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Work isn’t a place you go—it’s something you do.

Why do we have cities? Why do we have office buildings? There was a time when it made sense for people who shared a common industry to get together to share information and ideas. You needed financial districts and fashion districts and movie studio lots and towns built around the automotive industry because if people couldn’t physically congregate then the work couldn’t get gone.

But what about how work gets done today? Think about how much work today exists as data. Think about the millions of bits and bytes of voice data, e-mail data, visual data that flows in and around us in a typical day. It’s mind-boggling just how much work gets done over the phone or via e-mail, with people we may rarely meet face-to-face, or even with people around the country and around the globe whom we will never meet. Even people who work in “old economy” industries like manufacturing or farming end up pushing around a lot of electronic data. Everyone is a knowledge worker.

The funny thing about work is that every day most of us go to a physical space to do virtual work.

We go to our assigned cubes and put our butts in our assigned chairs to send and receive e-mails that only exist as electronic packets of information.

We talk on a phone attached to a cord plugged into a wall so we can have conversations that are beamed via satellite to people across the globe.

We work on a laptop that never leaves its docking station.

We use the neurons in our brains to work with ideas that will hopefully stimulate the neurons in other people’s brains.

When you force people to be at a specific place at a specific time every single day, they’re not going to give their best. If they have an idea outside the sanctioned time and place they’ll fight it back. And when they’re at work at least some part of them will wish they were somewhere else. Nothing stifles creativity and innovation like resentment.

In a ROWE, work isn’t a place you go—it’s something you do. The work going on in your brain can happen no matter where your brain is. When individuals and organizations embrace this idea, it frees people up to do their best work. Give people control of their time and their jobs and they start to come up with creative, innovative solutions to problems at all hours and in all kinds of surprising places. In a ROWE, people work where and when they work best, which means less time and energy devoted to getting to and from work and more time and energy spent doing the actual work.

This means no more hour- or two-hour-long commutes. Part of that time is now spent solving problems that arise out of your work. The rest of that time is yours.

YEAH, BUT ...

“I like having a regular, eight-to-five schedule. I like being able to show up, do my job, and then leave. I don’t want to have to think about it too much.”

One of the things that’s nice about a ROWE is that it’s scalable to different levels of ambition. If you want to work 8-5, go ahead. Or, for people like Trey, who want to follow their favorite band around as much as they want a career, a ROWE gives them the freedom and control to manage their life so they can put their hobbies on the same level as their job. As long as the work gets done, then that’s your choice.

But if you’re saying that you just want to show up and put in your time, then a ROWE is not for you. The true slackers (which, we’ve found, make up a very small minority) don’t last in a Results-Only Work Environment. The good news for the rest of us is that a ROWE no longer lets those people hide in the organization or play the Presenteeism game. In most departments at Best Buy, involuntary turnover rates (i.e., people getting fired for not doing their job) went up after they migrated. On the other hand, voluntary turnover rates (i.e., people leaving for a different company) plummeted. People who are willing to do their job don’t want to leave.

This means no more Presenteeism. If work is something you