Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [32]
We understand this sounds big. Management naturally freaks out about this. They can feel their control eroding. But even regular employees have concerns about this. It’s change. Change may be good but it’s also hard.
One thing that might be reassuring is that an entire corporate population went through this transition and it worked. Also remember that people at all levels have the same worries.
How are the results going to happen?
How do we know we’re achieving our goals?
How will we know that everyone is pulling their weight?
The glib answer is: How do you do that now? Because the way the game works now doesn’t provide answers to these questions. Do you and your boss have clear meaningful discussions about expectations on a regular basis? (The semiannual performance review is a start but not enough.) Do you have a mechanism in place for determining if the daily work that’s being done is driving actual results, or is it assumed that if everyone is there working hard then we must be getting it right? And finally, don’t you personally know someone (and maybe it’s you) who isn’t pulling their weight or who gets credit where credit isn’t due?
Before we started the pilot program for ROWE we polled managers on their concerns about all kinds of flexible work arrangements. Their concerns are the same ones we hear about a ROWE. They are also the same worries that a lot of employees have about work in general.
Is it fair?
Is there accountability?
Is there career development?
We took these concerns seriously. In response, and also to give ourselves a tool to measure our own results in making this change, we developed what we call a culture audit. Before we would migrate a team we would first poll everyone involved to try to understand how they viewed the nature of their immediate work culture. The questions are designed to take a quick snapshot of how work gets done and what work looks like in a given team or department. Did people think the culture was proactive or reactive? Did they think the organization was open to risk or afraid of change? Did management reward people based on face time or actual achievement?
What we’ve found across the board at Best Buy is that this survey trends toward the positive after migration. So even teams that score pretty well on people working effectively and with engagement see improvement thanks to ROWE, while teams that score negatively are profoundly transformed. Even taking into account the slippery nature of self-report, we feel confident that ROWE is making a difference.
As we move into the next three chapters we hope to show how these changes happen. And, as we’ll see, despite a ROWE’s seemingly radical approach, work actually ends up looking pretty much like it does now. People still go to meetings. People collaborate and team up. People are reachable. People are doing their jobs. Because that is what most responsible adults want to do. They want to do a good job and they want to be paid for it.
One final thought before we watch a ROWE in action. It’s easy to see this idea in terms of employer versus employee. If employees get more freedom then the employer must lose out somehow. Someone has to win, right?
So, if you have to think about it in terms of one side having to win, we will be honest. The employee wins. The employee gets their life back, their sanity, and their sense of self-worth. But the funny thing is that once employees experience a ROWE they don’t want to work any other way. So employees give back. They get smarter about their work because