The Power of WOW. The Employees of Zappos.com

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СКАЧАТЬ complaints—although both of those things are important if done authentically and for the right reasons. It doesn’t mean that we give things away for free all the time, or that we’re putting on some sort of an act to try to get customers to like us, either. In fact, just the opposite is true.

       Many people think that Zappos is a website that sells shoes. But that’s just what we are on the surface. What we really are, what we’ve always been, is a service company that just happens to sell shoes.

      The heart of Zappos’ culture is that we view our customers as much more than a source of transactions. We strive to understand our customers’ needs and to recognize that, in some cases, an order of shoes or some other product can mean much more. The real magic of our business culture is that we see our customers as humans. We see them as family. We see them as our neighbors and our friends. We see them as fellow employees. We see them . . . as us. And we know that the best thing we can do for each other is to treat each other authentically, the way humans should be treated under the best of circumstances. Which means that we do our best to lead with our hearts and to try to do the right thing for all of our customers, all of the time.

      We want our customers to be happy. Truly happy. And we want to keep spreading that happiness around.

      That’s why our employees wanted to put this book together: We’ve been working on our service-first mentality for nearly twenty years. I’ve been here for most of those years, and I can tell you we didn’t come to this conclusion overnight. It took time for us to understand that this mindset works best when it’s genuine. What we do at work and what we do at home isn’t and shouldn’t be two different things, because putting service first matters as much in business as it does in life. It took us years to fully grasp just how possible it is for a business to act more human, to have a little more heart, and to learn that doing the right things instead of just the profitable things actually creates more “profit” for everyone. And we are still learning every day.

       At Zappos, our core values are an honest part of everything we do. They are guardrails that guide our way.

      We’ve heard that we have done something pretty unique at Zappos: We’ve been able to retain our brand and our culture even after a major acquisition. A decade after being acquired by one of the biggest companies in the world—Amazon—we’re still prioritizing our customers and our culture more than ever.

      So how does a company grow from scratch into a business that’s worthy of a $1.2 billion acquisition, and then survive and keep its core solid, all while continuing to grow in a rapidly changing environment? How can a company develop that type of resilience?

      We believe that it all comes down to two pillars.

      The first is a set of core values from which everything starts and ends. These aren’t the type of “corporate values” or “mission statements” that get discussed in meetings and put on some document and forgotten. At Zappos, our core values are an honest part of everything we do. They are the guardrails that guide our way. Kind of like the Constitution, they serve as the basis of every decision we make and every venture we tackle. Our core values allow us to always know where we stand, so we can rest assured that we’re always moving forward with our compass pointed in the right direction.

      Our core values were discussed at length in Tony’s first book, Delivering Happiness. But for those who’ve never seen them (and as a reminder for those who have), our core values at Zappos are:

       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

      You’ll see each of these core values in action over the course of this book. You can also take a deep dive into our Oath of Employment (see page 235). It’s a document we give to all new hires, and beyond listing Zappos’ Ten Core Values, it defines exactly what we mean by each one in detail. The oath is our signal to every employee that keeping true to our core values, our culture, is the right and responsibility of all of us.

      Core values matter. When they’re present, when they’re solid, they sit at the foundation of every decision and every move you make. When they’re not there? Well, we believe that’s part of the reason some businesses might waver under pressure or struggle to make good decisions aligned with their brand and values.

      The second pillar of our company? At Zappos, what we’ve found is that every ounce of our success depends on our employees. Hiring the right people and then trusting those people to have our company’s—as well as our customers’—best interests at heart matters as much as anything else we could ever hope to design into the structure of our business.

      After all, what is a company made of if not its people?

      And putting people first is what service is all about.

      

       PEOPLE POWER

       Hollie Delaney

      Chief Human Resources Officer

       I trained dolphins after college.

      I was fed up. I’d worked in HR for years, in a whole bunch of different environments, from a casino, to a water park, to e-commerce, and finally for brick-and-mortar retail, and, to be frank, I just didn’t like what was I doing. I felt like all I did was enforce rules all day long, and deal with compliance issues, and tell people what they were doing wrong. There was nothing fun about it. Nothing uplifting.

      I didn’t even feel like I was me when I was at work. I didn’t dress the way I like to dress. I’m a ripped jeans and t-shirt kind of woman, and at one of my prior HR jobs they made us wear stockings. Like, pantyhose. Every day. Why? Because that was the way it had always been done. Truly, there was no other reason.

      When I was at work at my previous job, I didn’t act like I normally act. It was like I put on a persona when I walked through the door. Work was just a job, and sometimes a miserable job, that I dragged myself to every morning only to watch the clock in the afternoon, just waiting to go home to my family and be me again.

       Zappos’ HR department is like no other HR department I’d ever encountered. It’s fun and a little bit weird, just like me.

      When СКАЧАТЬ