Dive Brief:
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Zappos is moving forward with its “holacracy” approach — eliminating bosses and job titles and replacing them with self-governed teams it calls “circles” — which Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wants in place by April 30.
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In an effort to speed up the adoption of this approach, Hsieh in a March 24 internal memo has offered any employees in good standing who don’t like it an easy way out by offering severance packages of three months or more.
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Hsieh previously offered $2,000 to employees who didn’t like his idea when he first began the no job titles, no bosses experiment.
Dive Insight:
In a his extensive memo, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh calls his offer a ‘"rip the bandaid' approach” that will allow the company to entrench his team-based, hierarchy-less system. The exit-easing tactic is a sign that the unique and quite radical system hasn’t been entirely an easy sell.
Observers have noted that the approach can be difficult to explain — Hsieh’s memo was nearly 5,000 words — and that explanations in fact are riddled with a peculiar idiosyncratic jargon that some employees find hard to swallow.
"Yes, it can seem artificial and forced, and it can seem alien when you're learning it," John Bunch, who has been instrumental in the transition to this system, told The Washington Post. "But it's kind of like learning the rules of a new game you've never played before.”
“To a certain extent we don't care,” Bunch said of outsiders and others who say they don’t understand the intricacies of the company’s approach. “Whatever people outside the company think about this, we're only doing what we think is best for the organization and for the people within."