Life doesn’t end when you come to work, and the feeling of working for the Zappos family, which we talk about here a lot, should not end when you go home.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Google and Facebook and some of the most profitable, fastest-growing companies in the country have cute offices and strong benefits plans. But such companies are still few and far between. With Zappos, it’s “work hard, play hard.” I mean, the toys in the office, the nap rooms, the fun events we hold every week, the bar we built right on campus—the fringe benefits are what get highlighted in magazine articles, but people don’t look much at the other side of it, which is the incredibly hard work that people do here to maintain and grow this company every day.
The instigator and creator of the bar in our lobby is Letha Myles, who is one of our tour guides but also moonlights as a bartender around downtown Vegas. She also happens to love Prince (or the artist formerly known as Prince) more than life itself. (Pretty Woman fans: see what I did there? ) Anyway, Letha came up with the perfect name for the bar: 1999. (Zappos was founded in 1999 for those of you paying attention.)
We wouldn’t be where we are after our first twenty years without a lot of incredibly hard work, and I just don’t think that anyone would work quite so hard if it weren’t for the feeling of true support that this company offers. It goes both ways.
Little things aren’t frivolous. The fact is, if somebody can come wash your car and give it an oil change while you’re here at work, you can then spend that hour or two on the weekend with your family, so you can truly focus on living life when you’re at home and not waste an entire weekend running errands. Then you can come back to work on Monday morning and not feel like you missed your chance to be with your family because you were stuck in an office all day and not allowed to leave your desk. It’s just a different way of looking at things. And the benefits of that to the company, and to our customers—it’s enormous compared to the nominal cost associated with some of these things.
Do right by your employees and they’ll do right by you.
If our employees are truly our most important resource, then it simply makes sense to treat them accordingly. We want them to feel WOWed by our company culture, the same way we want our paying customers to feel WOWed by it, too. So we do as much as we possibly can.
It just seems like common sense, doesn’t it? Do right by your employees and they’ll do right by you.
Jeff Lewis
Customer Service Technology
I once received a call from a customer asking about our “Joke of the Day.” He explained that he was a janitorial supervisor at the McMurdo Research Station—in Antarctica, of all places—and that every Monday, his team would call in to our main line during their weekly meeting to listen to our Joke of the Day. He said that our jokes were the highlight of the meeting for his staff, and that they wanted to know if they might be able to contribute some jokes. We took them up on it, and a week later we started playing the jokes they had sent over.
Roughly a month after this interaction, we received a large box full of candy from the McMurdo janitorial staff, filled with all kinds of candy from around the world. It took so long to get here from Antarctica that some of the candy was expired by the time it arrived, but the goodwill shown by the McMurdo team has always stuck with me.
Loren Becker
Community Team
I have webbed feet.
It was one of our employees who came up with the idea to offer a “Joke of the Day” option on our customer service line, and it’s been going on for years now: Anyone who calls in can opt to be taken to the “Joke of the Day” before getting connected to CLT, if they so choose.
Um, Loren . . . I think it was, um, my idea, derived from my childhood shenanigan history of calling 976-JOKE without realizing the calls were not free. In my book Delivering Happiness, I wrote:
I asked if anyone had heard of 976 numbers. I had seen all sorts of ads on TV for different 976 numbers. You could call 976-JOKE, for example, to hear the joke of the day, at the cost of 99 cents a call. So we tried calling 976-JOKE, and heard a joke that wasn’t very funny. We tried calling the number again to try to get a better joke, and all they did was replay the same one. In retrospect, I guess it made sense since it was supposed to be the joke of the day, not the joke of the minute.
It wasn’t a marketing idea. It wasn’t designed to make calls shorter to keep our 800-number budget down (obviously, since it makes calls longer). It doesn’t result in increased purchases, at least not directly. It was just something fun to do. A way to let customers know that we’re a unique, fun place to call in to, and maybe even a way to relieve some tension if whoever’s calling is having a bad day—which might include the fact that something was wrong with their order and they’re now spending their valuable time calling customer service at Zappos.
The thing is, we’re quirky here, and we want you to know it.
Our employees have the freedom to tell jokes, to send cards, to send gifts, to talk to callers or vendors or contractors for hours and hours if they strike up a good conversation. They have the freedom to be themselves. And freedom is a pretty rare thing in the workplace, isn’t it?
When people come to tour our Downtown Las Vegas campus—and they do come, in the thousands, it’s crazy!—they’re excited by what they see. Like, the bar we built right next to the lobby, or employees playing video games and Skee-Ball in the company arcade in the middle of the day. They see employees stopping by the convenience store in our lobby, picking up some random item they forgot at home and need now, and they wish they could do that at their own places of work.
which also happens to be the former Las Vegas City Hall
The freedom and autonomy we give to our employees isn’t frivolous. It’s purposeful. We want everyone here to know that they are allowed to use their best judgment, to do things on their own without asking permission. That they can take a risk and try new ideas without feeling like, “Oh, if I take this risk and it doesn’t work out, I could get fired.”
If we were a brand-new start-up, I think you could write off our quirky ways and dismiss them as something that wouldn’t work anywhere else, and our critics certainly did that in our early days. But we’ve been around long enough now to have a meaningful track record, and I think more and more people are taking a look at this level of freedom we offer our staff and thinking,