Four Things We Learned From Zappos.com
A few weeks ago, the management staff of Miriam’s Kitchen traveled to Las Vegas to learn about developing a strong values-driven organizational culture.
Why Las Vegas? It’s the home of Zappos.com, an online shoe and clothing store known for its impeccable customer service. They also have a training program called Zappos Insights for organizations looking to improve their business by developing a great culture.
Here’s a bit of what we learned:
1. Nonprofits originated the values-driven organizational culture. For-profits made it profitable.
Nonprofits have always had a higher purpose that attracts and motivates their staffs.
However, some corporations, most notably Zappos.com, have figured out how to make their employees and customers happier by defining values and the culture that derives from those values. Moreover, the for-profit world did, as they often do, a great job of measuring the return on investment and creating metrics to gauge the culture’s effectiveness.
Many nonprofits, including Miriam’s Kitchen, could do a much better job of measuring the outcomes associated with their values-driven culture.
2. One size does not fit all.
When Zappos.com hires staff, they spend more time screening for whether that person fits within the Zappos.com culture than they do on screening for skill sets. Zappos.com lives its values by being willing to hire and fire based on those values.
They realized long ago that they can train someone for a particular job, but they will never be able to make a person fit into their culture if that person doesn’t accept the organizational values.
What we think is so brilliant about Zappos.com is that they’ve regimented this screening process in ways that most nonprofits have not.
3. The secret to a strong culture is not buy-in, but alignment.
Cultural alignment should be present in beliefs, values, words and actions, and workplaces should have systems in place to sustain that alignment. Having an evolving vision is also important because it creates a larger story, allows people to see themselves in the vision, and creates a sense of purpose.
4. Don’t try to copy Zappos.com at your organization.
It’s about finding the culture and values you have already. Your core values should be a living document, not just something you put on a shelf or hang on the wall. Like your cultural alignment, your values must always be present in your words and actions.
We’ve started to implement a few of the ideas we learned at Zappos.com, including all-staff lunch on Fridays and team meetings that focus not just on to-do lists but on discovering our values as well.
We have many more ideas we'll be implementing over the next couple of months, along with our work to define our culture and the things we value most. Because the lasting theme of our visit was this: If we get our culture right, everything else will fall into place.
