Getting the Right Results

By Matt Buttell, Deputy Editor

Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler are behind one of the most innovative and compelling initiatives the industry has seen in recent years. HRM’s Matt Buttell spoke exclusively with Thompson to find out more. Part I

There is a better way to work

“We started experimenting with teams and moving people away from the thought that work is a place you go, and instead, something you do”
-Jody Thompson of Culture Rx

It’s easy to be jealous of those working in a ROWE environment. For one thing, we all have those days when, no matter how hard we want to get the work done, we simply can’t. During a difficult economy like that of today, its no surprise as more and more companies struggle to not only meet the demands of its business strategies but also the demands of an increasingly stressed workforce.

Of course, that is exactly where ROWE would come in.

“What happens in ROWE is, you focus on getting the work done, you have control over your time and you do what’s necessary to drive the outcome,” says Jody Thompson, Co-Founder and Principal of Culture Rx – the company behind ROWE. “So if sitting in traffic isn't necessary to drive my outcome, I don't do it. If going in at 8:00 in the morning so that my boss can see me in the office doesn't drive results, I don't do it. That's why people are more productive. They're actually not focused on all that other stuff; they're focused on getting the job done,” she adds, saying that it's like every single person is the owner of their own business.

Put simply, ROWE shouldn’t work. It literally takes everything you might think you know about company culture and flips it on its head. But, oddly enough, it actually seems to work perfectly. ROWE – which stands for a Results-Only Work Environment ­– was borne out of Co-Founders Thompson and Cali Ressler’s own passionate belief that there is a better way for companies to work. “Cali and I were both employees at Best Buy,” explains Thompson when we sit down to speak with her. “We worked within the human resources area where we were tasked with taking flexible work arrangements and implementing them or bringing them across the organization. We knew that flexible work arrangements were old thinking, that they didn't work and that they create hostility in the work environment. We also knew that they were really exclusive of people and only accommodate for a very few.”

Fear

Subsequently, what Ressler and Thompson decided to do was something radically different. By experimenting with what the future of work could look like, based on where companies were today in terms of technology and by actually throwing out all the ‘old rules’, the ROWE environment began to take shape. “We started experimenting with teams and moving people away from the thought that work is a place you go, and instead, something you do,” says Thompson. “We’d have them talk about not tracking time, but actually focusing on work.” Adding that non-exempt employees in a ROWE follow DOL guidelines for tracking time, but they do not have schedules.

Today, while Best Buy corporate headquarters operates a ROWE environment in about 80 percent of its population, Ressler and Thompson work independently from their old firm and, with Culture Rx, are looking forward to implementing the same working model at other organizations across the globe. “We absolutely believe it's going to be a global initiative,” notes Thompson. “There's a lot of things about how the office operates across the world that's the same, and we are hearing from countries all over the world who are asking us when we're coming to their country. ROWE is very attractive to people. Anybody that does work is attracted to this way of thinking.”

Though this may be the case, its certainly not as simple as waltzing in and changing things with the flick of a switch. “We are working with other companies, but companies are nervous about being named until they are sure that ROWE is working in their culture,” explains Thompson. “Companies are very afraid of ROWE, and are skeptical of whether it can work in places besides Best Buy. We know it can, and we’re watching it happen, but we also understand that they're nervous about it.”

They need not be. Evidence shows that teams who have adopted ROWE see productivity rise by 41 percent on average. In short, what’s happening is, companies are able to get more from less. Or as Thompson puts it, “they can keep their same employee base and get a lot more work out of them in this new environment, and that's good for companies that are struggling right now with the amount of work that needs to get done and the fact that people are saying they can't take on anymore work.” Thompson explains how a ROWE environment actually allows employees to take on more work because they are operating in a smarter way. In fact, companies who are interested in retention and looking to attract the top talent (and who isn’t?) should probably know that a Results-Only Work Environment sees voluntary turnover rates decrease as much as 90 percent within ROWE teams.

No ‘i’ in Team

The several references to ‘ROWE teams’ is because, as was the same when the initiative was introduced at Best Buy, ROWE is implemented team-by-team throughout any organization. “People opt in if they want to do it. We don’t force this on anybody, and that actually makes it more appealing,” says Thompson. “People think ‘they’re not making me do this – I actually want to’, and that’s why change happens all the more successfully, because people really buy into it and want to make it work.”

While employees might buy into a ROWE environment, it can often be their managers that prove to be the biggest challenge for Thompson and Ressler. “T he people don't have a hard time at all,” cites Thompson. “They want to work in a better way, they want to work more efficiently, they want to give back to the company, but they don't want to be treated like children, and in the paternalistic way that we've set up the office across the world, it often treats people like they can't make their own decisions about how they spend their time, and they can feel robotic.” She says that managers today, particularly those working in what we would call traditional office environments, are managing people’s time and monitoring the hallways. “What they’re doing is showing that they’re under the assumption that if people are there and they can see them, they’re actually doing work,” explains Thompson. “When they think that way, they don't get really clear about measurable goals and expectations for their people. So when you start to talk about this radical new idea to them, their instant reaction is, ‘Well, how am I going to know if people are really getting the work done if I can't see them?’ and our retort is, ‘How do you know they’re doing it now?’” Put simply, managers need to get very clear with people about what they need to deliver and stop tracking time and place, and ROWE often finds they have a hard time coming to terms with that.

However, evidence shows that once a company’s people are ‘unleashed’ in this new environment, they can give back a hundredfold. “They are so excited and they have much more energy,” expresses Thompson, but managers often get worried because they want to control where people are and when they're doing work, and that's often what is bogging everybody down.

“We have seen that when a team goes to a Results-Only Work Environment, there's a lot of tension that's created because everybody wants it. They're not resentful of the team that has it; they're irritated if they have a boss that's holding them back,” explains Thompson. Often managers of teams within organizations have certain beliefs about the way work should happen, and, explains Thompson, what makes the social change effective is creating that tension so people continue to rise up and push against leadership. “And they can't give up,” she adds, “They have to keep rising and pushing, and saying, ‘We're not going to accept this antiquated, out-of-date way of working anymore’. That's what needs to happen, and that's why this change will happen, because the people will continue to rise up and ask for something better and it's going to get stronger and stronger.”

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson are also the co-authors of Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It? You can read the second part of this article in the next issue of HRM. To subscribe, please visit our website www.hrmreport.com.

How ROWE came about

Having spent their careers as ‘agents of change’ in the corporate environment and training related fields, CultureRx started as the embodiment of Ressler and Thompson’s own belief that there is a better way to work. Having come from different backgrounds – Thompson from a background in education, Ressler having worked at Best Buy as one of her first jobs – both women were driven by an intuitive notion that results-focused environments foster productive employees and have a positive effect on overall performance.

Working together at Best Buy, they experienced a melding of minds. Large-scale organizational change and teaching and working with teams to help them understand a new way of doing something proved to be invaluable preparation for what became ROWE.