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You also get a much greater sense of accomplishment. Work starts to feel more like a personal project. It’s like working on your house or your car or doing volunteer work. The task can suck, but you can’t beat the feeling of getting things done. A ROWE doesn’t take away the struggle of doing your job, but it does give you the sense of accomplishment. You actually feel like you’ve done something. Because you have. Every day feels like a Saturday because you own every day. Welcome to a life that’s yours.

Voices from a ROWE: Beth

Beth is a senior supervisor with a team of thirteen employees. She is in her mid-fifties and has been with Best Buy for five years. She has been in a Results-Only Work Environment for three years.

When we were on the verge of migrating to a Results-Only Work Environment, I remember being anxious. We were sitting in a conference room with other leaders in my area having discussions about ROWE and I actually felt pretty scared about the people on my team and what would happen to our business results. I was really worried that people would get distracted and not keep up with the work. I just couldn’t understand how I could let them do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. How in the world would the work get done?

I was most worried about one particular employee. When I began my position as her manager, she had already been tagged as a low performer: someone who wasn’t on top of things, someone you had to watch closely. I’d gotten a lot of negative feedback about her from her previous managers and other team members, and I knew she wouldn’t be able to handle this ROWE thing.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The employee I was worried about has now become my top performer. The year is half over, and she has already done more than she did last year as far as productivity goes. And she’s working out-of-state. Pre-ROWE, if she had told me she was moving out of the state, I never would have even entertained the thought. Now that she’s flourishing in a ROWE, I would do anything to keep her. She’s outperforming every standard we had before, so I don’t care where she is! I truly believe that giving her ownership of how she spends her time has done wonders. I can only wonder how many other “low performers” out there have the same potential. If just given the freedom to control their time, they might soar just like my “low performer” has.

Looking at my entire team, I am in awe of what ROWE has done for our productivity. I am setting extremely high goals for them and they’re reaching them with no problems. And no complaining. If I had set these types of goals pre-ROWE, they would have kicked and screamed and gone to HR to complain.

Whenever we reach our goals, we always set the next set of goals a little higher. Here’s what’s happening: A good year for us pre-ROWE used to be completing 300 audits in a year. Last year, in a ROWE, we completed 612 audits—double what good used to look like. This year we’re on track to exceed last year. And we’ve lost one team member, so we’re doing it with fewer people than we had pre-ROWE.

Part of this productivity gain is because ROWE has changed our team dynamic. Everyone wants to help one another now. When someone is finished with their own audits, they ask their coworkers if they can help them with theirs. It’s no longer “This is my work and that’s your work.” It’s now our work. At another company, they might try to do team-building event after team-building event to try to get this kind of teamwork happening, but we’ve done none of that. It’s just something that ROWE creates naturally.

Aside from the productivity gain, the best thing for me as a manager in a ROWE is not having to be the hall monitor. I used to hear things all the time from my employees like “So-and-so took a twenty-minute smoke break” or “So-and-so was playing games on the Internet.” Now no one cares. Pre-ROWE, I heard this kind of nonsense every time I would come back from a meeting. That kind of stuff is such a waste of everyone’s time.