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For me the beauty of a ROWE is that you remove all those elements, like the forty-six goals, that get in the way of the good job you could be doing. You take the list of what you could do this year and you focus on getting it shorter. You stop kidding yourself and you focus on the customer. All of a sudden in a ROWE all kinds of extra capacity shows up in the calendar because you’re focused on the results. That’s a ROWE. More and more choice and more and more control for the people you’re supposed to be working for: the customer.

CHAPTER THREE

A Results-Only Work Environment

In the early stages of developing a Results-Only Work Environment we weren’t as keyed in as we are today on how a ROWE creates an intense focus on business results. In fact, during the first phase of training, when around 30 percent of Best Buy employees had migrated to a ROWE, we were still talking a lot about the calendar.

Back in 2004 we helped define a ROWE using a calendar exercise. Depending on who was running the session, Cali or Jody would put a random month on the wall and then ask people to choose when they would like to work in the building, out of the building, or not at all. The employees were then given red, green, and yellow markers and asked to put a dot on a day for when they were not working (red), when they were working out of the building (yellow), and working in the building (green). We said, “do whatever you want.” Put a not-working dot on a Wednesday, put a working-in-the-building dot on a Sunday. As long as the work gets done it’s up to you.

After a dozen or so people put their dots on the calendar we all stepped back and looked at the big picture. A cynic might think that the whole calendar would be filled with red dots, but that was not the case at all. Even though this was just an exercise, people didn’t abuse the idea. They still put up plenty of green and yellow dots, but it was on their terms, and when we stepped back and looked at the whole month we immediately noticed two things. One, there was never a time when people weren’t working. People were still going to do their jobs. For a lot of managers in the room this was a relief, and, for some, even the glimpse at an opportunity. In a 24/7 economy it could be a great benefit to be able to have people solving problems and accomplishing tasks throughout the month. Bonus.

But the employees also saw that they could be comfortable working in a nontraditional way. They might have put a red dot on a Thursday, but there were always plenty of yellow and green dots from their coworkers. They wouldn’t have to feel guilty for “slacking off” on a Thursday, because there were other people contributing. They would have their time to carry the load on another day.

But the calendar exercise also raised some challenging questions that pushed at the boundaries of our beliefs about work. For example, we’d ask people if they put a red dot on a Wednesday, did they need to take a vacation day? People would hesitate and then someone would say, “No. As long as the work is getting done then it doesn’t matter.” Or we’d ask them if they were working at home on a Monday did they need to put an out of the office reminder on their e-mail. Again they would hesitate and then someone would say, “No. As long as I’ve got my cell phone and I have access to e-mail it doesn’t matter where I am. I’m working and people can get ahold of me, so who cares?”

These kinds of conversations were what led us to solidify our ideas about time, belief, and judgment. The more we did the calendar exercise the more we came to understand what Phil was talking about in his story. We’d start with time, but eventually we’d be talking about the work.

In fact, as more and more people started to migrate from a traditional work environment to a ROWE, word started to spread throughout Best Buy. People would come into the training sessions with smarter questions. It started out with us pushing employees to challenge their assumptions, but then