Pipeline – Building People

“Our philosophy at Zappos is different. Rather than focusing on individuals as assets, we instead focus on individuals as assets, we instead focus on building as our asset a pipeline of people in every single department with varying levels of skills and experience, ranging from entry level all the way up through senior management and leadership positions. Our vision is for almost all of our hires to be entry level, but for the company to provide all the training and mentorship necessary so that any employee has the opportunity to become a senior leader within the company within five to seven years. For us, this is still a work in progress, but we’re really excited about its future.”

What I love about Zappos is the company is actually a small-version university. They have courses such as: (just name a few, this is not a complete list)
- Zappos History
- Zappos Culture
- Four-week new hire training (including answering phones)
- Zappos Library: Fred Factor and Fish
- Intro to Finance 
- Science of Happiness 101
- Tribal leadership
- ….

What they mean building a pipeline is building a comprehensive training program, so employees can improve and get themselves educated in term of personal life and professional career. 

One reason they do that is they have a strong company’s culture. It is a sacrifice if they have to lay off any employee and be compulsive to replace that employee by a non-cultural outside employees. Therefore, having an well-trained understanding-culture employee next to his/her intending-to-laid-off employee is
always a safer decision to the company's culture and operation.

The second is the evolving nature of business. A company who wants to adapt to change of business environment must have a continually learning-and-training labor force. 

On top, I like about the learning environment of Zappos is it gives employees tools to improve themselves; therefore, it creates a sense of fulfillment and progress for them. Is it great if you can go to your workplace and learn something’s not only valuable about your job, but also your life? 

In brief, learning is a continual process and whoever stop learning will be depreciated over time. It is true to human being, and even more true to business.

The highlight to end the writing session is a part that delights me a lot:

“Without continually growing and learning both personally and professionally, it’s unlikely that any individual employee will still be with the company ten years from now. Our goal at Zappos is for our employees to think of their work NOT as a JOB or CAREER, but as A CALLING.”