Best Buy leading the world in workday flexibility
I am fascinated by what Best Buy has done:
[W]hen Hance participates in a morning teleconference with his co-workers or in-house clients, he sometimes is calling in via cell phone from his fishing boat on a lake or from the woods where he’s spent the hours since dawn stalking wild turkeys. “No one at Best Buy really knows where I am,” he explains. “Nor do they really care.”
Gone are the days when Hance needed to spend morning until night seated in a cubicle surrounded by papers and charts he’d carefully arranged to ensure that co-workers and bosses who peeked in would see he was hard at work. At Best Buy, he’s free to set his own schedule, to work wherever he wants-whether it’s a desk at headquarters or a table in a coffee shop-and whatever days and hours he chooses.
“It used to be that I had to schedule my life around my work,” he says. “Now, I schedule my work around my life.”
Welcome to Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, a radical experiment whose aim is to reshape the corporate workplace, achieve an unparalleled degree of work/life balance and redefine the very nature of work itself. In ROWE, most of the rules, restrictions and expectations within which corporate workers traditionally labor-such as keeping regular hours and showing up at the office each morning-are discarded.
The results?
And more important from a business standpoint, there are some financial payoffs. CultureRx does the math this way: The per-employee cost of turnover is $102,000, and ROWE teams have 3.2 percent less voluntary turnover than non-ROWE teams. So once Best Buy’s 4,000-person headquarters is completely converted to ROWE, the company stands to save about $13 million a year in replacement costs. Also, when workers switch to ROWE, their productivity jumps by 35 percent.
“Basically, we’re rewiring people’s brains, getting rid of an old belief system from the 1950s that is no longer relevant to the technologically advanced business world we have now,” Thompson says. “We want people to stop thinking of work as someplace you go to, five days a week from 8 to 5, and start thinking of work as something you do.”
Amazing.
After college, I remember arguing with one of my bosses about his rules for taking bathroom breaks, which I found completely ridiculous.
He told me I was one of his more promising employees. “I feel like I’m in high school again,” I told him.
He just looked at me blankly - and so I confirmed that the resignation I had just tendered was indeed for real.
Treat your employees like teenagers, and the adults will have to leave, sooner or later.
Today, of course, I have complete flexibility, since my wife and I own our own company, Zoom Strategies.
But the idea that certain companies (or a large corporation, in this case) have begun offering this kind of flexibility to their employees ... strikes me as an incredibly healthy sign about our culture.
Read the full article for much more: “Throwing Out the Rules of Work.”
(h/t Marsh for the link)
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.