Zappos’ experiment to end the office workplace

[blazespin]

Work life integration... Shudder. I like 6 hours a day of ruthless, compartmentalized efficiency (think mental sprinting) and after that, forget about it. Only if you give me significant equity in a rapidly growing company will i do work life integration.

Interesting quote "When the deadline arrived on the last day of April, 14 percent of the company, 210 people, took the offer. Twenty of them were managers, I was told, out of a total of 246. It was a difficult day. Tear-stained faces replaced the typical smiles on the Zappos campus." People want to be managed!

[VLM]

> People want to be managed!

I would interpret that somewhat differently, I'd take the offer, for example.

A long time ago as a high school student I stacked bags of sidewalk salt on pallets. The only thing keeping me out of toilet plunging, manual labor, and being yelled at by customers over the phone is my job title / position so eliminating them has very little appeal to me. If I was at the bottom of the hierarchy, sure, elimination of the hierarchy sounds great; but in the middle/top of a technical hierarchy... elimination doesn't sound so great.

I also expect to live a couple more years, and I have children relying on me to put food on the table, pay for schooling and health care, etc. Plus lets face it, I have no great desire to live under a freeway overpass myself. How do I explain at my next job interview that two jobs ago I was more or less a software dev but my most recent job title was ninja, but I'm just as good as the other 9 out of 10 applicants you have who were software devs in their most recent job. Sure you were, sure you were (insert sound of resume hitting trash can)

Another interesting interpretation is its like joining a cult. Self depreciation of myself and my career combined with permanently removing myself from the greater employable economy... So they're passing around the kool aide, smells kinda like almonds, eh, I think I'll pass, this is finally one step too far.

[freshfey]

No, I think people just hate change. We're always scared of the unknown, hence why historically humans have preferred dictatorships vs. anarchy.

[marknutter]

I do not want to be managed.

[gadders]

I'm not having meetings at 10pm at night either.

[mattlutze]

"People who live in trailers,” he said darkly, “generally do so because they're broke, not because it's a fun social experiment."

This quote closer to the end of the piece struck a cord with me. Part of leadership is the responsibility to provide a level of stability or predictability. I can see how these changes might really not fly or be comfortable for a lot of the staff that don't have the luxury of being on the buyer's side of their job market.

Boredom in the boardroom is no reason to add stress to your employee community's work life.

[kriro]

This reads like a bizzaro nightmare of a workplace for introverts. Seems like a bad long term strategy to be this "peoply" (and make it an uncomfortable place for a good chunk of the workforce).

[Joeri]

If you read the book mentioned in the article it is not quite so brainwashy. I expect it doesn't make sense for a majority of workplaces as is, but it didn't sound like teal workplaces where bad places to work. In fact, it sounded like the sort of place I would love to work, but at the same time I knew that the majority of my coworkers would not fit in. The basic tenet as I understood it is that you can replace the structure of management with a structure of decision-making processes where decisions are taken at the lowest possible rung (where lowest means as close as possible to the work the decision impacts). It's not democracy, but it is self organized. It's a book worth reading if you want to reset your expectations on what corporate hierarchy must look like.

From the article I didn't get the sense zappos is doing it right though. People aren't supposed to be afraid to speak up.

[officemonkey]

I think introverts will be just fine. It seems that the job is all about "have fun while getting the job done" and if my fun is "let's sit over here, drink tea, pet my cat, and review these quarterly reports" then I'm pretty sure they're going to support that.

[27182818284]

> workplace for introverts

Zappos strikes me as one of the last places to apply if I were an introvert. I'm not sure you can get there without being somewhat of an introvert as even the article mentions putting you on the phone with customers regardless of your role.

[boothead]

I have read "the book" mentioned (Reinventing Organizations) and it's amazing. Another book to read would be Maverick by Ricardo Semler. The companies covered, from a wide range of different sectors, industries and countries genuinely seems to provide a nurturing, egalitarian environment for their employees. I think that operating from a teal perspective would make the world a better place.

However I note in the book that most organizations covered had a visionary leader who at some point stepped back and allowed the company to become what it did. Essentially embracing chaos and allowing the culture to emerge. Tony seems to be trying to impose this evolution from above, which I'm less sure about. (At least this is how it seems many of the zappos employees feel about it).

I would love to hear anyone's experience who is working for a company that's embraced holocracy.

[veritas3241]

I loved "Reinventing Organizations" as well. It's interesting because some of the Teal ways of doing things rubbed me the wrong way because they felt too "touchy-feely" and I thought that my coworker would never go for this. I tried to have enough self-awareness to realize that maybe that's how people stuck in the Orange way of doing things feel about Green practices. Like you, I would love to hear from people who are working in a Teal environment.

