The late Tony Hsieh’s profitable solution to job satisfaction

Tony Hsieh – Charlie Llewellin from Austin, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

One the most original thinkers in business, Tony Hsieh, died in November in a house fire in Connecticut.

Hsieh, 46, left a vast legacy of entreprenuership, most notably in his online shoe company, Zappos, which he sold to Amazon in 2009 for $1.4 billion.

One of his innovations in staffing is the Hsieh put an actual dollar amount on job satisfaction and, you might say, company dissatisfaction.

How much does it cost a company to keep a worker that doesn’t like the work, doesn’t like the company, wants to leave, but can’t afford to quit the job?

In 2008, Hsieh thought getting rid of an unhappy worker was worth $1,000.

So, after a week or so on the job, some workers would be given an offer. They could continue to work and presumably do better, or they could quit. If they quit, the company would pay them to go.

Author Bill Murphy, Jr., wrote about this policy in his blog understandably.com.

He looks at the policy from a different perspective: That of the employee. Although the Hsieh policy wasn’t intended to be an act of charity, it actually is, Murphy writes, since it saves a person from doing something they hate. Life is too short.

Murphy should know. In 2009, he famously quit a six-figure job at 7:30 a.m. on the second day. But, he knew he was going to quit on the first day. No one paid him to quit that job.

The moral of the story: Don’t spin your wheels somewhere you hate. Find something you want to do and then give it all you have.