Jun 2, 2008 10:50 pm US/Central
Work Sucks! How One Company Aims To Fix It
RICHFIELD, Minn. (WCCO) ―
Everyone knows the 9 to 5 routine. You show up, work, go home and try to schedule everything else around your job. It's been like that for decades.
But two Minneapolis women have a crazy idea. They say take away all the schedules and meetings and let employees come and go as they please.
Inside Best Buy's corporate headquarters in Richfield, Minn. there's a revolution going on. You see empty cubicle, after empty cubicle, after empty cubicle; and it's the middle of the morning on a Tuesday. This is not the sign of a sagging economy. Productivity is actually up and morale is great.
In Mark Wells' space there's even a trophy for absenteeism. It's about 6 inches high and reads "worst attendance".
On this particular day Wells was working from his apartment. Two co-workers dropped by for a conference call.
"There's no reason to really be in a seat, I mean I could do this from wherever," said Wells. He's creating a Web site as part of the Best Buy e-learning system.
Employees all have the freedom to come and go as they please, as long as their work gets done. Hours don't matter, outcomes are how they are measured as employees.
"I know what to do and when its due. it's up to me to get it done," said Wells.
Work isn't where Wells
goes, it's what he
does. This radical new concept is called ROWE and acronym for a Results-Only Work Environment. Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler came up with idea.
"In a results-only work environment each person can do whatever they want whenever they want as long as the work gets done," said Ressler.
It sounds like a fantasy, but it's real. Wells use this example:
"You're in your cube, it's 11 o'clock, its a beautiful day. You can look around, literally you do this, you look around and everyone's in cubes. You can just stand up, grab your stuff and walk out. Go ride your bike, go ride your motorcycle, go do whatever it is that makes you happy."
However, getting to that happy place was hard.
"There's a lot of discomfort that goes on when you first get involved," said Scott Jauman, a Lean Six Sigma Director at Best Buy.
Jauman's worked his entire career in corporate American and holds an MBA in Finance. He's been in ROWE four years and would never go back to the traditional system. But he admits getting there required a sea change in thinking.
"I had a little bit of a panic attack, because it's like I'm going to lose all control over my team and they're all going to just take off and no one's going to get anything done," said Jauman.
His initial fear is something Thompson and Ressler heard all the time when they quietly started to introduce ROWE to select groups at Best Buy in 2003. ROWE was never mandated, but grew as a grassroots movement.
The key was to convince managers that employees would still get their work done. It also forces managers like Jauman to clearly define goals and expectations.
"Let me be an adult, treat me like an adult, treat all of us like adults and you'll actually get a lot more out of us. Treat us like children, who you're afraid will steal candy out of a candy jar, it's gonna be a whole different environment," said Thompson describing the essence of ROWE.
Another change was the removal of "sludge", the toxic language that makes judgments about how other people are spending their time. Together Ressler and Thompson fired off some examples of sludge:
"Sludge may sound like, 'Wow ,10 o'clock and you're just getting in. Wish I could come in late every day. Boy, those smokers get a lot of breaks, don't they? Did you see how many times Jill used the lactation room yesterday? There's no way she's putting in 40 hours. She takes an hour lunch too.'"
Thinking back, Jauman remembered his old way of thinking about time as work instead of work as results.
"You feel kind of ashamed about things you did and said because it was very much around making sure people were at they're cubes no matter what they were doing and that's just so stupid to me now. I don't know why I every did it," said Jauman.
Removing sludge and getting free of the 9 to 5 grind has led to better employee retention and loyalty. It's a tool to attract talent, and productivity is through the roof.
"At Best Buy productivity on ROWE teams is up an average of 41 percent," said Ressler.
With technology now in place to free people from the cube, Ressler and Thompson are on a mission to make ROWE the new status quo.
"If companies don't start to change and deal with that conflict between the 1950s work place and technology they're just not going to make it in the future," according to Thompson.
And because of ROWE, happy employee Wells spent 98 days outside of his cube last year. This summer he will travel to see his favorite performer Dave Matthews four times this year, and of course, he'll get his work done.
Wells said there is no turning back to the old ways.
"I don't know if I could go back to submitting forms, I need to go to the dentist, I need to work this out. You can just do it right now, just go do it, do whatever you gotta do. I don't think I could go back to working 9 to 5," he said.
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