If you're interested in other books that talk about the future of work I would recommend Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull (about how Pixar works) and Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock (about how Google HR works). They're both fascinating insights into how two modern companies try to do their best work.

Would love some recommendations if you have any as well.

[anodari]

I don't know if is related, but it remembers Valve to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Organization...

[ThinkBeat]

It is an interesting look at how Zappos now organizes their privileged / upper class employees.

However the employees who do most of the work, toil away in warehouses, under the control of Amazon and their soul crushing timelines.

[jinushaun]

Zappos sounds like a dystopia to me. It's well-off white-collar workers (i.e., leisure class) who depressingly keep trying to optimise their workflow/happiness--like an addict chasing the next high. It's the top part of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Need.

This experiment is only possible because Zappos is a stable money-making business and the CEO can afford the "risk" of failure due to personal financial security. How about experiment on improving the lives of the lower class, instead of the upper class? If this philosophy is the pinnacle of working human society, then why limit it to only a select few? I guess the warehouse workers will all be replaced by robots anyway, so they'll be someone else's problem after that.

[marknutter]

There's a different between working hard and working smart.

[WorldMaker]

So the objective is to humanize the corporation but the solutions they've wound up at are essentially gamification (points, badges). I wouldn't necessarily call gamification a humanization: it seems more like a tangent to a different rabbit hole. Instead of HR Policies that try to come from a human place you get "game systems" that become just as stressful to "play" if not more so...

[headShrinker]

People thought "the office" was funny for the way the characters handled situations with complete ineptitude and their inability to understand conventional norms. I think they should make a TV show based on people trying to handle architecture of Teal. The way it's being described, it sounds like another world; and just as hard to comprehend. Monkeys, ninjas, roles, badges, and the beach...

[itsybitsycoder]

The little trailer park for employees sounds like it would make a great set for a TV sitcom. Instead of meeting up at Central Perk they can sit on their individual tiny house porches and talk to each other.

[infecto]

Does anyone know why Amazon mandated they migrate the platform to Amazon? This multiyear project appears to be a sinkhole to me. Multiple years where very little changes in your company except for a backend migration to Amazons platform. Whats the value add? Would it not be less costly to keep the system and create a migration to any necessary systems?

[thewarrior]

Like someone on Twitter said this reads like some Douglas Adams novel.

[ommunist]

Well, never heard of anything like that in climates with serious winter. Any boss-free examples from Sweden, Finland or Norway?

[dagw]

Based on my experience working in both Norway and Sweden, bosses here are far more hands off and egalitarian than most of the horror stories I hear from the US. There just doesn't seem to be the same Us vs. Them feeling, so there doesn't seem to a big anti-boss anti-management movement here to begin with (although I'm sure lots of people will pipe up with personal counter examples).

In fact the only really annoying micro-managing boss I ever had was a guy from California.

[tommccabe]

The company encourages its 600 CLT representatives to make personal connections with callers, and to send flowers, cookies, or thank-you cards.

curious, do they encourage this on the company dime or is the CLT expected to pay out of pocket for these 'personal connections'?

[flavor8]

> Supercloud has about 20 different teams, with 250 to 350 people, including contractors, working with more than 100 different Amazon teams.

I'm interested in this aspect. Why is the migration so complex? It's an ecommerce store that sells shoes. What gives?

[jeffclark]

Complete guess on possible engineering teams that could make up that 250-350 people: SEO/acquisition, various "admin"/marketplace functionalities (adding, removing, updating products), analytics, financial reporting, marketing reporting, payment processing, probably some kind of "core" team, general bugs/RTB, etc etc etc etc.

[pm24601]

How is career development and mentoring going to be handled?

Good managers aren't just bosses, they provide mentorship and help break through and across organizations. Not everyone is emotionally equipped to do the intra-organizational networking.

[richardboegli]

I haven't RTFA yet, just skimmed a few comments. How does this different from Valve's setup of not having any bosses?

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

[nasalgoat]

The idea of having to invent badges to describe my job and justify my salary sends shivers up my spine.

[dharma1]

did it work?

[bru_]

I'm going to work at Zappos and do magic mushrooms all the time, refuse to wear shoes or change out of a wardrobe solely comprised of yak fur, and develop myself into the most central node on the org chart by generally being the chillest, most non reductionist dude in the organization

[abledon]

As long as you write good unit tests I'm sure you'll be fine ;)

[pinewurst]

Without a large tattoo, you'll never get anywhere.

[douche]

How are you going to avoid the yak-shaving in a suit made out of yak fur?

[timdiggerm]

Oh good, another article about Zappos