The Year Without Pants

The Year Without Pants dives into the company culture of Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com and explains how they’ve created a culture of work where employees thrive, creativity flows freely and new ideas are implemented on a daily basis.

“If you had 1 hour to fill this entire room with sand, what would you do?”

“How many ping pong balls fit into a Boeing 747?”

Ever heard questions like these? They’re usually part of extra difficult job interviews, consulting companies like McKinsey love to use them. They’re supposed to assess your ability of complex thinking and creative problem solving.

While I agree that those types of questions are better than “Where’d you go to school?”, they still miss the target. Don’t you want to hire whoever’s best at the job that must get done? Because with this process, you’re just hiring whoever’s best at the skill of being interviewed.

That’s why at Wordpress, job applications involve a small project similar to what the applicants would be doing later. In addition, they’re given the exact tools available on the job, to make sure people are effective at what they’re supposed to be doing, not just answering questions.

Once people are hired, they’re immediately trained by spending their first week in customer service. A company is always about serving people and letting new employees spend 1-on-1 time with customers as their very first experience instills this thought in them. Whatever they work on later, they’ll always keep the customer in mind.

So once you hire someone, make sure you train them instantly to align them with your company’s mission.

Here’s how ideas go to die: You come up with an awesome new category for your company’s website. Your boss tells you to sketch it out on paper. When you hand him the sketch, he starts scribbling around in it. Then a meeting is held, where everyone from the marketing department can give their input, until the sketch is finally ready to go into prototype mode. Now you can build it behind closed doors, and after several more meetings, you can eventually go into beta mode to get feedback from co-workers. If the new category ever hits the actual website, it probably looks nothing like you’ve imagined. It’s even more likely that it’ll never see the light of day. Stories like this one happen every day, and they’re the reason why most employees eventually just stop trying. Not at Wordpress. Wordpress releases new product features, every single day. Employees can code and implement their projects instantly and release them as soon as they’re done. People feel that their ideas and inputs are appreciated, and no, the world doesn’t collapse, because if a feature…