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Tony Hsieh wanted to make people happy: customers, employees, everyone. It was a goal as premonitory as it was ambitious.
As CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos for 21 years, Hsieh, who died on November 26 at the age of 46 from injuries sustained in a house fire, was one of the first trailblazers to do so. employee happiness a business priority. His quest to create an environment where workers felt excited about their work and, by extension, their lives, is an indelible part of his legacy, which reveals both the promise and the pitfalls of happiness as a goal of business.
Zappos culture of pleasure
Today, the idea that companies should care about the welfare of workers (or at least pretend they are) is so common that it is part of the official statement on corporate goals released by the Roundtable of companies in 2019. CEOs like Eric Yuan of Zoom and Richard Sheridan of Menlo Innovation have gone even further, following in Hsieh’s footsteps to publicly commit to the idea that when employees are happy, productivity and profits have tendency to follow.
But when Hsieh ran Zappos in the 2000s and early 2010s, the idea that an ambitious and growing company would care so much about the happiness of workers tended to raise eyebrows. In an interview with WNYC’s Marketplace in 2010, interviewer Kai Ryssdal questioned the sustainability of Zappos’ culture during a visit to the company’s headquarters in Las Vegas, telling Hsieh that there was a ” large group who stood around chatting. There’s a party down the hall that’s been going on for an hour. How does all of this actually affect shoe sales day in and day out? “
Hsieh did not deny that his business needed to sell shoes and make money. He just believed that socializing with coworkers – inside and outside the office – was essential to achieving those goals. When managers bonded with their teams, he told Ryssdal, productivity increased: “There were ‘higher levels of trust, communication is better, people are willing to do each other favors. because they are doing favors for their friends, not just their co-workers. “
To Hsieh’s thinking, having fun at work wasn’t a handicap; it was an asset. In his 2010 book, Offer happiness, he boasts of running the kind of office where departments set up improvised bowling lanes and host impromptu Oktoberfest parades.
This festive approach to corporate life gained popularity with the Second Great Tech Boom. Startups and then more traditional employers have turned to facilitating social opportunities as a way to keep workers engaged – and, according to critics, tied up in the office, spending 16 hours a day without any overtime waits. All those happy hours and pinball tournaments in the office, Laboratory rats author Dan Lyons said Wired this year, are simply “a way to distract employees and keep them from noticing their pockets are being picked up.”
The office as the center of social life
That said, Offer happiness suggests that Hsieh had a very real personal interest in seeing the workplace as a place of close relationships. He writes that he realized in his twenties how important a sense of belonging was to his personal happiness, and vowed “to never lose sight of the value of a tribe where people really feel connected and connected. care about each other’s well-being. . “
He found this feeling while attending his first rave, where “the whole hall looked like a massive, united tribe,” and tried to recreate it at work, first in the San Francisco penthouse suite that served as the venue. party for Zappos and (at one point) rent-free employee housing complex, and later, with the company’s move to Las Vegas. In the book’s opening scene, as he discusses the sale of Zappos to Amazon in a show of hands, he is touched by “the unified energy and emotion of everyone in the room. And referred to the transcendent feeling he experienced at that time. first rave.
Happiness research supports Hsieh’s reflections on the importance of relationships: Social bonds and community are essential to our emotional well-being. Where things get tricky is his idea of the workplace as the social focal point in the lives of his employees. “Probably the biggest advantage of moving to Vegas was that no one had friends outside of Zappos, so we were all forced to spend time together outside of the office,” he recalls. Offer happiness. He later told the New York Times that he preferred the idea of ”work-life integration” to “work-life balance.”
It seems clear that Hsieh really enjoyed this approach in her own life. But such sentiments can raise red flags for readers concerned about how the 21st century workplace has eroded the barriers between employee work and personal life. When socializing with co-workers becomes an expectation, rather than an option, it penalizes working parents and others with caregiving responsibilities – and can deepen, rather than bridge, racial and cultural divisions.
The issues inherent in placing such a high value on labor relations were also evident in Project Downtown, Hsieh’s hugely ambitious attempt to turn downtown Las Vegas into a start-up city. The contractors involved in the Hsieh project had left their friends and family behind to travel to Las Vegas. It meant they spent a lot of time together. But in 2014, reporting three suicides among the entrepreneurs involved in the project, writer Nellie Bowles found that the expectation of constant socialization after office hours had an impact on many founders. Since their social life was inseparable from their professional life, with a lot of time spent courting venture capitalists, they were unable to be emotionally honest and vulnerable to the struggles and pressures they were under. faced as they tried to get their business off the ground.
“We call it the ‘face’ in China – it’s okay, we’re doing great,” a founder told Bowles. “But at the end of the day, you need a community, a safety net. You don’t want to share these issues with your investors, but if there are only investors, what do you do? “
The cost of positivity
Maybe striving for constant happiness, whether it’s for ourselves or for others, is just too much pressure on everyone involved. After all, there’s little a CEO can do to create the conditions for workers to thrive. Fair wages and generous benefits go a long way; the same goes for helping people identify a purpose in their work.
Beyond that, individual temperaments and circumstances will vary. Some employees may be looking for exactly the kind of close-knit, loving community Hsieh wanted to provide; they’d be happier working at Zappos than spending their days, say, in a buttoned-up bank. Others may prefer to keep their work and personal lives separate, and so the very efforts to boost morale may well backfire and make them more anxious or frustrated.
But making room for people to express such feelings doesn’t seem like Hsieh’s style. As well-intentioned as his efforts to spread happiness are, the relentless pursuit of positivity often means that there isn’t much room for dissent or discussion of the darker aspects of human existence.
He paid new Zappos who hire $ 2,000 if they leave soon after joining the company, in order to weed out people who were uncomfortable from the start and to preserve the corporate culture. . When employees struggled to adjust to Zappos ‘new holacracy management structure, Hsieh offered several months’ allowance to anyone who was not fully on board, hoping they would no longer stay. than with true believers. (Almost 20% of Zappos workers agreed to the buyout, and the company ultimately moved away from a strict interpretation of holacracy.)
All of this has apparently been done in the service of maintaining an optimistic atmosphere. And to be fair, the evidence suggests that Zappos employees are mostly happy with their jobs. Current and former employees give the work experience there 4.1 out of 5 stars on the job review site Glassdoor, and it is frequently listed on the lists of the best companies to work for. But there is also reason to believe that Hsieh would have been better off listening to the haters of the holacracy rather than getting rid of them – making room for the people Adam Grant calls “nasty donors.” , the insightful malcontents who drive organizations to do better and who could have saved Zappos from years of implementing a system that ultimately didn’t serve the business.
Typically, when we try to eliminate conflict or quell negativity, happiness becomes more elusive. Research shows, for example, that there are real psychological costs to acting happy when we are not. Conversely, people who accept their darker emotions rather than deny them tend to experience less depression and anxiety and react more resiliently in the face of adversity. As reporter Aimee Groth, who got to know Hsieh personally while writing a book on the Downtown Project, notes in her tribute to her flawed but expansive vision, “Failure and suffering are a more instructive teacher than unconscious success.”
As new details about the circumstances surrounding Hsieh’s death continue to surface, the business community grapples with the question of how to remember her life. Perhaps one of the most important lessons to learn is that employers can care about their employees – as Hsieh did – without expecting or asking them to be happy.
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