Lively Thought

My new column in Report on Business Magazine came out on Friday. It is a look at the revolutionary work environment they have created at Best Buy’s corporate HQ.

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Killing time

Best Buy has embraced an environment where employees may come and go as they please. Will the tyranny of the eight-hour workday finally meet its match?

KEN HUNT
Globe and Mail
September 26, 2008

“The fog of false productivity.” That’s how Scott Jauman describes the aura of busyness that tends to surround people in traditional offices. They appear to be working hard, but when you sit down and look at what they really accomplish in a day, it doesn’t add up to much. At Jauman’s office, “we’ve stopped paying attention to how busy people seem and started looking at what they actually produce,” he says.

Welcome to the world’s first “results-only work environment” (ROWE). Jauman and 4,000 of his co-workers are part of a bold experiment at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters, just outside of Minneapolis, that takes the concept of flextime to an extreme. Employees at all levels, from the CEO down to front-line support staff, are free to come and go as they please (store clerks, of course, don’t yet qualify for the program, although the concept is currently being tested at a number of locations). They can work whenever and wherever they want. There are no mandatory meetings, and no one tracks sick days or even vacation. Everyone’s time is their own to control, as long as they find a way to get their work done.

Before moving over to ROWE, Jauman, a lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, recalls that with competitors like Target and Wal-Mart constantly breathing down their necks, the culture at Best Buy headquarters was becoming unsustainable. “Marriages were falling apart, people weren’t seeing their kids; it was getting to the point where talented people didn’t want to work here any more. That’s how this began.”

It’s been three years since Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two of Best Buy’s human resource managers, started ROWE. It began slowly and quietly, almost as a “guerrilla movement,” they say. Managers were initially skeptical, but as one team after another found they were seeing not only better morale but improved productivity, the concept spread throughout the company. The two women have since written a book about the transformation called Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, where they claim that their new approach can work for any industry. “Work isn’t someplace you go; it’s something that you do,” says Ressler.

Ressler and Thompson have a raft of numbers to back up the business case for ROWE. At Best Buy, voluntary turnover (quitting, that is) is down 90% in a company that was once losing a lot of young talent, particularly women, who weren’t willing to give up their personal lives in order to do their jobs. Involuntary turnover (getting fired) is up, as workers who were good at playing the system and putting in face time at their desks have been exposed. In some departments, overall productivity is up by as much as 40%. Beyond all the numbers, though, the pair truly believe that workers have the right to control their own schedules, as long as they get their work done.

The concept of the eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek is so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s easy to forget that this, too, was once a radical idea. In the mid-1800s, employers had nearly complete control over the lives of their workers, and 10- to 12-hour workdays were commonplace, six (and often seven) days a week. In fact, one of the most important events in Canadian labour history occurred in 1872, when the Toronto Typographical Union demanded their workdays be limited to nine hours. The resulting strike lasted three weeks and was such a popular cause that John A. Macdonald saw it as an opportunity to win support among the working classes. Not only did typographers get their nine-hour day, but the Tories passed the Trade Union Act, legalizing the labour movement in Canada for the first time.

Workers’ lives were changing, if only gradually. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will!” became a standard rallying cry for unions around the world throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. Business leaders scoffed at the idea, claiming it would lead them to bankruptcy, while priests led sermons decrying that the idle time would result in moral decay. The fact that an eight-hour workday is ubiquitous today is perhaps the single greatest achievement of the labour movement.

Still, a “results-only work environment” may either be viewed as the next great step in workers’ rights, or as a return to an age when companies had near total control over their employees’ lives. Dividing the workday into a timespan that belongs to our employers and one that belongs to ourselves at least lets us know when to put our pencils down. Many of 
the people who have participated in the Best Buy experiment say that one of the most difficult things about ROWE is knowing when to stop working.

There is an old adage called Parkinson’s Law. Coined in the 1950s, it declares that any task will naturally expand to fill the time available in which to accomplish it. In other words, freedom from schedules might merely allow us more time to procrastinate, or work less efficiently, rather than give us more leisure time. As any writer or high school student will tell you, there is something about a deadline that focuses the mind.

In fact, even with his new-found freedom, Scott Jauman still keeps a fairly normal schedule. “I’m not married. I don’t have kids. So I can’t tell you that ROWE saved my marriage,” he says, “but from a business viewpoint, ROWE works. Employees work harder and are happier under this system. That’s what makes it revolutionary.”