No Schedules, No Meetings–Enter Best Buy's ROWE – Part 1

“Maverick” is very good book. A one you “Must have” I think.

Hola Tim, me parece muy interesante tu blog y te felicito, pero una propuesta para tu web, seria que nos hicieras a los Españoles, una versión en castellano, 🙂 seria de gran ayuda.

Personalmente tengo un diseño de vida muy bueno, en estos momentos lo unico que me falta es un empuje economico, yo tengo una propuesta interesante para un negocio, que es lo que puede completar mi diseño de vida,( viajes, teatro, escritura y poder tener mucho tiempo para mi, esto ya lo estoy realizando pero deseo aumentar mis ingresos con este nuevo negocio para poder realizar mas cosas) pero no acabo de concretar por falta de inversor, 🙁

algun consejo? 🙂

So…very…jealous! 🙂

If only there was a way to develop ROWE situations for government contractors. Working in a top secret environment is very demanding of actual physical presence.

Fascinating but I wonder if this would work in a manufacturing environment.

B Smith,

In a ROWE, EVERY meeting is optional. No more wasting time in unproductive meetings. Cool, huh? No more going to meetings just because you were invited. If the meeting is not set up to drive results, then it’s a waste of time. And you can respectfully decline.

Employing 4HWW principles…I try to arrange my work schedule so that I can have Friday afternoons free to go to Wrigley Field to enjoy Chicago Cubs games (my wife calls this my “therapy”). A few weeks ago, my employer (for business puropses, I am a self-employed independent contractor with only one client) had a meeting with me to discuss my lack of office time…even though I was on schedule to accomplish all of the tasks that I had been assigned.

Maybe I should buy a copy of the ROWE book and have it sent anonymously to my employer!

Dan – the gas tax suspension is a great example of a technical solution to an ADAPTIVE (social) problem. It SUCKS. Companies do the same thing – like ‘no email Fridays’ to solve the problem of too many emails. Or ‘Blackberry Blackout time’ to show someone how to get off their Blackberry and spend time with their families. INSANITY!

I just started a new business, pitching my website marketing skills to prospective clients. Reading this post saved me 2 hours of my time!!

There was this prospective client I’ve been chasing for weeks, and he wanted to meet me in his office (a 1/2 hour train/bus ride across town). I took the plunge, picked up the phone, and sweetly asked him if we can discuss this over the phone, in order to save time. He gave me the job over the phone. Thanks Tim!!!

The problem I see with implementing this in most traditional companies is the total lack of useful metrics for determining results. ROWE simply won’t work if your metrics are crap.

Cali & Jody – do you address this in the book, or do you have any wisdom you could add to this post?

This is the future. As the web generation starts to take over the corporate world the traditional work place will shrink. “You don’t pay me to commute, you pay me to produce X”. North America’s economy will be driven by knowledge workers, our products are intellectual, a product easily shared and produced through technology. Face time and 9-5 will be the exception not the rule. Work will be ruled by content and deadlines. This is how University Education works, so why not the work place? Professors don’t (often) care how or where just when and what you produce, so why should your boss? Associating salary with time is antiquated. If your company makes business decisions based on ROI and productivity; whether or not you produce the desired input in 4hrs or 40 is much less important than whether or not it is worth the $50, 75, 100K+ they pay you a year. If I produce value greater than the cost to employee me plus a contribution to gross profit I am a good employee, if I don’t fire me or outsource my function.

Maria – yes, we do talk about measurement. Funny thing is, there should be clear measurement in any work environment – a ROWE forces managers and employees to get clear about goals, and then how to measure them. No more monitoring the hallways, but instead, monitoring the work. Even people doing ‘knowledge work’ should have a way to measure the outcome of their work.

Great post, I have come to expect nothing less.

I hope the ROWE model can stand the test of time and top level management changes (and stock price fluctuations).

It’s going to be interesting to see how the adoption rate increases as the transient employee become more common place and technology breaks down more barriers.

