In 2008 Harvard Business Review's Bill Taylor wrote about an odd habit at Zappos, the online shoe retailer famous for its customer service. Every new call-centre employee went through a week of intensive training. At the end of that week they received something the company simply called The Offer1.
It went like this: if you quit today, we will pay you for the time you have worked, plus a 1,000-dollar bonus1.
There was no catch. People who took the money really did leave. Zappos was betting that anyone willing to trade the job for a thousand dollars should not stay, and that finding out early was cheap.
The logic behind an apparently absurd expense
Tony Hsieh, Zappos's chief executive, built the company around a belief: great customer service cannot be squeezed out with scripts and targets, it only comes from people who genuinely want to give it. Taylor summed up what Zappos understood: it could not deliver great service unless employees were committed to the company's values1.
Set the 1,000 dollars against what an unwilling employee costs and the arithmetic flips. That person takes a training place, draws months of salary, answers thousands of calls in the mood of someone counting the days, leaves anyway, and the company has to hire again from scratch.
The offer also works quietly on those who stay. They have not just been hired; they have actively turned down money in order to stay. Psychologists call it the commitment effect: once people have chosen something themselves, they tend to act consistently with that choice.
Amazon borrowed it, with a different headline
Amazon bought Zappos in 2009. In his shareholder letter published in April 2014, Jeff Bezos described the Pay to Quit programme Amazon ran for its fulfilment centre associates, crediting Zappos with the idea2.
Once a year Amazon offers to pay associates to quit. The first year the offer is 2,000 dollars, rising by 1,000 dollars a year to a maximum of 5,000. The headline on the offer reads: "Please Don't Take This Offer"2. The point, Bezos wrote, is to get people to take a moment and think about what they really want, because in the long run someone staying where they do not want to be is not healthy for them or for the company2.
When the offer went to the whole company
In 2015 Zappos used the same logic on a much larger scale. Hsieh decided to move the whole company to Holacracy, a self-management model without managers in the traditional sense. In March he wrote to around 1,500 employees: anyone who did not want to go along with the new model could leave with a severance package of at least three months' pay3.
By the 30 April deadline about 14 percent of employees, or 210 people, had taken it. Another 4 percent left during an extended window afterwards. In all, 18 percent, about 260 people, left Zappos3. The press called it an exodus. Hsieh said about half of them left for reasons that had nothing to do with Holacracy: they wanted to start their own businesses, and the severance gave them the money to try3.
The Holacracy story is far more complicated than The Offer for newcomers, and it is still debated. But it shows one thing: the bigger and later the offer, the harder it is to treat as a gentle test. For a newcomer after one week, it is a chance to correct a wrong decision. For someone who has been there for years, it is a shock.
How HR teams in Vietnam can use the idea
Vietnam's Labour Code already contains something close: during probation, either party may end the arrangement without notice and without compensation. In practice, though, very few companies actively ask newcomers the question Zappos asked. A newcomer who does not fit rarely says so. They see out the probation period out of politeness or because they have nowhere else to go yet, then leave in the third or fourth month, after the company has finished investing in their training.
You do not need to pay 1,000 dollars to learn the core lesson. The core lesson is to give newcomers a real way out, with an explicit invitation, at exactly the moment they understand the job well enough to know whether it suits them.
