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Imagine a workplace with no rules. You can breeze in at noon and leave at 2, and no one gives you the stink-eye. Want to see a movie on Monday afternoon, or spend Tuesday morning at your kid's school? No problem. The only thing that matters in this workplace is that you get the job done.

It sounds impossibly idealistic. But it's really happening for 3,000 employees in the corporate offices of Richfield, Minn.-based Best Buy.

Two human-resources professionals, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, created what they call the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE. They're trying to spread the idea with their new book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, published last week. In a nutshell, they want to abolish the notion of a 40-hour (or 50, 60 or god help us, 70-hour) workweek.

“People can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as their work gets done,” they write. “You get paid for a chunk of work, not for a chunk of time.”

They stress their philosophy isn't just about making workers happy – they believe it's good business, too. At Best Buy, ROWE teams lowered their voluntary turnover (a.k.a. quit) rates while increasing involuntary turnover (a.k.a. fire) rates. That means, when they were judged solely on their results, desirable workers stuck around while incompetent people were caught out and dismissed.

Still, making work not suck is a tough sell. Best Buy Canada hasn't hopped aboard the ROWE train. Ms. Ressler and Ms. Thompson spoke to The Globe and Mail about their crusade, why we all need to eradicate “sludge” and why they think flextime is a farce

What is ROWE, and why do you think everyone should be doing it?

Cali Ressler : We believe that everyone should be in a results-only work environment because today the workplace is broken. The workplace isn't giving people the freedom to be adults and have control over their time. And in a results-only work environment, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.

Jody Thompson: If businesses want to get the most productivity out of their people, if they want to attract the best talent and keep that talent, a results-only work environment will do that. And because ROWE is for everyone, it really elevates everybody's ability to give their best to a company and have the best life that they want.

People might say, ‘Oh, that sounds great, if only my boss or my company would let us do that!' What can employees do to start making these changes themselves?

J.T.: That really is the conundrum: People are afraid their bosses aren't going to want to hear about this idea or want to implement this kind of idea. And it's because managers have been monitoring the hallways for 50 years. To say to your boss, “We just want to do whatever we want, whenever we want – don't worry, we'll get the work done” – it's very frightening, and it's also a power shift in giving people more control, and managers feel like they're getting less control.

But what they should be focused on is results. So if a person wants to get this started, or they want to start kind of [easing] this into the organization, the first thing they should start to do is start getting really clear with their manager about what they're hired to do – what exactly am I supposed to be doing, and how am I going to measure that? That's the first thing, because right now I don't think we're very clear on that in organizations. In fact I know we're not, because we're putting in time.

The second thing they can do is they can start sludge eradication ... [Sludge] is really the language of the work environment that's focused on everything but results. It's focused on how people are spending their time. So removal of sludge and getting clear on goals and expectations: two important things to do.

Sludge, as you call it, is all those little comments we make that enforce the idea that work is about time, not results. How do you get rid of that?

C. R.: That's a very tough thing to do because those beliefs are so ingrained. Sludge is this language in the workplace making judgments about how people are spending their time that actually keeps the culture stable and not changing. It's because this language is all about our beliefs about time and place, and how people are behaving in the work environment, rather than the actual work that's getting done.

So when you hear comments like, “10 o'clock and you're just getting in? Wish I had your job,” that's a comment that's all about the belief that someone has about the time that work starts and when you should be in the physical office building. It doesn't have anything to do with the great work that people are doing.

We created 13 guideposts that describe what a results-only work environment looks and feels like. One of them is: Work isn't a place you go, it's something you do. Another one is: Arriving at the workplace at 2 p.m. isn't considered arriving late, and leaving the workplace at 2 p.m. isn't considered leaving early.

And so when people are focused on these guideposts and they try to make them true, they start really questioning why they believe the things they do. And eradicating sludge is the first step in making this change happen. It's the first step in lifting that load off people's shoulders and freeing them up to focus on the work and be adults.

The cynical view of human nature is if you lift these restrictions, people will just goof off and no work will ever get done.

JT: If we ask managers, if you said to your people, do whatever you want whenever you want, as long as the work gets done, how many people in your organization are you really afraid of? And they'll think for a minute and they'll say either nobody, or one person. So we're setting up the rules of the work environment for that 1 per cent that we're afraid of.

The people that are just putting in time or just slacking off, we'll be able to tell who they are and they can go work somewhere else. So that fear that people are going to slack off – if we keep being afraid of that, we'll never get out of our people what we really could, ever.

How did you manage to expand this idea to all of Best Buy corporate?

C. R.: We love talking about this. When Jody and I came together, and had this passionate belief that the workplace was broken, we decided not to benchmark with other organizations and just organically start to grow what we thought was the work environment for adults that would really get the company what they deserved in terms of productivity.

As we created ROWE, we didn't ask permission of anyone: We didn't ask our bosses, we didn't ask HR, we didn't ask the CEO. We started an underground movement. And we also didn't push this on anyone, we didn't force anyone to do this, because we knew it was a radical change and it was really going against the beliefs that people had about how work needed to happen.

