Company culture close to a Cult

Next when reading Tony Hsieh’s book I’m wondering about how it is to have a family at home and friends from before when working at Zappos. It’s great to love to go to work, to feel that you have friends there who care for you and who support you, but as a parent of three kids I wonder how you cope with the other cultures that you must be a part of – the small communities of every school and daycare that your children belong to? It feels quite important to actively take part in your children’s school when parents arrange mingles and activities. If you don’t your kid is soon an alien to school, friends and to you. So how do you fulfill your parental role while being a part of a culture as Zappos, asking you to check in your full time, ethics and soul into the company?

Or maybe it’s a culture created by and for dinkies or at least childless employees and there should be other companies in the society building culture by, with and for parents… and everyone else who is not willing to check in his soul to a company.

It is much more fun to go to work when believing in and embrasing the goals and when being a part of the company, but at the same time it’s easy for this kind of culture to become a cult – a religion - creating new goals and ethics over time that everyone follows out of pure social validation. In my mind it is sound and maybe even human to be precautious to that kind of traps. At the same time as I adore the described Zappos culture and philosophy, it is always scary when groups become strong and powerful. Powerful cultures got power over the group and over others.

More thoughts from Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness

Motivators to greater achievements: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

This 10 minutes film from theRSA.org is entertainingly visulized as it describes the results of to some surprising research on motivation. It's actaully quite obvious and yet it contradicts traditional models of rewardings and bonuses as incentive models.

A summary for you who don't have 10 minutes:

It is a common theory that if you reward something, you get more the behavior you want.

MIT studies show that as long as the task involves only mechanical skills the bonuses work as expected, but once the task called for rudimentary cognitive skills, a larger reward showes poorer performance. It actually works the other way around.

Further tests in India with a much different target group proved this result with an even stronger effect. Huge rewards resulted in disastrous achievements.

The conclusion is that you have to pay enough for your employees not to care about the money, because if you don't pay them enough they will not be motivated at all, BUT the factors that lead to better performance from these employees are:

Autonomy - the desire to be self directed and engaged outrules money
Mastery - we like to get better on stuff, when we improve it's fun
Purpose - only bad things are generated when the profit motive is set above the purpose of the work

I will think more about those bad things not described here in an upcoming post.

More from me about what is fun:
The goal of having fun
Fun is challenges