 |
Throwing Out the Rules of Work
A workforce experiment at Best Buy's headquarters allows employees to decide how, when and where they get the job done.
By Patrick J. Kiger
 ack
when he worked in a conventional corporate office for a previous employer, Best
Buy employee relations manager Steve Hance admits he sometimes got through long,
unproductive meetings by fantasizing about fishing or hunting. But since he began
working for the Richfield, Minnesota-based national electronics retailing chain
in March 2005, the outdoorsman no longer has to daydream.
Instead, when Hance participates in a morning teleconference
with his co-workers or in-house clients, he sometimes is calling in via cell phone
from his fishing boat on a lake or from the woods where he's spent the hours since
dawn stalking wild turkeys. "No one at Best Buy really knows where I am," he explains.
"Nor do they really care."
Gone are the days when Hance needed to spend morning until
night seated in a cubicle surrounded by papers and charts he'd carefully arranged
to ensure that co-workers and bosses who peeked in would see he was hard at work.
At Best Buy, he's free to set his own schedule, to work wherever he wants—whether
it's a desk at headquarters or a table in a coffee shop—and whatever days
and hours he chooses.
"It used to be that I had to schedule my life around my work,"
he says. "Now, I schedule my work around my life."
Welcome to Best Buy's Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE,
a radical experiment whose aim is to reshape the corporate workplace, achieve
an unparalleled degree of work/life balance and redefine the very nature of work
itself. In ROWE, most of the rules, restrictions and expectations within which
corporate workers traditionally labor—such as keeping regular hours and showing
up at the office each morning—are discarded.
Instead, employees are allowed to decide how, when and where
they get the job done. Whether they choose to work in the office or somewhere
else, such as a spare bedroom, salaried employees are required to put in only
as much time as it actually takes to do their work. (Hourly employees in the program
have to work a set number of hours to comply with federal labor regulations, but
they still get to choose when they do it.)
Physical attendance at meetings usually is optional. As for
supervisors, they no longer give the hairy eyeball to anybody who lingers too
long at the water cooler or occasionally dares to leave in the middle of the afternoon
to watch a child perform in the school play. The only yardstick for evaluating
employees is whether they meet goals for productivity.
"In the standard corporate work environment, you have to put
in face time because that's how you show your commitment to the organization and
your level of dedication," Hance says. "When you come into the office, you've
got to make sure you're always seen by the right people. That becomes the goal,
rather than actually getting things done. With ROWE, all those little rules that
we've grown used to living by are out the door. Instead, the work itself is the
only thing that matters."
Since Best Buy began switching to ROWE on a division-by-division
basis in 2002, 2,400 employees, or 60 percent of the 4,000 people at its headquarters
campus, have converted to the new way of working, according to Cali Ressler and
Jody Thompson, two former Best Buy employees who now run CultureRx, a Minneapolis-based
consulting firm that is managing the process.
Already, they say, ROWE has had a significant impact. Employees
in divisions that convert to ROWE report in surveys that they have better relationships
with family and friends, feel more loyalty to the company and feel more focused
and energized about their work.
And more important from a business standpoint, there are some
financial payoffs. CultureRx does the math this way: The per-employee cost of
turnover is $102,000, and ROWE teams have 3.2 percent less voluntary turnover
than non-ROWE teams. So once Best Buy's 4,000-person headquarters is completely
converted to ROWE, the company stands to save about $13 million a year in replacement
costs. Also, when workers switch to ROWE, their productivity jumps by 35 percent.
"Basically, we're rewiring people's brains, getting rid of
an old belief system from the 1950s that is no longer relevant to the technologically
advanced business world we have now," Thompson says. "We want people to stop thinking
of work as someplace you go to, five days a week from 8 to 5, and start thinking
of work as something you do."
Flexibility, but accountability
An increasing number of companies are experimenting with nontraditional
work arrangements—43 percent of U.S. employees now have conventional flextime,
in which they select their own starting and quitting times around a core of regular
working hours, according to the New York-based Families and Work Institute. That's
up from 29 percent in 1992. Nine percent of employees work at least part of the
time at home, rather than in the office. Seventy-nine percent of employees say
they would like to have more flexible work options, as long as it doesn't negatively
affect their careers.
But Best Buy is taking flexibility much further than the rest
of the corporate world, according to institute president Ellen Galinsky.
"Most companies basically play with their traditional schedule
and try to make it a little looser," she says. "You can start at a different time,
or you can do some work outside the office, but you're still basically keeping
to a schedule. ROWE, in contrast, completely alters the way people work. You're
in control of everything—not just where and when you work, but whether you
go to meetings, for example. The only thing you're judged on is whether you get
results. It's flexibility—and accountability—to the fullest."
Al VanArsdal, a Minneapolis-based management consultant who
is chairman of the Minnesota Organizational Development Network, a professional
group for those working in the field of organizational development, says ROWE
is a radical departure from the way most companies bring about cultural change.
"Usually, change is top-driven," he says. "At Best Buy, they're
doing it from the inside out. Department by department, they're letting people
blow up all the rules and redesign things in a way that makes sense for them.
They're deciding what they need to be successful, and creating it."
ROWE's origins date back to 2001, when Best Buy management
did a survey of headquarters employees and received some disturbing results. "Basically,
the employees said they didn't think their supervisors trusted them to do their
work, that someone always was looking over their shoulders," Ressler recalls.
