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If your boss offered you $1,500 to quit right now, would you take it?

That's the choice given to every new employee at the headquarters of online retailer Zappos. After two weeks of training, managers present new hires with what's known as the Offer - quit now, and we'll pay you for time worked and a $1,500 (U.S.) bonus.

Pretty sweet, eh? But only about 2 to 3 per cent of new workers take the money and run, training manager Rachael Brown says. And for the most part, company executives figure good riddance: If you accept the Offer, you weren't really Zappos material.

"We definitely hire for personality," Ms. Brown says. "If you just want to do a 9-to-5 job and leave at the end of the day, this isn't the place for you."

The company's method of preserving its passionate start-up culture grabbed headlines and raised eyebrows after it was reported in the Harvard Business Review. But it also sparked serious discussions about a challenge facing most companies: How do you foster and preserve a positive workplace culture, especially as you grow?

"You cannot hire a PR company and immediately create a strong culture and a strong employee brand," says workplace researcher Graham Lowe, president of Graham Lowe Group and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta. "This stuff has to be genuine and it has to be organic."

He cites FedEx as an example. Like many companies, FedEx espouses a "people first" philosophy. Unlike many others, it didn't lay off staff after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - it reduced hours and moved some people around, but no one got the axe.

"It's those tough times that are really the test" of a corporate culture, Dr. Lowe says. "It absolutely makes business sense. It reinforces to employees that they are important, they are critical to the success of the company. That organizational commitment translates into positive customer service."

At Zappos, before they get the Offer, prospective hires go through a core-valued interview, meant to gauge whether they'll fit the company culture. Questions may include, "When was the last time you did something out of the norm?" or "On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird do you think you are?" (Weirdness is good, according to Zappos.)

The pre-employment screening usually works, Ms. Brown says, but Zappos decided to start the Offer during a period of intense hiring three years ago. The company, based in the Las Vegas area, has grown from 700 employees in 2006 to about 1,600 today.

"We were starting to grow really fast, and we were noticing that not everyone that came in was the right fit," Ms. Brown says.

It's easy enough to preserve a fun, quirky culture when a few dozen people are working closely with the founder. It gets harder as a company gets bigger.

As senior vice-president of mergers and acquisitions for Toronto-based tech firm Softchoice, Nick Foster spends a lot of his time thinking about culture. The company, named one of the Top 50 workplaces by Canada's Great Place To Work Institute, recently expanded from 600 to 1,000 employees, in part because of three acquisitions in the past three months. As a sort of shorthand, Mr. Foster sometimes tells people, "We're a dog company" - employees bring their pooches to work, provided they are well-behaved.

"Our founder would say, 'It's really not about the dogs; it's a visual clue that we're not a normal company,' " Mr. Foster explains.

Softchoice recently bought a 60-person company in St. Louis, Mo., that Mr. Foster describes as founder-led: Everyone looked to the big boss for guidance, and no one could really do anything until he signed off on an idea.

"The culture at Softchoice is more pro-active," he says. For example, when employees at the newly acquired company asked what they should do about their vacation time, Mr. Foster told them, "I don't know, I trust you to figure it out. ...

"They looked at me as if I had three heads," he says.

Assimilating new people into the company culture is important, Mr. Foster says, because culture is really about how stuff gets done. Do you send an e-mail directly to the vice-president, or do you go through the chain of command? Do you check in with your boss every day, or work on your own?

When employees don't fit in, Mr. Foster says, "It makes people feel really crummy about going to work. They feel, 'Ah, I don't get it.' "

Softchoice has considered instituting something like the Zappos' Offer, but so far has no plans to do so, preferring instead to concentrate on training and development.

"It's sort of interesting," Mr. Foster says. "It's a wonderful way for them to ask people if they are committed."