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Thought experiment: ignore the holacracy angle and offer everyone in any company 3-months severance if they quit by a certain date. What percentage would quit?

by basseq 11y ago

Thought experiment: ignore the holacracy angle and offer everyone in any company 3-months severance if they quit by a certain date. What percentage would quit? I wouldn't be surprised if the average was 10-20% and a vast majority of these people are taking advantage of what they see as a good deal irregardless of their feelings on holacracy as a management style.

Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
It's like cleaning your email subscriber list every few months.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Not really; people who can't get a job elsewhere possibly because of skill wouldn't be taking the offer. But someone who gets constant job offers by other companies? Unless you're absolutely in love with Zappos why wouldn't you? I know I would have.
  - petercooper 11y ago
    Although of 1500 Zappos' employees, I doubt many are getting frequent offers or recruiters reaching out. How many are doing IT, development or high level sales stuff where well paid jobs are plentiful? I imagine the majority are customer support agents of one kind or another, packers, logistics people, etc.
  - Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
    Fair enough. Though I'd note that there's quite a few options in between "no job prospects / low skills" and "constantly getting job offers". The average complacent / comfortable employee probably does more harm to the company than most others on a daily basis. I know PLENTY of workers who stay in jobs for years while being unhappy and constantly talking of wanting to leave. That's more of the "list cleaning" to which I was referring.
scott_karana 11y ago
Actually, that aspect of Zappos's strategy isn't new at all. Here's an article from 2008. tl;dr is "If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus." https://hbr.org/2008/05/why-zappos-pays-new-employees/ https://hbr.org/2008/05/why-zappos-pays-new-employees/
- eli 11y ago
  True, though 3 months pay for seasoned employees is signifanctly different in timing and scale
- x43b 11y ago
  "tl;dr is "If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus."" Paying you for the amount of time you worked is a legal obligation. So really you are talking about can you find an equivalent or better job in the amount of time you would have earned $1,000 if you stayed. Even in the lowest of paying legal jobs in the US, it does not take that long to earn $1,000 relative to securing a job. Not to mention that new job is not guaranteed to fit into your current living situation and other factors that cause the inertia for staying with a current job to be quite large. Seems a bit like a gimmick to me.
velodrome 11y ago
What percentage would quit? The ones that could land another job by the quit date. They would essentially get a 3-month "bonus" for doing nothing. I would say this is only possible if the these people were looking to jump ship anyway.
- basseq 11y ago
  Or the ones that think they can find another job with 90 days, or the ones who want to try their own thing for a little while (subsidizing the first 90 days of startup runway: enough for a MVP).
- Phlarp 11y ago
  What percentage of any competent IT team can't have a competitive offer in writing by the end of the day? Even if your anticipated time between jobs is 1-2 months, you can still confidently quit by the deadline and end up with six weeks paid vacation and a six weeks bonus.
  - Retric 11y ago
    In the US I would guess around 95%. Extend things to 1-2 months and that probably drops to 20% or so which is very good odds. However, the difference between a 'competitive' offer and a 'good' one at a company you want to work for is huge. If your spending between 1/3 and 2/3 of your waking hours at work you need to make them count.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Furthermore, Zappos is in Las Vegas. It wouldn't be my idea of a place to live but some people like it and it's certainly hugely cheaper than most of California. So someone leaving Zappos in IT/software development probably has the option of going to work for one of the casino groups or moving.
  - toephu2 11y ago
    When you refer to IT do you mean IT/desktop support or software engineers?
CPLX 11y ago
One important subtlety here is that it would depend greatly on where you were geographically. In a small town with one employer it would be one way, in LA or NY it would be another. Zappos is located in Vegas, which is a bit of an oddball market and somewhere between these poles I would think.
lukaslalinsky 11y ago
I think that only people who do not have particularly good relationship with the rest of their team, and either already have or can easily find another good job. If that's a somewhat stable company, I don't think the percentage would be high. Most people don't like change. If things are okay-ish and you have friends on your team, I don't think a 3-month severance is enough to make you change your comfortable routine. Do some large change at the company, like changing the management structure, moving the company and the chances that people will take that offer will very significantly increase.

slg 11y ago

That is assuming that everyone is a hired mercenary. I could rather easily find a job that pays me a 10%-30% raise over what I currently make. I don't do that because I already make "enough" and I like my current job, company, and coworkers. It isn't even a matter of loyalty, it is a matter of different priorities that puts money further down the list than job satisfaction. Finding a good paying job is much easier than finding a good job.

AceJohnny2 11y ago
When it comes down to it, it's a matter of comfort and risk.
Touche 11y ago
I can find a good job easier than I can find $30k+ free money.
- simplemath 11y ago
  hear hear
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  If you can find a better job than you have, why haven't you done that already?
  - Touche 11y ago
    No one's giving me 30k to go look for one.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      This is highly relevant. Looking for a new job is like another job in itself. You have to do research, have telephone conversations, be "switched on" in your interview persona for hours at a time, jump through flaming hoops, and if possible, also be younger, more energetic, and more beautiful than you really are. It's a sales job, with you as the product. I. Hate. Doing it. So while a lot of people could go out and get a better, higher-paying job, there is a potential barrier and significant activation energy for that reaction. Doing my regular job plus the self-sales job is absolutely exhausting. When my current job is already almost good enough to keep, I have little incentive to go sift through piles of recruiter spam and speculative postings to find the actual jobs, retype every last detail of my resume into yet another stupid custom candidate tracker web-app, suffer through the bozo filter and the pop quiz of the tech screen, fly or drive wherever, and spend one of my vacation days playing along with some stupidly involved interview process, only to see a curtain of silence descend forever. For $30k, and an extra 40 hours per week in which to do it, I would certainly put up with the tech hiring circus for a couple of months.
  - rifung 11y ago
    Note that he said a good job, not necessarily a better one. I think the idea is that if someone is giving you 30k to find one, you really only need to find one that pays the same, or close. Technically you'd come out positive if you found something that's at least more than (what you make) - 30k, but then you have to consider raises and such.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Their current job might be "good enough" in that the benefits of switching are not significantly over the costs of switching. But when you add 3 months of salary to the equation, that might tip the scales.
  - a3n 11y ago
    There's always a better job. At some point you have to stay somewhere for awhile, to gain whatever it is you're trying to get: stability, experience, improvement, contribution, pay, benefits, community.
fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
But if you weren't currently happy with your job and you weren't confident in the chances of that changing, it wouldn't make you a mercenary to jump ship at that point.
a3n 11y ago
There is nothing wrong with being a hired mercenary. If you consciously attempt to hire true believers, then you will get two kinds of employees: true believers, and people who lie about true believers. That set of employees is probably pretty small compared to the larger set of qualified employees without such a restriction. You write off a huge pool of talent. Just because you're a mercenary doesn't mean you won't bring your all to the task at hand. Also, consider the employee relationship from the other direction. No corporation is going to hire an employee because the corporation is a true believer in the employee's mission. That relationship is a strictly mercenary one: Can you do for us what we need you to do for us? Full disclosure: I'm old.