‘HUMAN beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles, staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.”
That line from the 1999 movie “Office Space” prompted a mass outcry of “Hell, yeah!” from corporate drones the world over. But its message of a “do what you want, when you want” revolution was just a crazy pipe dream. Right?
Not if you ask Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the authors of a new book called “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.” The Minneapolis consultants are the pioneers behind the “results-only work environment” (ROWE for short), a concept as simple as it is bold. Its premise is this: Forcing people to adhere to a set schedule and equating productivity with hours logged in the workplace is an outdated practice that leads to wasted time and unhappy workers.
So let them do what they want, when and where they want – and everybody wins.
In a ROWE, “you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission or tell anyone where you’re going. You just do it. As long as your work gets done – as long as you get results – then your life is your own.”
No more being treated like a disobedient child by your boss. No more sitting through pointless meetings just to put in “face time,” and watching people whose chief talent is looking busy rise through the ranks. No more working at your office if you’d rather be working from home – or, for that matter, from a box seat at Yankee Stadium.
“Every day, people go to work and waste their time, their companies’ time, and their lives in a system based on assumptions – about how work gets done and what work looks like – that don’t apply in today’s global, 24/7 economy,” they write.
ROWE might be dismissed as the crackpot vision of utopians who’ve inhaled too much toner dust from theoffice printer, except for one thing: It appears to work. When the Minneapolis-based chain Best Buy adopted the practice, not only did workers applaud, but productivity spiked and turnover plummeted.
Ressler, 31, and Thompson, 50, started developing ROWE while working at Best Buy seven years ago. Hoping to make the company more worker-friendly, Best Buy’s leaders surveyed workers to ask what they wanted, and the resounding answer was that they wanted to be trusted to do their jobs. So the two were charged with creating a flexible-schedule program, which started as a pilot, then grew in size and scope when it proved a success. (Today, some 4,000 employees at Best Buy work in a ROWE.)
Now the pair are consultants, spreading the word about the need for a workplace revolution, and helping firms put their ideas into practice. We caught up with them on the eve of their book release, and asked them to explain their vision for the future of work.
How does a “results-only work environment” differ from the traditional office?
Jody Thompson: Right now, it’s generally 8-5, Monday through Friday. People come in at the same time and leave at the same time. And what we hope with ROWE is that people are coming and going at all different times. The foundation is not the same anymore. It’s deconstructed. I can’t go in at 8 a.m. and expect everyone to be there. If I have a reason to go there, I go, but I don’t show up just because everyone else does.
Cali Ressler: Nobody brags about how many hours they work. It’s just not a part of the environment. There are no more badges of honor for it.
In the book, you detail the statistical increases in productivity and employee retention in a ROWE. In the face of evidence like that, why are companies resistant to it?
CR: There are a couple reasons. One is because in an organization, leadership inherently doesn’t trust their employees. They say they do, they say all the right words, but their behavior and actions shows that they don’t. It’s like saying, “I don’t trust that you know when and how to complete your job, so I need to prescribe that for you.”
Another reason is that the whole reward system is based on time. It’s based on putting in a lot of hours, and who turns on the lights in the morning and who shuts them off at night. In a team meeting of 300 people, when one person is recognized because they worked 80 hours and came in on the weekend, the other 299 see that, and they know they’ll be rewarded for giving up their lives.
You write that people are more productive when there’s no surveillance of their work. Can you explain why that would be?
JT: You can get so much more out of somebody when you let go of the reins. We actually found that people who may appear to be underperforming can actually flourish in a ROWE. With Gen Y, for example, they’re already highly collaborative, they’re all about technology changing all the time, and when we box them in and say you have to commit to this old structure, it’s really undermining their ability to be productive.
How long does it take to transition to a ROWE?
JT: It’s approximately a six-month process. It involves three different phases. First is preparing people, which entails talking to leaders. The second is actual migration work, where we introduce ourselves to the whole team, and get them all set up to go. And the third is to go live. That’s the sustained phase, where we work with them to make sure they don’t slip back.
