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There are no answers in the employee handbook.

The only solution is to change the game entirely.

We’re starting a movement that will reshape the way many things in this country, and across the world, get done. We’re offering not a new way of working, but a new way of living. This new way of living is based on the radical idea that you are an adult. It’s based on the radical idea that even though you owe your company your best work, you do not owe them your time or your life. This new way of living is practical and simple (though not necessarily easy), and while it’s a sweeping change from how we live life now, it requires only a basic adjustment in your thinking.

We are talking about a Results-Only Work Environment or ROWESM.

In a Results-Only Work Environment, people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Many companies say their people can telecommute or work a flexible schedule. But these arrangements often still include core hours, or can be dissolved should business needs change, or are doled out stingily as a perk for the privileged few. In a ROWE, you can literally do whatever you want whenever you want as long as your work is getting done. You have complete control over your life as long as your work gets done.

You can go grocery shopping at ten in the morning on Tuesday. You can take a nap at two in the afternoon on Wednesday. You can go to a movie at one in the afternoon on Thursday. And 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.

You get paid for a chunk of work, not for a chunk of time.

We realize that this sounds too good to be true. This kind of freedom and control and trust sounds like the stuff of rainbows and unicorns. But this idea didn’t come out of the blue. The seeds of a Results-Only Work Environment started in 2001, when a leader at Best Buy corporate headquarters was looking for help in making the company an Employer of Choice. The Employer of Choice committee was an internal task force whose goal was to figure out how to make Best Buy a top consideration among talented people looking for employment. The group conducted a survey asking employees what they most wanted from work. The overwhelming response was, Just trust me with my time. Trust me to do my job and I will deliver results and be a happier employee to boot.

Enter Cali Ressler. Even though Cali was only twenty-four years old and an hourly employee, one of the leaders of the Employer of Choice committee asked her to help turn this insight into action.

This turned out to be the perfect opportunity for Cali, given where she was in her life. Best Buy was one of her first jobs out of college, and she was quickly learning the absurdities of the workplace. The veterans around the office were teaching her how to play the game, how to fill out time cards to reflect the number of expected hours (not actual time worked), how to look busy when the boss was walking the floor, how to appear “engaged” by asking lots of questions in meetings. Mostly she was learning how unhappy everyone was at work, not so much with the tasks they had to accomplish but with the whole culture of the workplace. Even the salaried employees—the people who seemed to have power and control—were always looking over their shoulder.

In an effort to respond to this misery, Cali helped create the Alternative Work Program, a pilot program that gave people a choice from a predetermined set of flexible schedules. The choices were all based on typical flextime arrangements (telecommuting; four ten-hour days; eight-hour days that started and ended at unorthodox times), but the AWP was different in two key ways. First, everyone in the 320-person department who took part in the pilot got to participate. The flexibility wasn’t just available to top performers or those above a certain job level. Second, the employees (not the managers) decided which of the