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People started to put red, yellow, and green dots on the same day. They realized that there was never a day where you didn’t think about work in some small way. They started to talk about how total control over their time couldn’t be confined to days. It had to be fluid enough to work throughout the day. They wanted to get up and answer e-mails at six, then take the morning off to spend time with their kids, then come into the office in the afternoon to have a meeting, then go to a movie and then wrap things up at night. They wanted total control.

The employees didn’t want the core values and identity of the company to change, but as the work culture started to change, we recognized that both our message and our methods needed to evolve.

In those early days we called ROWE a Results-Oriented Work Environment. The ever-changing calendar showed us that “oriented” didn’t take the idea far enough. Flexible work arrangements are “oriented” toward employee empowerment but when push comes to shove it’s still the old game of hierarchies, chains of command, and the military model of management. After we had been implementing ROWE at Best Buy for a year or two we realized that the only way for this idea to work was if it were a Results-Only Work Environment. In other words, results and only results are what everyone uses to measure performance in the workplace. If people were going to have total control over their time, the only measure could be results. Eventually this led us to what would become the simplest definition of a Results-Only Work Environment:

Each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.

Let’s take the first part of that definition: Each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want. What does that mean?

The closest analogy is college. In college you know what you have to do to learn and to get good grades. You have to go to class, study the material, do well on tests or papers or in labs. And depending on the grade you want you can gauge for yourself how hard you want to work, what kind of extracurricular activities you select, how involved you want to be with your professor’s research or the inner workings of the department. Depending on what you want out of college you might even be careful about the types of people you hang out with.

A college student has complete control over when and how their work gets done. There are rules of thumb, but ultimately it’s up to the individual. You learn pretty quickly that boozing every night with trust fund slackers is probably not the ticket to an A. Also, no one stands over your shoulder while you’re reading your textbook and says, “Study that! No, wait! Study that!” Even classes, which seem mandatory, are in fact optional. (It’s not advisable to skip all your classes, but ultimately it’s your choice.) Furthermore, you are expected to be ethical, academically honest, and fair in your dealings with faculty and other students. Whatever you want, whenever you want, doesn’t mean you can lie, cheat, and steal. Even though there is freedom, there are still rules.

Probably one of the hardest things about college is that for the first time in your life you’re pretty much on your own to figure out what’s important to you, how you study best, where your strengths and weaknesses are as a reader, writer, and thinker. But that’s also the fun of college. You choose the results, and then you drive the behaviors and attitudes that will get those results.

This is what happens in a Results-Only Work Environment. If you get results, then anything else you do with your time is completely up to you. What work looks like in terms of where it takes place and during what hours is no longer important. You work when and how you work best. You are in complete control.

Like college there are also larger expectations. You are part of a team, part of a division, part of a company. If you choose to party and play Hacky Sack in the parking lot