Results-only Work Environment

Trend: Work from anywhere anytime may soon gain some momentum if Best Buy's results give it a competitive advantage.

BusinessWeek describes Best Buy's experiment with flexible work hours. Excerpts below.

Link: Smashing The Clock

The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours. Hence workers pulling into the company's amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren't considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It's O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid.

Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.

But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. "This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work," says the program's co-founder, Jody Thompson. By the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Starting in February, the new work environment will become an official part of Best Buy's recruiting pitch as well as its orientation for new hires. And the company plans to take its clockless campaign to its stores--a high-stakes challenge that no company has tried before in a retail environment.

Comments

[Scott Semple]

As a committed lifestyle-over-workstyle business owner, I was really looking forward to the ROWE book. I hoped that it would help me to restructure my business as a Results-Only Work Environment for everyone that works at our office.

In the end, I was hugely disappointed. “Cali and Jody” have put their consulting careers ahead of the ROWE idea itself, and have handicapped its development by publishing a 10-page memo in a 200-page form. The tagline for the book is ““No Schedules, No Meetings — No Joke”, but due to the complete lack of detail, the tag line should be: “No Tips, No Detail — No Help.”

More of my thoughts on the ROWE book can be read here: www.whyrowesucks.com.