"They felt they couldn't live healthy, happy, productive lives the way that they
saw fit."
In an effort to find a solution, Ressler, who at the time managed
Best Buy's work/life balance programs, began experimenting with flexible work
arrangements for one particular headquarters group, the 320-member retail operations
division. She soon was joined by Thompson, then working as Best Buy's "large-scale
organizational change agent."
Ressler and Thompson looked at optional flextime and telecommuting
of the sort that other companies had instituted, but decided that such measures
would only put a Band-Aid on Best Buy's real organizational woes.
"Flexible work arrangements usually turn out to be a con game,"
Thompson explains. "It's only for certain jobs and you have to apply to your supervisor
to get them, so often there's favoritism involved."
It can create a stigma that drives a wedge between employees.
"Your co-workers start looking at you as that person who's
not loyal to the company, because you're not there at the same time in the morning
that everyone else is. And eventually, it dawns on you that you're trading one
box for another, that there isn't much difference between working 8 to 5 on Monday
and 7 to 4 on Tuesday."
Just as important, Ressler and Thompson realized, such programs
didn't change the way leaders managed their teams. Managers still assessed employees'
engagement on whether they looked busy and filled up the days with meetings that
created the appearance of work.
Instead, they decided, the only solution was to get rid of
the old structure altogether.
"Instead of giving flexibility to a few select people, give
it to the whole department at once," Ressler says. "Managers can't turn anybody
down, and nobody has to ask permission. If you want to work from Starbucks on
a PowerPoint presentation, that's OK. If it's a nice day and you feel like taking
a walk in the park, nobody's checking on you. People can do what they want, as
long as the work gets done."
Outcomes, not appearances
Shifting from a traditional office culture to ROWE isn't necessarily
an easy process, explains Jeff Johnson, Best Buy's director of human resources.
"With any organization, you're going to have a mix of managers—some early
adopters who are open to trying something new and others who are traditionalists,
the ones who feel comfortable with what they have and are worried by change,"
he says.
Either way, ROWE requires a commitment from the leader of a
group that is converting to the new way of doing things. For that reason, instead
of forcing the entire organization to convert all at once, Best Buy is allowing
departments—and even teams within departments—to gradually migrate to
ROWE.
Converting to ROWE is roughly a six-month process. The first
phase is leadership training, in which Thompson and Ressler work to get managers
to rethink their concepts of what work means.
"You can spend lots of money equipping your people with laptops
and cell phones," Ressler says. "But if you're the manager and you cling to the
old definitions of working, then everyone is going to know that being in the office
every day is the basis for good reviews and promotions, and nobody is going to
dare do anything else." The trainers also do a cultural audit of the department
or team to get the sense of how they are performing in the old environment and
set up a baseline against which changes wrought by ROWE can be measured.
The second phase is training for the team itself. Employees
go through role-playing exercises and "sludge sessions," in which they learn to
cope with negative expressions that cast judgment, place guilt or add stress in
the workplace. ("Ten o'clock and you're just getting in? Wish I had your job,"
is a typical example.)
To playfully reinforce the change, such "sludge" expressions
are written down and thrown into a large silver trash can provided by Ressler
and Thompson. After that come "culture clinics," in which they discuss the details
of making flexibility work—how to use e-mail and voice mail, for example,
to make one's location irrelevant.
Then the group "goes live" and tries ROWE for six weeks before
returning for another debriefing. "That's when all hell breaks loose," Ressler
says. "They have to take a deep breath and do things like working from home one
day without telling anybody where they are. They have to trust that their manager
isn't going to get upset. And their manager has to trust them."
Employee relations manager Jennifer Martin realized that sometimes
she was better off calling in to a meeting rather than rush to the office.
"Say it's a rainy morning and your dog doesn't want to go outside,"
she explains. "If you go in, you might spend the rest of the day worrying that
the dog didn't get a walk, instead of concentrating on work. Instead of having
to be someplace, I'm focusing on what I need to accomplish."
Once freed from the old rules and obligations, employees and
managers also find ways to become more efficient. One Best Buy team, for example,
realized that they had been wasting huge amounts of time creating unnecessary
PowerPoint decks simply because they needed something to fill space at equally
unneeded meetings. In another department, an employee freed from the 9-to-5 routine
came up with the idea of splitting the work of online order fulfillment between
a U.S.-based team and another based in Shanghai, China, so the process could continue
around the clock. As a result, customers began getting products they had ordered
online more quickly.
"You start looking at everything and saying, 'Is this really
going to help get me to my desired outcome?' " Ressler says. "Pretty soon you've
cut out 10 of those unnecessary things that used to fill up your week, and you're
getting a lot more done."
Best Buy is so enamored of ROWE that it is in the process of
marketing the system to other companies, and is even considering trying a modified
version in its retail stores. There are skeptics who wonder whether ROWE will
work outside of a relatively homogenous corporate campus.
But then again, as Best Buy manager Steve Hance recalls, many
people, himself included, weren't sure ROWE would work at headquarters either.
"Being able to take an extra-long lunch or get off work early if you wanted—it
sounded like a utopia, but could people really do this?" he says. "As it turned
out, they could."
Patrick J. Kiger is a freelance writer based in the Washington, D.C., area. E-mail editors@workforce.com to comment.
|
|
|
