Cultural Fit.

When was the last time an employer offered you $2000.00 to quit after the initial training period? Sometimes you quickly figure out, if a company culture is not for you but you took the job and now you stick around hoping that things may get better. A $2000.00 incentive to not hang around and mess up the chemistry may make your decision to leave easier and help the company out at the same time. If a company culture does not fit how you do things and you can't see any change in your direction of thought, then the choice should be obvious.

Of course that doesn't happen very often and the choice for joining a new employer seldom has to do with the culture. It's about friends who may work there, it's closer to home, there is a pay increase, your'e desperate to leave your current job or a dozen other reasons that make sense in the short term. Long term tenure requires more thought than just the annual pay increase and cultural fit within the work place is becoming a major factor for people looking to achieve for one employer and not use a series of them as stepping stones.

The $2000.00 get out of jail, phew I nearly messed up, this is not my bag idea, comes from Tony Hsieh of Zappos shoes. Zappos sells shoes online, nothing extraodinary about that, except they do it better than any company on earth as witnessed when Amazon bought them for a billion a few years ago. From $70 million to $1 billion turnover in under a decade and more than 4 million pairs of shoes to choose from, sold by a sales team working in a call centre environment is the work place for employees who as a group would take the proverbial bullet for Hsieh. For most this environment would not engender thoughts of staff having the audacity to come to work and enjoy it. Yet that is exactly what Tony is offering thousands of people living the Zappos brand.

Culture as a competitive advantage is a by line for Zappos, along with company values of inspire, connect, educate and experience, showing they value their employees above profit and share value. Amazon does not interfere with the workings of Zappos because they bought a culture of success that not even they could emulate. Culture can be easily explained as the way things are done in the work environment but Tony Hsieh pushes that envelope further and believes the work place should also fulfill employee's aspirations and personal values.

What a great reason to come to work. In fact the "work" becomes secondary to your experience and no one yet has come up with a counter argument that happy workers don't equal profit. Zappos is the post child for employees looking for that opportunity to marry work and life and come away satisfied with both. It is achievable as Hsieh describes in his book " Delivering Happiness" so why are companies like Zappos so rare? It is only people, after all, working to create a place they love, just like home.

Do you have the audacity to change your culture at work?