Is Your Company Culture Worth Firing Someone Over?

Recognize This: If company culture is truly important to you, make it a major portion of your performance review process.

Online shoe company Zappos, famous for offering employees thousands of dollars to leave, has made the news again with its performance review process.

Forbes recently reported a speech given by Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hseih, particularly this statement:

“Fifty percent of our performance review at Zappos measures how you are furthering the company’s culture.”

50%. That’s an astounding percentage. But more importantly, think of it this way. If Zappos is putting that much emphasis on culture in the performance review, that means they must be doing an outstanding job of communicating what, exactly, it means to advance the company culture in your daily work. If they didn’t, they’d be opening themselves to a massive lawsuit.

Are you so confident in your company culture – and in how well it is communicated to and, more critically, understood by your employees - that you’d make “advancing company culture” 50% of your performance review?

Do you think culture is important enough to require this?