We started with a couple leaders who we heard were progressive and were having some problems with retention. We started there, and as we started experimenting, we really felt that the folks that we were working with were part of our Petri dish. They were part of our experimental ground to find out what this environment would turn into. And as it started becoming viral, and people started really attaching to this environment and realizing this was how they needed to live their lives in order to do their best work, other teams started hearing about it and word started spreading.

By the time it was about 40 or 50 per cent of the way through the population that's when word started getting up to leadership and the CEO, and by that time there was no turning back. People had now realized we were completely in the Stone Age. We were in a world where all of the policies and guidelines about work were outdated. They were outmoded and they were out to lunch. And why did we live that way?

So when it got to that point of no turning back – productivity was up and retention was looking good, and the company was known now as an innovative employer – that was it. It was going and it was full force. And that's what Jody and I believe will happen throughout the U.S., throughout Canada, throughout the world. We believe this will spread in a viral sense like this. And that people will realize they've now found the answer.

It's starting to sound almost cult-like!

J.T.: [Laughs] It is a social change, so it can almost act cult-like in the beginning.

Both of you started this experiment while you were working in the human resources department at Best Buy. Was there ever a moment in this process when someone called you into the boss's office and said, ‘Excuse me, what are you doing to our work force?'

J.T.: Yes, there was a moment I almost got fired. What we were doing was going against all the rules and policies that HR had in place. It was interesting because here we are in the middle of HR, and we're throwing out all the rules. I was supposed to be doing another type of work, and I was working with Cali on results-only work environment.

So my boss said to me, you know what, we have other things that we should be focusing on and I need you to stop doing [ROWE]. And whenever that would happen I would do the work I had to do, I would get that done really fast, and I would keep working on ROWE. So ROWE, as an idea, two or three times got put on hold as an initiative. Well, you can't put a social change on hold, I'm sorry.

So Cali and I would just get together and we would just quietly go about doing the work. So it did get a little touchy for a while. We were called zealots, we were told we were having too much fun and that needed to stop.

It's interesting too because here all these really great things were happening. But because we weren't getting in line and we were acting sort of outside of the gravity of the organization, we were not well-liked. But we knew it was the right thing so we just kept going. Courage and perseverance.

So you weren't very popular there at times?

J.T.: We were actually popular with the people, because the people really wanted it, so we were sort of the voice of the people. But when you got to management level and above, we had to kind of stay out of the way. It was difficult for that level to accept this.

Why do you say flextime doesn't work?

J.T.: We think flextime is really a big con game. It's really a change trap. It's one of those things leadership thinks they're offering that's really good for the organization, and in fact they're damaging what could be happening through the organization. What happens when you start implementing flexible work programs is you opt some people in and some people out. And the second you do that, you create resentment and guilt and greed and envy and all sorts of other things. “You can have it but you can't, this job code can have it but this one can't,” and it sets up that inequality right out of the starting gate.

C. R.: There's really limited flexibility with these arrangements. When companies offer them, people feel like they're going to jump into a scenario that's now going to be perfect for their lives. But they find out that their lives don't follow a schedule, so they find that they need to be asking permission to be able to work outside of their flexible schedule. And it's that asking-for-permission that's also a big difference between flexible work arrangements and a results-only work environment. There's no permission needed in a ROWE, absolutely none, to be working any way that you want.

The second reason we see a problem with these is there's limited access. Some people are able to work these arrangements and other people aren't, which just sets up an environment of exclusivity rather than inclusivity.

The third reason that we see is career tradeoffs. This is something that it's not very widely talked about, but it's so true. In an organization where people are working “outside” of the traditional norm, they're stigmatized and they're judged for not being as dedicated, not being as committed to the company. And they lose out on promotions and on better opportunities in the company because they've made this choice. And we think that's just wrong. If people are getting the work done, that's all that matters, nothing else.

What about work-life balance? Is there the danger of your work life just taking over your personal life?

C. R.: That is a very common concern that we hear before people make the switch to a results-only work environment. They think that it will just become 24-7 work and all the lines will blur and it will become more stressful. In fact, it doesn't. And we have found, both anecdotally and in research that has been done on results-only work environment employees, that the lines don't blur, that there isn't any spillover from work to life, and it's really because people have complete control over every second now of their lives.

They have complete control over what used to be considered work hours, 8-5, and everything outside of that. So they could be making a choice to go grocery shopping at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, when they used to have to leave that until the weekend or until after 6 o'clock at night. So now they're able to do those non-work things during work hours if they so chose. And they don't feel as bad or as stressed out about doing work at night or on the weekends.

People are just much happier because they're in control of their time. And we hear that all the time anecdotally, and we were really glad to see the research done by the University of Minnesota that specifically asked that question, does it spill over into your life? And the people said no.

J.T.: That's one of those things that stops people from doing this kind of thing, is that belief. In a social change like this you don't often know the unintended consequences and how it's going to turn out – you just assume because you're looking out a traditional frame, it's going to come out a certain way. And in ROWE it just didn't. There's people who are gong to keep saying, look at them blurring the lines all over the place, they're going to make things worse for people, but it just is not true.