11 ms·

I work at a company that was in bad shape during the financial crisis. A temporary CEO was put in charge. Ultimately, a number of companies were merged to creat

• exelius 11y ago
  I think the idea with Zappos is that they're supposed to be such a great place to work that you wouldn't want to leave. And in Zappos' case, I get why they offered severance deals. They were embarking on a radical experiment in organizational structure, and not everyone is going to be on board with it. Rather than having a bunch of people at the water cooler talking shit about the changes, you offer them money to leave so that people who aren't on board with the changes get out of the way. I would guess that many of the people at Zappos who took the deal were managers themselves. If you're a middle manager, you have skills around managing people but maybe not so much with doing the actual work. If your skill set doesn't align with the new job you're being asked to do (which is effectively a demotion), and the company offers you a buyout to leave, what would you do?
  • bunderbunder 11y ago
    I imagine that people in management positions have reason to take the package even if their skill set is perfectly aligned to the new job. If you're on a career path where one of the major measures of your success is how many people are under you, then you better be pretty committed to the Zappos vision if you're staying on. A long stint of not having anyone reporting through you might be a bit of a black spot on your resume if you ever end up for a position elsewhere.
    • latj 11y ago
      The list of people who took the offer was posted internally. I imagine it must be out in the wild somewhere by now as well. Besides managers who are looking to jump ship and pretend to do work somewhere else, a lot of professionals are on the list- lawyers, accounting people. I imagine some of these people will show up on Amazon's roster in the near future.
      • manigandham 11y ago
        > "Pretend to do work" Little presumptuous isn't it?
    • liquidcool 11y ago
      Yes, even the title change from something like "Senior Manager" to "Employee" might hurt your chances. With IT/dev it's not so bad, as some very good organizations list both grads and greybeards as "Member of Technical Staff." I have to imagine that those who remain plan to retire from there.
    • lsc 11y ago
      > If you're on a career path where one of the major measures of your success is how many people are under you, My assumption would be that those are the people that this move is attempting to push out.
  • Spooky23 11y ago
    I'm surprised the number of people taking the deal isn't higher. If I need religious zeal, I'll go join a religion.
    • dingbat 11y ago
      well another way to look at it is that there is already a fundamentalist organizational religion that most people adhere to, they're just unaware of being part of one already
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • kzhahou 11y ago
        Please explain.
      • some1else 11y ago
        Please identify this "fundamentalist organizational religion" a bit clearer. Did you mean capitalism, b-school, emergent hierarchical organizations.. tribes?
        • honeybooboo123 11y ago
          My guess would be "statism". It could be defined as the belief that political power should be used to fix societal problems, even though they were caused by it in the first place.
        • dingbat 11y ago
          its pretty simple, there is obviously a very ingrained faith in the standard organizational structure w/ management, staff. its so obvious that is how things should be (its "fundamental"), that its difficult to consider that belief is possibly also a matter of faith, even if that standard structure was itself emergent in some respects. its possible the commenter i was responding to was referring more to the "rah rah" aspect of zappos as a whole, rather than religious zeal re: this new organizational concept. those are different things in my mind, also both are exhibited by the directive "to all employees: read this book and indicate you have done so". anyway it isnt a comment on whether or not the zappos idea itself is useful and/or just another fad coated with new terminology (i have no idea). just that when you can identify someone else as engaging in religious zealotry, its fun to consider what that zealotry is being compared to, which probably turns out to be something like "everybody knows its supposed to be this way", aka. some sorta implicit religion.
  • lmg643 11y ago
    it's easy to forget that zappos was acquired by amazon. i am interested to what extent sales growth or lack thereof, would be a driver of radical restructuring.
    • exelius 11y ago
      I think that Amazon is content to let Zappos experiment. If Zappos loses customers, statistically most of them will end up at Amazon anyway. Tony Hsieh is pretty out there, and a lot of his ideas sound kind of crazy, but I think Bezos believes in him and is willing to let him try. Even though everyone says "Oh, that won't work" you don't know until you try. If Zappos can experiment with a new leadership style, maybe it produces desirable results that can be replicated elsewhere. Maybe it fails miserably. What's likely to happen is that there will be things that work and things that don't, and I guarantee Amazon is interested in that. Because of all the things I've heard about Amazon (many of them good), I've never heard that it's a great place to work. Their turnover is high, so maybe they're looking for ways to reduce it while not losing the culture of urgency (though some would say fear) that makes them so good at executing on things. Of course, if it's a total failure, Bezos will likely fire Tony and trash the entire idea.
      • eclipxe 11y ago
        It's a great place to work. There, you can no longer say "you never heard it's a great place to work". Sample size of 1, but I love it.
        • jevanish 11y ago
          That's great to hear, but how much did that change for you or others when the holocracy processes were added? I can see where that could totally change how I feel about a job even if I still love my coworkers, the job perks, etc.
