Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [50]
True teamwork emerges, even in a department filled with individual contributors. One department at Best Buy, for example, is staffed with hourly employees who used to be only accountable for their own work. Their job is to process orders within twenty-four hours. The process has to be accurate but also fast (the customer can’t see a slowdown). Before ROWE people were processing about fifteen orders an hour. After ROWE productivity went up 13 percent, but even better, the quality went up. The reason is that people are no longer judged on personal performance. Because individuals are now working at all hours of the day, the entire team is accountable for the business results. As their manager says, “We share in the successes and we share in the failures,” and this means more planning and more communication.
Getting your head around how to communicate in a ROWE takes time. One of the dangers of a ROWE is that people try extra hard to respect one another’s time. This is good, but at first it can also lead to people being overly respectful. They don’t pick up the phone even when the person they’re calling is more than available by cell. Often people solve that problem by putting together a preference list for how they like to be reached. They may prefer an e-mail first, then their cell phone, then their work line, then their home line. There are growing pains at first, but eventually people find out a way to both get what they need from their coworkers and respect their time.
But ultimately a Results-Only Work Environment is not a test of the employee; it’s a test of the manager. A ROWE becomes a proving ground for the management team. Can they do their jobs communicating expectations and holding people accountable? Can they develop systems to get the information they need without doing it through drive-bys or fire drills?
As one Best Buy manager put it, it’s about being “clear and crisp.” Managers can’t be uncomfortable getting negative feedback or getting push-back from their employees. Managers can’t develop one person’s career at the expense of another’s. Managers stop managing and start leading.
People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s time.
When you take care of your life, do you develop overcomplicated processes for getting things done? Do you spend your free time coming up with systems and programs for buying birthday presents or making dinner or feeding the dog? Do you have regular family meetings to discuss whether or not people are doing their chores, what the status of those chores is, and what kind of outcomes those chores are expected to achieve?
Why do we spend so much of our business life talking about the business we need to take care of rather than simply taking care of it?
In any organization there is always wasted effort. There is always busy work. Because if you’re basing productivity on the clock then people need to be busy for forty hours a week. If their actual job only takes twenty hours to do then we’d better give them another twenty hours of reporting. Surely there is a form out there to keep these people busy.
In a traditional work environment there is no employee incentive to do a job more efficiently because if you did manage to get your job done more quickly you’d still have to fill the hours. So people might, for example, slow down their work