The importance of corporate culture

Read this article earlier today and it just blew my mind. It talks about the importance of corporate culture, values and giving your customers a reliable feeling when they work with your company:

So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

We work in the exact opposite way – raise or fire – within 90 days, and I have to admit that the above does look better. My primary Office Space problem in growing OWN is that the experience is definitely not consistent because there is a personality tradeoff in hiring – I can hire someone social or someone technically savvy, but we generally don’t find both, so we have hordes of people that likely go home and work on their roadkill taxidermy projects for all I know. IT customer is not exactly the “people person” nurturing system, 99% of the time you’re dealing with some asshole who also gets kept in a dark, moist basement rarely exposed to sunlight much less people.

Wonder what it takes to raise socially presentable IT employees?