          • eclipxe 11y ago
            Sorry I should have clarified - I meant Amazon is.
  • keithpeter 11y ago
    "Rather than having a bunch of people at the water cooler talking shit about the changes, you offer them money to leave so that people who aren't on board with the changes get out of the way." Each change creates winners and losers. The losers will be around that water cooler. You can't manage this before the trajectory is flown. Best of luck to all involved.
  • teammatters 11y ago
    Personally, I don't care too much about company culture in regards to the rat race of working in office(work remotely for a large company). I would take the money and find another gig; preferably a remote job. On a different note more employers need to offer remote working options. You wake up, rollover and start working without needing to shower right away, drive/get stuck in traffic, pay a lot for gas ... remote working if more and more allow it/offer it is a solution to the traffic on our highways. Yet there goes many construction jobs ... an example of the Internet killing tons of jobs in that field. Well im off track, but feel passionate about working remotely, not needing to are about office culture/politics and the huge benefits to society if more companies allowed/forced remote working.
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    Rather than having a bunch of people at the water cooler talking shit about the changes, you offer them money to leave so that people who aren't on board with the changes get out of the way. There's that element directly, but I think even more powerful is the sense to the employees that they are consciously opting in to staying. They are literally passing up a (small) pot of gold in order to stay in the new structure. The mere fact of choosing in such a way (even if that's the default choice) will tend to increase commitment in the inevitable dark moments of the transition.
    • sopooneo 11y ago
      Doesn't Zappos make a similar offer to everyone that finishes their new employee training program?
      • MetaCosm 11y ago
        Yep, 3k -- and for the same reason. http://bigthink.com/inside-employees-minds/zappos-will-give-you-3000-to-get-your-priorities-straight http://bigthink.com/inside-employees-minds/zappos-will-give-...
• jackmaney 11y ago
  > It was unclear what his intentions were. To determine loyalty to the company, possibly. Corporate loyalty has been dead for many, many years.
  • grecy 11y ago
    > Corporate loyalty has been dead for many, many years. The higher-ups in be corporations have yet to get that memo.
    • SlalomStallone 11y ago
      Corporate loyalty is gone, but nepotism never dies.
    • leothekim 11y ago
      Maybe you need to write a 5000-word memo to get the message across. http://www.webwordcount.com/count.php?u=FoW3dBdV http://www.webwordcount.com/count.php?u=FoW3dBdV
    • vonmoltke 11y ago
      They got the memo; they just want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want you to be loyal to them, but to retain the option to dump you on the street as soon as somebody needs to bump their profit numbers by 0.1%.
      • rosser 11y ago
        You missed a zero or two on the right side of your decimal point.
        • rylee 11y ago
          Surely you meant "left side".
      • hinkley 11y ago
        Since we've learned that they are almost all sociopaths (not as an epithet, but clinically so), this behavior is perfectly consistent.
• nostrademons 11y ago
  People work at a company for a variety of reasons. Some want or need the money. Some really believe in the company's mission. Some like the people they'll be working with. Some want to develop skills for their next move. Some want the brand name or status. Over time, the company will accrete people of all sorts of different motivations. What a buy-out does is take money out of the equation. It makes it so that everyone who is there for financial reasons has a financial reason to leave. This can be logical if the company has little to offer financially, as in, for example, a company that's in bad shape during the financial crisis. The only employees who're left are those who are not in it for financial reasons - the true believers in the company, those who like their coworkers, and those who want to gain skills. Those people will be a lot happier when they don't have to listen about their financially-motivated colleagues grousing about how the company is going under, and they'll be more productive when they're happier. The CEO's fatal mistake was that he forgot that his board is financially motivated. From their perspective, he's acting insane, because why would anyone stay at a company for reasons other than money? And they're his bosses, so they can have him removed. For this to have worked, he probably should've taken the company private, or at least packed the board with people who bought into his vision for what kind of company it should be. The board's fatal mistake was in removing the CEO. By offering buyouts, he had just aligned the company in one direction. By removing him, they suddenly took the company in a different direction - one that they had less than zero capital in, because the CEO's previous actions had alienated everyone who might've helped them. In both cases, the failure was in understanding that people are different and may have different motivations, and that a company survives based on how well it can hold together people who all have their own goals and worldviews and motivations.
  • mrich 11y ago
    I don't see how the usual buyout amount would be able to take the money out of the equation. "Low performers" who don't have good chances in the job market surely will stay, since their earning potential is greater than what you reasonably offer them in a buyout. The likelihood that the skilled employees will take the money, knowing they will get another job immediately, is much higher.
    • 11y ago
• sobkas 11y ago
  >It was unclear what his intentions were. "a tenure-based package to leave the company" People who have been longer with company are also more likely to be older than average employee. So I think he wanted to get rid of "old" people who would "slow down" company and be unfit for its "new and vigorous" culture?
