Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [59]
My employees don’t have to make up excuses to be sick anymore. I just had an employee who had to stay home to get her water meter changed. Pre-ROWE, she would have made up an excuse to be home and would have turned in some kind of time-off notice. Imagine a forty-year-old having to make up an excuse like that! Don’t you think it’s demeaning to make adults lie? Think of how many hours of productivity we lose from people because they call in sick for things like this when they could be working. It’s crazy.
The hardest thing for me as a manager about migrating to a ROWE was giving up control. I thought I had control over my people before. I thought if I could see them all in their cubes that they were working hard for me. Now that I’m in a ROWE, I realize that was all just an illusion—I really had no idea what they were doing. As managers, we’re bound to this illusion. It’s time to let go and really see what our employees can do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
What’s Next for ROWE
By the time this book is published almost everyone at Best Buy corporate will be in a ROWE, but there is still a lot of work to do. For starters, we need to make sure that Best Buy’s success with ROWE doesn’t erode. While people who are in a ROWE would do anything to keep their new situation, individual teams or departments can still backslide. First, all of those early adopters are going to need a ROWE refresher. Second, even those who are successfully living in a ROWE need support. Until other companies get on board with ROWE, there is a chance that the rest of the world will view Best Buy as a curiosity (and Sludge it). There are also still people within the company who would rather see the old ways return. Which would suck.
Fortunately, we have some factors working to our advantage, such as tangible results. In the middle stages of rolling out ROWE at Best Buy, the sociologists Phyllis Moen and Erin Kelly from the University of Minnesota’s Flexible Work and Well-Being Center came on-site to study the effects of a Results-Only Work Environment on employees. Their study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, was a rare opportunity to watch an organic, natural experiment with a nontraditional way of working.
As part of their study, Moen and Kelly kept track of 658 employees. Half went from being in a traditional work environment to starting their life in a ROWE; half continued in a traditional work environment. They compared the experiences of these employees before ROWE and six months later, after half had migrated. Using surveys, they targeted four areas of concern: control over work time, overall health, work behaviors, and organizational commitment. Because it typically takes a year for migration to take place, their findings are geared toward the beginning of the change process, but even so they found dramatic results across age, gender, and employment level. (For a link to the complete study, please visit www.culturerx.com.)
The good news was the people did not report an increase in work hours. Some people worry that because a Results-Only Work Environment ignores time as a measure, either employees would feel more pressure to work longer hours, or employers would try to squeeze more time out of people. But that wasn’t the case. What did change was that people felt a big increase in work-schedule fit. Forty-two percent (compared to 23 percent in the control group) said they felt their work schedule fit their life better, while 53 percent said they had more time to take care of all aspects of their life (compared with 39 percent for the control). One quarter of people had an increase in sleep and 41 percent felt an increase in energy compared with 35 percent of the control group. On the job people felt less pressure to work overtime and do unnecessary work. The ROWE group also said they experienced fewer work interruptions. Perhaps one of the most striking changes was in what the researchers