market.
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#8So just the managers and supervisors left then?
I can't even tell if this is being spun as a positive or a negative. That is a radical change and if anything it seems like a low number of people to take the severance. Whether the new policy will work out in the long term remains to be seen. I believe I read that Google tried a flat hierarchy for a few months and found that it did not work quite how they wanted. Also, what will Tony Hsieh be doing in the new manage…
> Also, what will Tony Hsieh be doing in the new managerless structure?
Writing more 5,000 word emails?
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#9So just the managers and supervisors left then?
If so it might be what he wanted. There was speculation that the buyout was a way to get rid of managers without having to fire them.
Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum
#10> Hsieh sent a nearly 5,000-word company-wide memo... > To get their severance, employees had to be in good standing with the company. They were also asked to indicate by email that they had read the management book "Reinventing Organizations" and disagreed with its manager-free vision or else state that they were not reading it. Crazy. I wonder how many more employees would have left if Zappos was based in a region…
Wow, I wish my company would do something like this - middle management is clearly slowing us down and adding very little value right now.
I can't wait to read that book.