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    In my (thankfully limited) experience, it's entirely standard for severance packages to be tenure-based and, IMO, most of those reasons have nothing to do with ageism. The longer you've been with us, the more you've likely contributed and we should recognize that as we part ways. The longer you've worked with us, the more life upheaval the separation represents. The longer you've worked with us, the more personal relationships you have developed, perhaps with the same people making the decision to eliminate your position. A generous severance (which IMO requires a tenure component) sends an important signal of stability to the employees who remain AND makes it easier for managers (who are of course humans themself) to make the decision to eliminate the position of a long-tenured but "surplus to ongoing operations" employee. What's the alternative? The person who joined 6 weeks ago gets the same package as the 10-year veteran? That seems worse all around to me.
    • sobkas 11y ago
      There is a subtle difference between company wide push to get rid of employees and severing employment on an individual basis. Giving presumable older people more in the first situation looks like a systematic effort to get rid of them.
• bsg75 11y ago
  > It was unclear what his intentions were. When you don't know how to run a business, cut costs and call the result a profit. Then take the bonus for "hitting the target", and pull the golden parachute ripcord.
  • Ecio78 11y ago
    This. I was going to post a reply just to say that, but I couldn't have said it better..
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  This is the risk (the "wrong" people taking the buyout). It was the source of a lawsuit during one of HPs many acquisitions and then downsizes where HP tried to give "selected" individuals the option to leave early, and the folks who were not given the option sued. The courts affirmed that you could not give preferential treatment for early retirement/severance it was everyone had the same choice or no one did. For what it is worth, managing staffing levels is one of the hardest things to do in a large organization because the visibility of contribution is so low. You have the quiet guy who gets things done everywhere but is invisible, and the useless guy who keeps up a very believable patter of what they are getting done. If you layoff people just based on the optics of the situation you screw yourself.
  • rahimnathwani 11y ago
    a la 'Office Space'
  • yuhong 11y ago
    Personally I think this idea is probably flawed in the first place.
  • danjayh 11y ago
    I think that's one of the important roles of a team leader - to know who is getting how much done (among many others). I wonder how Zappos will accomplish this now that they have no team leaders.
    • a3n 11y ago
      I had a team leader who had to convince me that I was getting things done. One of the best.
    • a3n 11y ago
      Yes, and another way to look at this is that team leaders maintain teams. They're not there merely for leadership's sake, they happen to have a particular role, maintenance. Who will maintain teams without people whose specific role is maintenance?
• makeitsuckless 11y ago
  I once started a gig at a broadcasting company that had just bought a respected multimedia/internet company running several major high traffic websites. The broadcaster didn't like the employment contracts with all the "cushy" benefits, so they offered the staff a buyout. The entire technical staff took the buyout, most of the easily replaceable editorial, project management and graphics people stayed put.
• kabdib 11y ago
  I've seen this done, but there was a class of employee not eligible for the buyout (e.g., engineer). So you wind up with good engineers, and all the bad management and support that couldn't find jobs elsewhere, and that works out real well, you betcha...
• hydrogen18 11y ago
  The company I worked at "solved" this problem by offering the same package but with a clausing stating "key employees are not eligible to receive this package". There was some legalese at the end of the document that deciding who was "key" was ultimately up the company and no explanation was required. As one of my co-workers explained it: If you're incompetent you can get a great payout and then go be someone else's problem.
  • danielweber 11y ago
    That sucks. If you ask, you are signaling you want to leave, which you don't want to do unless you really can.
  • s73v3r 11y ago
    Isn't that illegal, though?
    • hydrogen18 11y ago
      Possibly, but I have no idea really. You'd have to sue them anyways to find out wouldn't you?
• walshemj 11y ago
  It was the same at British telecom when there where such good incentives to leave that many of the key technical staff left. Most of the Uk's mobile networks was designed and built by ex bt people who took redundancy
• whyaduck 11y ago
  Did he make the offer without consulting HR? I've received occasional buyout offers - they're always subject to approval and capped based on a number of factors.
• SilasX 11y ago
  >But what actually happened was that people who were good at their job, and could find work elsewhere, left. So they would have had all of the top talent leave the company and the remaining employees would be the people who did just enough to get by. I remember this being an issue with General Motors near bankruptcy (2008) too. They couldn't lay off union workers, and figured it would be cheaper to offer them buyouts than keep paying their above-market salaries. There too, people pointed out that the only takers would be the best workers, who can easily find work elsewhere, and they'd be left with the ones who can't.
• shagie 11y ago
  > But what actually happened was that people who were good at their job, and could find work elsewhere, left. So they would have had all of the top talent leave the company and the remaining employees would be the people who did just enough to get by. This reminds me quite a bit of a blog post from The Wetware Crisis on what he deemed The Dead Sea Effect ( http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d... ) While not a forced evaporation which you describe, its the 'the best people can get jobs elsewhere' and 'the less capable people entrench themselves as experts on critical systems to where they can't afford to be let go'.
• deleted 11y ago
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