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I get my son ready for his soccer games now without being in a rush. We can actually sit down and have something to eat beforehand instead of rushing to the games on empty stomachs. During the summer, I’m able to be with my son instead of putting him in a summer program five days a week. This Friday we’re going to the Minnesota State Fair. He plays with his friends outside while I work on my laptop. I feel like I’m giving him more of a childhood now.

Fun and spontaneous stuff doesn’t always and shouldn’t always come on the weekend. And I want my son to know that too. A few weeks back, after I attended a couple of meetings, I picked him up from his grandmother’s house around noon, fully prepared to go get ice cream and go back to our house and do work for a couple of hours more that afternoon. Well, he had other ideas. He talked me into renting a kayak and spending the afternoon on the lake instead. Then I just logged on to work later in the evening. So what is he going to remember? And what values do I want him to learn?

One of the biggest moments for me since I migrated to a ROWE was when my son told me he wanted to be a mom when he grew up. He watches the way I’m able to be part of his life now and knows that’s a possibility for him when he gets older too. I think it’s so cool how he sees me, his mom, as someone he wants to model himself after. His friends see me coming into school to be with him during his activities, they know I work for Best Buy, and they think this company is the best.

Epilogue

You have the right to control your time.

You have the right to eat when you’re hungry and sleep when you’re tired.

It’s that simple. Yes, your company is providing you with a paycheck and possibly other benefits. Yes, they are giving you a job, and, in some cases, a career. For that you absolutely, positively owe them hard work, focus, and dedication. More important, you owe them real, measurable results. But if you’re delivering those results, and your company is benefiting, then there is no reason why they should have the right to make you sit in a cubicle from eight to five. You owe them your work; you do not owe them your time. You do not owe them your life.

For us this line of thinking is irrefutable. We have heard every objection imaginable to the logistics of creating a Results-Only Work Environment, but we have yet to hear a single person stand up and say that adults don’t deserve to be treated like adults.

Nevertheless, social change happens slowly and not without resistance. Even commonsense ideas have to be argued over before they are implemented. It’s not as if one day someone said, “Hey, maybe seven-year-olds shouldn’t work in coal mines,” and the country nodded its collective head in agreement and the next day we had child labor laws. History is filled with people who have dedicated their lives to being on the wrong side of an argument.

History also teaches us that work can change. If you were to travel back in time and tell someone at the beginning of the last century that women would enter the workplace in record numbers, that there would be federally mandated health and safety regulations, that technology would allow people to conduct business twenty-four hours a day, they would have thought you were crazy. We wonder what a time traveler from a hundred years from now would tell us that we wouldn’t believe, but a Results-Only Work Environment would not surprise us in the least. The next generation of employees will have grown up with too much control over their time to give it up for the sake of a job.

At the same time, we have a fight on our hands, and we’re asking for everyone’s help. The change from a traditional work environment to a Results-Only Work Environment will come from the middle and below. As a result it will not come easily or quickly. We’re grateful to those brave souls in upper management who pushed for ROWE from above. We also realized very early in this process that the people typically identified as leaders—the ones with the weighted