Rise of the results-oriented work environment

Philip Delves Broughton
28 Sep 2009

Companies that bother to consider their employees' difficulties balancing work with the rest of their lives tend to nibble at the problem.

They create flexible hour schemes, or four-day weeks, job-sharing schedules or on and off ramps for employees who want to take a break to raise children or travel the world. But what they rarely do is cede control over their employees' lives. The flexibility schemes feel like variations on the traditional apron strings, tying workers to their employers.

Imagine instead a job where all that mattered was your results. Not the hours you spent at your desk or the number of meetings you attended but the extent to which you produced what was asked of you. This is the essence of ROWE, the results-oriented work environment.

“There's this misconception at many companies that time plus physical presence equals results,” says Jodi Thompson, one of the creators of ROWE. “If people put in the time and they're around we're under the false impression that they're getting work done. We have this system where managers tell people where they have to be.

But today, we should be able to use our common sense to work in a way that's most productive. You don't need to tell people how they should meet. Let them figure out whether they meet in a conference room, a coffee shop or via instant message.”

When Thompson and her colleague Cali Ressler explain ROWE to companies, they hear what they call the “yeah-buts” — yes, it would be marvellous if people could be trusted like that, but can it really happen? How would shareholders feel if they knew a firm was using so few controls to manage its workers?

The answer is almost Zen. By letting go, you gain control. “Managers see ROWE as a loss of power,” says Thompson. “They worry that they won't know whether people are doing any work if they're not in the office. But we always ask them how they know what their staff are doing now. How do you know they're working when they're sitting in their cubes? Trust is hard but we found that people give back more if they're trusted to make common-sense decisions.”

Thompson and Ressler met in the human resources department at Best Buy, a chain of electronics stores in America. Frustrated by what they saw as failing work/life policies, they began a guerrilla campaign to allow employees to work wherever and whenever they wanted. Their motto: “No schedules. No meetings. No joke.” When Best Buy implemented ROWE throughout its corporate offices it saw productivity, retention and morale rise.

Thompson and Ressler then left to set up their own firm to promote ROWE and to write a book: Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. Since then, another major corporation, Gap, has signed up to ROWE. Gap Outlet, the division that has implemented the scheme, faced a slew of challenges.

The firm is based in San Francisco, an expensive city which imposes a terrible commute on many workers. Three-quarters of its corporate staff were women, with an average age of 34. They tended to be given a lot of autonomy, which makes their work highly demanding. What the firm found was that many enjoyed the work but found it too exhausting. Gap was consistently losing important, seasoned staff because it could not provide any work/life balance.

After tinkering for several years - allowing more telecommuting for example — Gap implemented a ROWE pilot programme last year. Staff turnover dropped and morale rose immediately. Thompson and Ressler guided staff through the initial change and returned to monitor and encourage employees and their managers.

In addition to giving staff greater freedom, ROWE also forced managers to be clearer and more definite when laying out targets and practices. Managers now spend more time coaching employees and less time disciplining them, transforming a paternalistic, hierarchical corporate structure into one which is more egalitarian.

Done right, ROWE also separates personal from professional issues. Employees can no longer explain away poor performance on the grounds of illness or a personal crisis. They now have the latitude to work around all of those and managers can focus simply on results. Gap Outlet is now rolling out ROWE throughout its corporate offices, though not to its stores. Giving shop workers a results-only work environment still seems like an HR policy too far.

ROWE, says Thompson, is built around three Ts of trust, time and technology. Managers and employees must trust each other. There is no longer a 40-hour working week and technology enables people to stay in touch wherever they are.

All of this is a step towards what other business gurus are calling the “virtual corporation”. This is a business with a traditional corporate core, which determines strategy, culture and provides oversight, a circle of employees with much greater latitude than most have today, and then a large geographically dispersed workforce with the loosest ties to one or multiple companies.

“It's not a question of if but when companies adopt ROWE,” says Thompson. “Because the way we work today — people turning up on fixed schedules to offices — is very old-fashioned. We need to move the culture to align with technology.”