Slip back how?
JT: One main thing we see happen is managers get freaked out, and they don’t want to lose entire control. One of the first things they’ll try to do is put back in core hours, like, 10-2 Monday to Friday. And we make sure those things don’t seep back in.
How do you reinforce these new behaviors with the employees themselves? Do they slip back too?
CR: We definitely need people to do some scary things. Something different than they would have done in a traditional work environment. Each person gets a scary assignment, something like: I will get up from my desk at 2 in the afternoon and walk out without telling anyone where I’m going. And when you think about that, it’s like, I’m an adult, why don’t I do that? But people don’t do it, because they’re stuck in the old rules.
Do people ever take it to an extreme, though – never giving themselves time that’s really considered not working?
CR: The University of Minnesota did a study on the ROWE, and found that there isn’t any negative spillover from work into life – because people are more in control of their lives. A really big shift in a ROWE is that all of your time becomes your life.
One term you use a lot in the book is “sludge,” which is your word for the kind of trash-talking office employees aim at one another over the amount of time they work, when they get in, etc. Can you explain what sludge is, and how you combat it?
JT: Sludge is what work culture is. Stuff like, “Why do you get to come in late every day?” People with kids get crap like that; it happens all the time. So what we do is create teams of people who learn about what sludge is, and how to eradicate it from their environment. It’s interesting – when people start to become aware of sludge, they realize how disturbing it is and how they’ve been treating people in a disrespectful manner. This is language that basically has been acceptable in a work environment.
And what happens to those show-up-early, leave-late people – the ones you claim are the perpetrators of a lot of the sludge – in a ROWE?
CR: It becomes really easy to spot those people, if they’re just taking up space and putting in their time. They are performance-managed out of the company. In a traditional environment, those people can hide. We figure, they’re in a cube for 12 hours a day, they must be doing something. When in reality, they might not be doing anything at all.
What questions and concerns do people usually raise when you float this idea in conversation?
JT: When we talk to people about this, they really want it. But a lot of times this is what we get: “Oh, that’s really great, but it’ll never work in our office.” Or, “My manager would never allow that.” For us, that’s really sad, because people are giving up. We’re trying to start a groundswell, to help people wake up and start talking about this issue. In the book, we have a whole series of “yeah, buts,” because we’ve heard just about everything. Managers are afraid because it’s a shift in power. People want it, but they feel like it’s so great they’ll never have it.
Does hearing about the ROWE ever cause people to become more unhappy with their traditional jobs?
CR: We do see some of that, because once employees see the possibilities, they can’t imagine continuing in this old system. And so they become what we want them to become – frustrated to the point that they take action.
Our recommendation is, for a first step, to find like-minded people in your company and band together. And when you talk to a management team, talk about productivity and business results. And know that while you’re doing this, it’s going to be a big change for your department or organization, and that change is uncomfortable. If it wasn’t uncomfortable, it wouldn’t be real change.
Can the ROWE work for any occupation? It seems like it would be tougher to apply to jobs like retail, that require people to be physically present at a certain time.
JT: Best Buy is actually thinking now about how ROWE might work in a store environment. We believe there is definitely an application for ROWE in different environments, like manufacturing, and stores, and nursing homes.
How fast do you see this system moving forward? Where do you see it in five years?
JT: Because it’s a quite radical social change, and slightly ahead of its time, it’s going to take a while to really gain momentum. It’ll be a slow start, but then it’ll be apparent pretty quickly that companies that aren’t ROWEs are just not going to get the talent. Graduating college students look for environments like this.
Do you think the ROWE would work in New York, or are we all just too type-A to pull it off?
JT: It would actually work great in New York, because it has some of the brightest and most creative go-getter types. And some of the games people have to play – they know they’re games – are ridiculous. These politics in the workplace could just stop happening.