Treating employees like adults, creative and inspired adults…what an innovation. A few inventing teams I’ve worked with have used such a model and the effect on creativity is equally impressive. I think any number of R&D groups would also benefit if they were liberated by ROWE.

Hey,

I’m very much into the ROWE concept. I implemented it at my jewelry company. My employees are compensated based on results, i.e. pieces made. On top of that, if they take care of errands, shipping, etc, I ask them to “bill me” for the time spent on it.

It works really well, my employees love it because:

– they can make their own hours

– they can take some work home

I love it because the system makes my company efficient and effective giving me more time to play!

Anna

I like the new ad. It’s very tastefully done.

G-man – people worried about your lack of ‘office time’ even though you’re on track to deliver RESULTS, definitely need to read the book – and act on it!

Marvin – yes, there’s always a ‘but’. In fact, we’ve heard so many, we devoted a section of our book to the ‘Yeah, buts’. You’re so right. Mangement often seems to care more about control than productivity. They may say that the bottom line and productivity – really getting the ‘most out of each employee’ is their goal, but their behaviors are contradictory. It’s time to stop serving two masters – time and results – and start serving just one: RESULTS.

OT: “Test Driving the 2009 Audi A4 at Infineon Raceway” – how was it? blog post coming soon? So cool! (So jealous :))

Mr. Ferris, I dig your vibe and I want nothing from you. I hope you will keep the discourse alive.

A few respectful comments and questions I have asked myself:

1. Greetings from Galt’s Gulch. I am on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties.

2. Could 4HWW & ROWE be symptoms of a bloated, bored, and spoiled national economy and workforce?

3. For you acolytes, if you didn’t show up at work tomorrow, who would miss you… and why? Do you actually have a trade, a skill, a craft that fulfills you? Do others need that trade, skill, or craft of yours?

4. Do you have trouble explaining to people what it is you do? Could you barter your labor for another person’s efforts?

5. Are you just filling out TPS Reports?

6. Is it possible that the bread and circus of 4HWW + ROWE = replacement by robots or lower paid, higher educated, and more motivated workers who will at best inspire their company, their co-workers and their clients or who at worst will not sit around bitching about how they’d rather be working in their pajamas or clogging or going to the Burning Man festival or shopping at Whole Foods or “learning from their children.”

7. It seems that the one thing is terribly missing from all of these articles and comments: a voice from someone who is inspired, motivated, and passionate about hard work for its own sake. Could that person also be someone who is inspired by their boring profession, their “old” habit of getting in early and staying late, and their zealous drive to create a prefect product for their customers and clients? Maybe that someone can help someone else be or feel just a little bit better off because that boring laborer gave it their absolute very best and would not sleep until the problem was fixed, the condition was cured, or the defect was remedied.

8. Have we thought that perhaps a person connects to something bigger and makes a nice living simply through their labors? Who earned a blue belt in jiu jitsu without bruises or being choked? Would you even want that belt? I prefer my bruises, my sore ribs, my aching muscles from being arm-barred and choked rather than any new belt. How about this mantra: No hedge funds or movie deals. No gimmicks, no tricks, just a solid day’s work for an honest wage.

9. Maybe we few, we proud few, are just lucky to have realized that we were good at one thing, and that one thing is something we enjoy. The money follows the passion and all of the shortcuts in the world won’t change that. Neither will diets.

10. Follow your bliss (whatever it is – work, play, or eccentric little hobbies). Then shut up as I will now. Or don’t, and keep buying Corti-Slim and boring all your co-workers to death at the useless meetings you’ve been attending at your unessential job for your soon-to-be-extinct companies.

Charles – of course the work is never ‘done’ – that’s why we have jobs. But we are not machines. When people have control over their time, and have the autonomy to get work done wherever and whenever it makes the most sense, they actually get more done. This has been proven many times over at Best Buy. And the real beauty is that there is always ‘wasted time’ in any traditional work environment (frequent interruptions, for example)- in a ROWE, where people control their own time, they are much less willing to waste time – leaving more time to do what’s important to get a job done. Individual and team capacity increases! A quote from a Best Buy employee who told us that they were swamped, overworked and could never see the end: “I think I’m working more now than I did before but I’m getting more done, am less stressed and much happier. Thanks, Best Buy!” It’s all about having ultimate control over your own time – every second of every day.

