Can Corporate Communication Survive Best Buy's "Smashing the Clock" Culture?
BusinessWeek Online ran an article by Michelle Conlin (click here for the full text) about the schedule-less work environment that Best Buy has begun testing at its corporate office. Here’s an excerpt:
"No schedules. No mandatory meetings. The nation’s leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical—if risky—experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for ‘Results-Only Work Environment,’ seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours."
"Hence workers pulling into the company’s amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren’t considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It’s O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid."
According to the article, it seems to be working. Since the program’s implementation, voluntary turnover has fallen drastically and Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average of 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE. In some participating departments, voluntary turnover among men dropped to 0.
"For years I had been focused on the wrong currency," says a Best Buy higher-up. "I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done."
Some of the Best Buy ROWE initiators have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx (http://culturerx.com), set up to help other companies go clockless.
Today, some commuting employees only venture to the office once a week. Could you lose some of the interoffice magic when workers don’t gather together all day, every day, bouncing ideas off each other? What about teamwork and camaraderie?
"You absolutely lose some of that," a Best Buy manager says. "But what we get back far outweighs anything we’ve lost."
This schedule-less concept works like a charm when managers are supervising people in jobs whose work they understand. That is, if the manager has done the employee’s job and knows how long the work project should take, no problem. But managers supervising technical employees building a widget, designing a gizmo, or planning a whatchamacallit don’t know if the work should take two days, two weeks, or two months. How can that manager tell how productive the employee is and set reasonable expectations and rewards for what should be accomplished in any given week or month? Any ideas on that hurdle?
Readers, what do you think? Wireless broadband certainly makes this concept a more realistic possibility, but it can’t be as simple as it may sound. Can productivity be stable, even take an upswing, when people are allowed to work at their own convenience? And at what cost to the traditional office concept? I’d be interested to hear your feedback on this idea, especially if you are in a ROWE-like work environment.
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