A couple of weeks ago, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, laid off eight per cent of his work force. Shortly after, he sent this message out on Twitter:
Very emotional day for everyone at Zappos. I’ll be sending out an update later today with details of what’s going on.
Zappos.com is an online retailer specializing in shoes, but also sells handbags, clothing and some electronics. Tony is anticipating that Zappos will do one billion in sales this year, but this didn’t make the company immune from the economic downturn.
What caught our attention about the Zappos situation was the transparency of it. Tony twittered about the layoffs and then later posted the internal company memo on his blog for the public to read, including details about severance.
While this was happening, Zappos employees were also twittering about the news. Zappos encourages its staff to have Twitter accounts (they even offer a Twitter class at the office) so while the pink slips were being handed out, employees were tweeting about the whole experience.
On the November 24 and 29 episode of Spark, Nora talks to Tony Hsieh about why he blogged about the layoffs, and about his take on having a strong company culture.
An edited version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download the MP3.
Play audio:
We want to hear what you think:
Now that employees can have their immediate and unfiltered say on blogs, twitter and facebook, how transparent will companies need to be with good/bad news?
Are the days of the PR department controlling the company message gone? Add your two cents, or your advice for big business, in the comments.
photo by Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us.
I appreciated the transparency discussion today. I remember being a client and the helpless feeling during project development of not knowing what was happening. Now that I own a web development company, transparency is an important part of everything we do. Along with telephone, email and face-to-face meetings, we manage most of our projects on pbwiki.com. Here clients, vendors and I have full time access to a common workspace while the project is in production. PbWiki surprised us this summer by asking us to be a case study for them on this very topic. It was recently posted at
http://pbwiki.com/content/casestudy-thesimplifycompany , and of course I was thrilled by the exposure this offered my company. It seems a no-brainer though. Transparency should be expected and provided, wherever and whenever possible.
Thanks for your show. I appreciate how you put it together.
smiles,
rudy
People always hate to talk about when they are laid off. But as it has become every day’s news headline since Yahoo started it with cutting 1500 of its task force last year, now a need of platform has been in demand where people can express their selves in words how they are feeling about their company, whey the got laid off was that justified or not.
And every thing they want to tell anonymously.And http://www.layoffgossip.com is providing you that platform.