Zappos’ experiment to end the office workplace

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.<p>Interesting quote &quot;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.&quot; People want to be managed!

<i>&quot;People who live in trailers,” he said darkly, “generally do so because they&#x27;re broke, not because it&#x27;s a fun social experiment.&quot;</i><p>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&#x27;t have the luxury of being on the buyer&#x27;s side of their job market.<p>Boredom in the boardroom is no reason to add stress to your employee community&#x27;s work life.

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

I have read &quot;the book&quot; mentioned (Reinventing Organizations) and it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;m less sure about. (At least this is how it seems many of the zappos employees feel about it).<p>I would love to hear anyone&#x27;s experience who is working for a company that&#x27;s embraced holocracy.

It is an interesting look at how Zappos now organizes their privileged &#x2F; upper class employees.<p>However the employees who do most of the work, toil away in warehouses, under the control of Amazon and their soul crushing timelines.

So the objective is to humanize the corporation but the solutions they&#x27;ve wound up at are essentially gamification (points, badges). I wouldn&#x27;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 &quot;game systems&quot; that become just as stressful to &quot;play&quot; if not more so...

People thought &quot;the office&quot; 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&#x27;s being described, it sounds like another world; and just as hard to comprehend. Monkeys, ninjas, roles, badges, and the beach...

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?

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

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

<i>The company encourages its 600 CLT representatives to make personal connections with callers, and to send flowers, cookies, or thank-you cards.</i><p>curious, do they encourage this on the company dime or is the CLT expected to pay out of pocket for these &#x27;personal connections&#x27;?

&gt; Supercloud has about 20 different teams, with 250 to 350 people, including contractors, working with more than 100 different Amazon teams.<p>I&#x27;m interested in this aspect. Why is the migration so complex? It&#x27;s an ecommerce store that sells shoes. What gives?

How is career development and mentoring going to be handled?<p>Good managers aren&#x27;t just bosses, they provide mentorship and help break through and across organizations. Not everyone is emotionally equipped to do the intra-organizational networking.

I haven&#x27;t RTFA yet, just skimmed a few comments. How does this different from Valve&#x27;s setup of not having any bosses?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.valvesoftware.com&#x2F;company&#x2F;Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.valvesoftware.com&#x2F;company&#x2F;Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...</a>

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

did it work?

I&#x27;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

Oh good, another article about Zappos