Success In Business Is About Company Culture
If you can get the culture of your company right, all the rest – good customer service, happy and passionate employees, the creation of a brand, and the generation of profits – comes naturally.
I’ve recently finished reading Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering happiness,” and it was full of fascinating stuff. For those of you who don’t know, Tony co-founded Link Exchange in 1999, and went on to sell that business to Microsoft for $265 million. He then sunk most of that money into a company called Zappos – an online shoe retailer. Applying his quite radical philosophies around customer service, he grew that company to the point where Amazon bought them last year for $1.2 Billion! He remains the CEO, and a strong believer that delivering excellent customer service through happy employees is the root to business success.
I’ve selected some highlights around what they do at Zappos to give you a flavour:
Training
Everybody, from the cleaner to someone coming in as a director, goes through the same four week training program. For two weeks they learn about the company history, the customer care philosophy and the culture of the business, as well as it’s position in the market. Then they spend two weeks on the phone, handling customer calls. Everybody does this!
The $2000 Bounty
After the two week training, and before they hit the phones, every employee is offered $2000 to leave. No strings! Only about 1% take them up on the offer, but everybody else has to make a conscious decision that they’d rather work for Zappos, than take $2000 to walk away.
Every employee is an ambassador for the brand
Every employee is encouraged to use social media in work time to help promote the brand, and every employee takes a turn at giving visitors and journalists guided tours of the premises. They build up a pride in “their” company.
Empowerment
Every employee is empowered to deal with customer service issues. They don’t have to check back with a supervisor, they do what they feel they need to in order to deliver great customer service.
Core Values
The company’s core values, which every employee knows by heart, are interesting:
1/ Deliver “WOW” through service
2/ Embrace and drive change
3/ Create fun and a little “weirdness”
4/ Be adventurous, creative and open minded
5/ Pursue growth and learning
6/ Build open and honest relationships with communication
7/ Build a positive team and family spirit
8/ Do more with less
9/ Be passionate and determined
10/ Be humble
Summary
I can almost hear some people reading this and thinking: “That’s all very well, but it’s also very American!” And I agree – it would be hard for many European businesses to use some of those core values without people wondering what on earth they were talking about.
But ponder the fact that Zappos became the world’s largest shoe retailer in almost no time at all, and think about how you could translate some of the learning to your own business.
Imagine if all your staff were actively pursuing learning, were as passionate about your business as you are. If you had a real family spirit amongst your team, if people were always striving to do more with less and above all were delivering incredible customer service every day.
If you want to read Tony’s book, it’s available through Amazon:
