Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [35]
The 13 Guideposts needed to be extreme so that people realized that creating a ROWE required a radical rethinking of work. We wanted the Guideposts to be big and bold so that people left their first session about ROWE (called a Kickoff ) buzzing with thoughts and feelings and ideas about what this new way of working could mean. So when we rolled them out we presented the Guideposts all at once. Before we explained or discussed what each Guidepost meant, we wanted employees to simply experience them as a thought experiment. We asked people to imagine what life would be like if the following were true:
1. People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s time.
2. Employees have the freedom to work any way they want.
3. Every day feels like Saturday.
4. People have an unlimited amount of “paid time off ” as long as the work gets done.
5. Work isn’t a place you go—it’s something you do.
6. Arriving at the workplace at 2:00 PM is not considered coming in late. Leaving the workplace at 2:00 PM is not considered leaving early.
7. Nobody talks about how many hours they work.
8. Every meeting is optional.
9. It’s okay to grocery shop on a Wednesday morning, catch a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, or take a nap on a Thursday afternoon.
10. There are no work schedules.
11. Nobody feels guilty, overworked, or stressed-out.
12. There aren’t any last-minute fire drills.
13. There is no judgment about how you spend your time.
We knew right away which Guideposts were going to get people riled up. Not wasting employee time or company time and resources is valid and useful and good, but the idea that every meeting is optional really sets people on fire. What if you got to decline a stupid meeting that you knew was a waste of time? What if you really had the power to do that? What would life be like?
If these kinds of statements were shocking to employees, you can only imagine what it must have been like when we first rolled them out to senior leadership and management.
From the beginning, management was vital to creating this change. So that everyone can benefit from a ROWE, everyone has to participate, and even though this is a people’s movement, we always made sure to have buy-in, or at least a healthy optimism, from the top.
Before a team starts their migration, there is a leadership meeting. They get the same ideas, but these ideas are communicated in a slightly different way because the change for managers is different from that of individual contributors and teams. And as you can imagine, the first time we introduced the Guideposts to upper-level management there were some people in the room who were very uncomfortable.
The first reaction from management in those early days was the desire to negotiate. The idea of no work schedules was fine, but every meeting optional? Surely some meetings still have to be mandatory, right?
There was one leadership meeting in particular that was a real turning point for ROWE. After that meeting Jody was approached by people in management who said the Guideposts absolutely had to go. We couldn’t show these ideas to employees. We had gone too far.
Afterward we met and argued over whether or not we would be willing to rewrite some of the Guideposts, but every time we tried to soften one or remove one we realized that we were compromising the idea. If every meeting weren’t optional then people would still be judged on what work looked like. If there were still mandatory meetings they could be results-oriented, but not results-only.
Shortly after that discussion we went back to senior leadership and held firm. We challenged them to think about their beliefs about meetings. What does that say—about your meeting’s effectiveness, about its usefulness—if people only come because of your title or because it says “mandatory” in the invite?