This week, we distill insights around Zappos - how the online shoe seller delivers happy employees and consistently appears in Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more about Zappos Delivering Happy Employees, visit: http://peopleslab.mslgroup.com/peoplesinsights/zappos-delivering-happy-employees-peoples-insights-volume-2-issue-33 100+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on reputation, employee engagement and citizenship on the MSLGROUP Insights Network. Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it -- on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web -- to distill insights and foresights. We share these insights with you on our People’s Insights blog and compile the best insights from the network and the blog in the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities. We have further synthesized the insights to provide foresights for business leaders and changemakers — in the ten-part People’s Insights annual report titled Now & Next: Ten Frontiers for the Future of Engagement, now available as a Kindle eBook. For more, see: http://peopleslab.mslgroup.com/future-of-engagement

1. Reputation | Employee Engagement | Citizenship
Zappos
Delivering
Happy
Employees
People’s Insights: Volume 2, Issue 33

2. What makes Zappos, Zappos?
Zappos.com is an online
shoe and clothing shop
which has fostered an
employee-centric culture
and has been named in
the Fortune 100 Best
Companies to Work For list
for five years in a row.
Source: happymonday.biz

3. 7 ways to deliver happy employees
Happiness Culture
Explicit Core Values
Celebration Bell
Parades
Culture Book
Great customer service
The “offer”
Source: money.cnn.com
Zappos believes in
delivering happiness, both
to customers and
employees, and has built a
culture of delivering
happiness internally
through its core values.
Here are 7 things Zappos
has introduced to deliver
happy employees.

4. 1. Happiness Culture
Zappos encourages
employees to "create fun
and a little weirdness" in
the workplace and build
personal connections with
co-workers.
Zappos celebrates its
people's successes with
parties, carnivals,
employee bonuses, and
thank-you gifts, for every
employee.
Source: jessicamah.com

5. 2. Explicit Core Values
Zappos culture is guided by
a set of core values which
aims to empower
employees, create a sense
of community in the
workplace, and serve a
higher purpose beyond
bottom-line metrics.
Source: about.zappos.com

6. 3. Celebration Bells
Many departments in
Zappos have a bell
hanging in their area that
can be used by all to
make announcements.
Managers use this to
announce promotions or
goals being met, and
employees use it to thank
others or announce a
project completion.
Source: money.cnn.com

7. 4. Parades
Zappos has parades
all the time, but when
something big happens
- like a million-dollar
sales record - it calls
for a special parade.
The department in
question gets together
and parades through
the building with music
and costumes and lots
of candy.
Source: blogs.zappos.com

8. 5. Culture Book
Zappos has a culture
book which is written
by employees every
year. It details how
people feel about the
Zappos culture and
how they reinforce and
develop the culture
every day.
Source: mullen.com

9. 6. “Zappos pays you to quit”
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.
Bill Taylor
Co-founder, Fast Company
Source: blogs.hbr.org
After four weeks of
extensive, new hires
receive “the offer”: if the
new hires wish to quit,
Zappos pays for the
amount of time they have
worked for and also offers
them a bonus.
In 2008 the bonus was
$1,000. Today, it is
$4,000.

10. 7. Extraordinary customer service
Every new employee
irrespective of their
position starts out by
answering phones in the
call center.
The key to Zappos
customer service? The
company doesn't have a
script directing how call
employees should interact
with customers on the
calls.
The result? 75% of all
orders come from repeat
customers.
Source: blogs.zappos.com

11. A competitive differentiator
In service-oriented organisations, employees are
not only the hands and legs, but also the heart and
soul of the organisation. Everything else becomes
secondary. So if organisations want to succeed and
grow, they must have a passionate set of inspired
individuals. If your employees are not happy,
chances are they’ll be less passionate about work.
Passionate, Happy Employees - that’s vital. It’s not
a skill set that can be taught.
Alethea Fernandes
Senior Account Manager, MSLGROUP
India
Happy employees are
integral to the success of
any organization,
especially those in the
service sector. As Zappos
demonstrates, good
employee engagement
can actually be a
competitive differentiator.

12. *BONUS* 8. Effective use of Twitter
Zappos streams Twitter
conversations to
showcase people’s
experience with customer
service (and to show
employees how people
are responding).
Zappos’ culture and
employee empowerment
benefits it's performance
on social media - 1,200
conversations take place
on Twitter every month.
Source: dev.twitter.com

13. Read People’s Lab insights & foresights
The People’s Lab team shares the insights and foresights from the
MSLGROUP Insights Network on the People’s Insights weekly blog , quarterly
magazine and annual report.
MSLGROUP
INSIGHTS NETWORK
100+ MSLGROUP planners
share and discuss inspiring
projects on reputation,
employee engagement and
citizenship.
PEOPLE’S INSIGHTS
WEEKLY BLOG
PEOPLE’S INSIGHTS
QUARTERLY MAGAZINE
We deep dive into
conversations around one
project to distill insights and
foresights.
Every quarter, we compile the
best insights from the network
and the blog into a magazine,
as a showcase of our
capabilities.
For more, visit http://peopleslab.mslgroup.com/peoplesinsights

14. People’s Lab: Crowdsourcing Insights &
Innovation
People’s Lab is MSLGROUP’s proprietary crowdsourcing platform and
approach that helps organizations tap into people’s insight for innovation,
storytelling and change.
For more, visit http://peopleslab.mslgroup.com/peoplesinsights

15. For People’s Lab solutions,
please contact:
pascal.beucler@mslgroup.com