I run a restaurant. The work my employees do involves serving customers as they come in, cleaning as things get dirty,etc. Work is created throughout the day at various times. There is not a set amount of work that has to be done and as long as it gets done, physical presence doesn’t matter.

How can I apply this idea to my kind of business?

Great post Tim – and it immediately made me think of Ricardo Semler and his books Maverick (and the Seven Day Weekend), and the first person to comment on your post beat me to it! Maverick provides the background of Semler’s unique way of working, and Seven Day Weekend takes the story further. They both make fascinating reading, and are best summed up by Semler’s comment “Why is it that we’ve learnt to take work home on a Friday night, but haven’t learnt to play golf on a Monday?”

I first came across Semler’s company SEMCO when it was highlighted in another very good book called The Stone Age Company by Sally Bibb. She works for the Economist and the book focuses on the new working methods of (the few) forward thinking companies, giving other examples like SEMCO. Sally talks a lot about trust-based companies, which she – as I do – see as the pre-requisite for success. As well as being results-orientated, Semler’s companies work on the basis of employees signing up to a set of agreed values – a million miles away from the rules & regulations far too many companies still adopt.

I get very fired up about this topic so I better stop there, but hope you might find these books of interest, and thanks for the great post. I look forward to your further posts on the topic and hearing more about what Best Buy are doing.

Thanks

Tamsin

@Marvin – Thanks for the Berkun link. Scott’s a brilliant guy and I had missed that post.

RE: applying ROWE in restaurants and retail – while it’s not possible to apply ROWE completely in these types of environments, it seems to me that most restaurants, stores, and other walk-in types of establishments (like banks) are open too many hours, at the wrong hours, and don’t really serve their customers or employees optimally.

Wouldn’t it be more efficient if restaurants adopted the European model of closing between lunch and dinner? How many people want to eat between 2pm and 6pm? Is it even economically worthwhile to keep the doors open then to serve those couple of people?

Coincidentally, line staff are most qualified to figure out high and low traffic times. Their input in the scheduling process could be invaluable if anyone wanted to listen to them.

I run my own company in this same fashion, and while we’re much smaller than Best Buy, it most certainly works. I would imagine that a lot of smaller firms run their shops in such a way as well, particularly those in the knowledge sector.

What makes this story of particular interest to me, though, is the fact that a company the size of Best Buy actually figured out how to step out of the corporate mindset of “presence equals productivity,” to implement such an inherently logical idea like ROWE.

I look forward to reading more about the system in the book, but I imagine the largest challenge must have been creating a system that “managed” a “non-managed” workforce. Even a free-flowing stream has its banks to keep it on the right course. . .Best Buy must have had to really think of some clever ways to staying on track as well in spite of what some might think would be measured chaos. Once other firms learn their system, open-minded professionals can copy it and hopefully duplicate the results.

It all comes down to creating your own ideal workplace, I believe, and if people actually take the time to sit back and think about how things can be better, and what they really want out of life and work, then find ways to make those two things happen the way they’re visualized, the whole world can truly be our proverbial oyster.

When I was an advisor at the University of Minnesota, I always used to ask my students who weren’t clear on what they wanted to do with their lives one question: “If you didn’t HAVE to work, then what would you do with your time?”. The answer almost always had them thinking about their true passions. Once our passions are out in the open, finding efficient ways to then do the things we HAVE to do are created.

It seems like Best Buy took this individual approach and applied in in the largest sense to its own massive organization. What a coup, and what a revelation that must feel like for every employee with a dream of a rewarding work and personal life at their firm.

Rock on, Best Buy. And, of course, Cali and Jody!