What do people want when they talk about working in a top-tier company? Most of you must answer ‘Money’, and yes that is true, but is it the only thing one wants?
Monetary consideration is a part of the agreement when you are hired and the employer wants your time, effort and skill to ultimately add value to the company’s business in one form or the other. Keeping both sides in check, one can call this equation balanced and this makes the workplace more efficient, more productive and happy.
Late former CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh believed in the same theory and in his tenure of over 20 years as CEO, he delivered countless productivity strategies and policies that endorsed working in a happy and productive workplace.
Zappos is a US-based online retail company that was acquired by Amazon in the year 2009 for USD 1.2 billion.
Tony Hsieh devised a very interesting policy in Zappos which was referred to as “The Offer” in which new employees who were unhappy with their work or workplace, in general, were offered a bonus of $2,000 to quit.
Sounds like a bribe, doesn’t it? Well, according to a 2008 Harvard Business Review article, as published by Business Insider, “The Offer” was described as a policy which involved that new employees, potentially unhappy with their work and company’s work environment were offered a bonus $2,000 cheque following a training period of four consecutive weeks.
In its initial stages, the company wasn’t big enough to offer $2,000 to every employee who’d like to quit, but still inculcated this policy and started offering $100, $500, $1,000 and finally $2000 along the years.
Noteworthy to mention, this bonus amount was paid on top of the existing salary of the employee, for whatever period of time he/she has worked with the organisation.
Tony Hsieh mentioned in a 2016 Business Insider interview,
“We want to make sure that employees aren’t here just for paychecks and truly believe this is the right place for them.”
The man was actually known for his out-of-the-box ideas and workplace policies intended to make the workplace, a better, efficient, productive and happy place.
It is learned that this practice is started was manly to chicken out those employees who were either there just for the sake of money or were simply not a good fit for the company’s workplace.
As unfortunate as it is, Tony Hsieh died this Friday on November 27th in a house fire in Connecticut.