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.
