Source: Samantha Lee/Business Insider It's a shame Zappos doesn't seem to have the answers to whether or not Holacracy works for them. It was the fact that 5 percent of a 40 billion (i.e., 2B ) shoe business was already being done through mail order (i.e., Total Addressable Market size). So, when we entered the office we tried hard to leave our biased views on the sunny streets of Vegas.Zappos employees, however, seem to struggle with the fact that there is no proof whatsoever to convince them to keep working in this new way. People were already buying shoes without trying them on. Over time, we started to feel that the culture of Zappos had become a caricature of itself. The way people interacted wasn't the fake and happy chappy we expected it to be. More and more teams find ways to beat the system and have adjusted the processes in such a way that they feel more comfortable with it.
I AM TONY HSIEH Cofounded Zappos And Link exchange DELIVERING HAPPINESS 2. It’d be an awesome and really powerful case study if Zappos has largely been immune to this trend!The success of this business model is the result of an effective alignment with its underlying operating model. While at my last startup, we tried to learn a lot from Zappos’ customer service and gave agents a lot of freedom. Now, you can join too.Download a free sample chapter of our book. Uncommon Service: The Zappos Case Study An excerpt from the book, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, by Francis Frei and Anne Morriss. At Zappos, this doesn't seem to be the case.Employees directly involved in the implementation of Holacracy told us they hoped the Holacracy hype to be over better sooner than later.“We love working for this place, some of us for plenty of years already. For example, meetings are not as rigid anymore as they were initially implemented and how we are supposed to hold them. Also, we think that a predefined and off-the-shelf system replaces a proper dialogue between employees.The decision to start working with Holacracy at Zappos has been a top-down decision. Some have struggled very much with the new way of working, others picked it up quite fast. My question is how Zappos will maintain it’s current quality of service under this new operating structure? Today, we still sell shoes — as well as clothing, handbags, accessories, and more. to be productive. But honestly, not everyone is trained in Holacracy. We talked to a couple of long-time Zappos employees, fairly new recruits and people that have already left the company for a while. Most of us are just trying to make the system more human.” We wanted to visit the place with an open mind as to develop an objective view of what makes Zappos so special. But it is just nonsense to think that this one model will work for all the teams in an organization of this size.One of the major reasons Zappos implemented this model is the reasoning that in cities innovation tends to increase when the amount of people increase. It felt inclusive, diverse and pleasant to walk around the office and encounter Zappos employees interact in an authentic manner. It’s interesting to me that the retention rate fell once they implemented the new “circles” staffing model.