Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [47]
This Guidepost doesn’t mean that people never get back to customers in a timely fashion or that they never come into the office. You’re never allowed to use ROWE as an excuse not to do your job. But if you want to work from a coffee shop or from home, or if you want to work on a Saturday night, or a Sunday morning, then it all counts. There is no more of that telecommuting judgment that says that if you’re not in an office then it’s not really work.
As we’ve said before, most people do come to the office most days. For a lot of people at Best Buy, the idea that they have the freedom to work whenever they want from wherever they want is something they keep in their back pocket. The point isn’t the time so much as the trust. When a company commits to a ROWE, it is committing itself to results, but it is also committing itself to an unprecedented level of trust. For a lot of people, just having that trust is enough. They still work pretty much regular hours, but it feels different because they know that if they want to, if the demand in their lives arises, then they have the control over their time to act accordingly.
As a result people take ownership of their work. They are being paid for results so they start behaving like entrepreneurs. They feel like they have a stake in the business.
Every meeting is optional.
This is probably the trickiest of the 13 Guideposts because this whole idea threatens the very core of the status quo. You say this to some people and they’ll look like they’re about to have a fit. Every meeting optional? How will people communicate? How will they build consensus? How will they collaborate? How will they get any work done at all?
We could write a whole book about meetings, but the point of this Guidepost is not the meetings themselves but the assumptions behind the meetings, namely that the very act of meeting is a form of work. We say it is not. If it gets work done then a meeting is work. If nothing gets done then it’s just an elaborate social dance, a fancy way of wasting time.
Our favorite meeting story comes from Phil, the hardcore Six Sigma black belt. He is all business. One day, before ROWE, Phil was unable to come into work because of a snowstorm, which in Minnesota is perhaps the ultimate in socially acceptable excuses. Phil had six meetings scheduled for that day that were canceled because everyone was having trouble getting to the office. When he returned the next day, four of those meetings were never rescheduled. One was resolved with an e-mail, another with a phone call. He had spent much of his “snow day” worrying about those six meetings. He was ready to drive in and brave the weather in order to have them. Now that he’s in a ROWE he thinks about that snow day a lot. When an invitation to a meeting comes up or when he’s thinking about scheduling a meeting he puts on his “blizzard goggles.” Is this meeting really necessary? If there were a snowstorm today, would that meeting fade away, or could it be taken care of with an e-mail, or, would it in fact prove to have genuine value?
A Results-Only Work Environment gives everyone the power to question the value of a meeting. That means anyone at any level can question their need to participate in any meeting. An admin can question a VP. (This doesn’t always happen, but it can and does happen.) In a ROWE you can question weekly staff meetings. You can question “mandatory” training. At any given point you are free—and even encouraged—to make sure that the way you spend your time (and the company’s time) is productive.
This Guidepost does not mean that people get to decline all meetings, or that they can decline a meeting that drives an outcome, or that they can become disrespectful and out of control. The point is to give people the power and the opportunity to have a discussion about value.
We’ve all been in a meeting where there are ten people but only two of them are talking.
We’ve all had someone schedule us for a meeting simply because they could, because the power to schedule other