Business Insight Zone

A Broken System

The thesis of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It is as provocative as its title. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson seriously believe that businesses can achieve new levels of success — and that employees can achieve new levels of personal happiness — when businesses start treating employees like grownups, by holding them responsible for the results of their work rather than any of the trappings that we’ve come to use as proxies to tell us how hard people work.

I know, “results.” Crazy, huh?

What are the proxy measures we so often use? Things like how many hours you spend in the office, how “busy” you seem to be, and how heavily booked you are into meetings. As the authors emphasize again and again, none of these things actually indicate how good a person is at a job or how well they are performing in the job. Probably we’ve all known people who spent 12 hours a day in the office, yet never seemed to deliver on their projects — or, worse, who actually created more work for others than they ever took care of themselves. And we all know people who wear their busy-ness like a badge.

A Focus on RESULTS

Too many companies — too many of us — have put up with these varieties of nonsense for reasons that have a lot to do with habit and tradition and not much to do with actual productivity. This devotion to the status quo has cost us untold amounts, in terms of both foregone productivity and thwarted human fulfillment. Ressler and Thompson want us to discard these old ways of being for a new paradigm, the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), which promotes results as the be-all and end-all of business, and demotes appearances, trappings, rituals, and everything else to the point that they are no more than optional add-ons to our work experience.

Crucially, in a ROWE the option for adding on these trappings lies with workers, not with management. Management sets the stage by making it very, very clear what sort of results are expected and in what timeframe, but then it frees up workers, both individually and in teams, to achieve results by whatever legal methods work for them. If your graphic designer can work up a logo for a new promotion while sitting in her jammies at her grandma’s house in Manila, who cares? The work got done — the result was achieved — and the business need was met. Even better, the designer is likely to be far more loyal to your company because you let her go visit her old grandma without making a big deal about it, and because you trusted her to get the work done remotely.

The ROWE idea takes full advantage of modern Internet technology, and it embraces the reality that much of today’s knowledge-work can be achieved just as well (if not better) in an environment outside the typical corporate cube-farm.

Embracing Massive Change

Mind you, ROWE also implies huge changes for management — new routines, new areas of focus, and new ways of thinking about everything from staff meetings to “managing by walking around” to performance evaluations, raises, and promotions. Although they don’t spend very much time detailing these implications, the authors are candid and unapologetic about them. In their view, if a ROWE brings better business results while making life easier for workers, it ought to be followed, starting as soon as possible, by every company that can possibly follow it. Q.E.D.

Their assurance about this is not based in theory or abstractions, because they’ve spent the past few years implementing the ROWE method at a little outfit called Best Buy, where the entire corporate staff now adheres to ROWE principles. (Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson wrote the foreword for the book.)

The baker’s dozen of “Guideposts” that spell out these principles are deceptively simple. They include:

• “People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s time.”
• “Employees have the freedom to work any way they want.”
• “Nobody talks about how many hours they work.”
• “Every meeting is optional.”

If the first three examples don’t choke many corporate managers, that last one surely will. You can almost hear the sputtering: “But, but, people have to be in the weekly staff meeting!”

Oh, really? It’s really that important?

The Unexamined Myths of the Old Way of Business

Ressler and Thompson have spent years of work — and they spend the bulk of this book — posing those pointed questions to the Old Way of working. Is it really important that people attend the weekly team meeting? What if they spent that time serving customers or working shoulder-to-shoulder with other team members instead?

Is it really important that you keep track of people’s time? What if someone incompetent works a zillion hours of overtime but still doesn’t get the job done? Shouldn’t you fire that person and hire someone who will deliver results, regardless of how long (or not-long) it takes them?

Does it really show “commitment” to the company to come in on Saturday, come in before 8:00 on weekdays, stay past dinnertime, and so on? There are some very good companies where such overwork is seen as a negative, not a positive, if it hampers the happiness-with-life and overall effectiveness (i.e. the ability to deliver results) of the worker.

The authors raise these awkward questions to bring the focus back to results, and to show how the Old Way of doing things arises, in many cases, from the workplace assumptions of the Industrial Age, rather than from a sober assessment of the way things work today. In a factory setting, one well-trained worker will produce more than another primarily by dint of working more hours on the line, but that’s hardly true — or at least, it’s not necessarily true — of most of the information-driven jobs we see in the modern office setting.

The Dread Affliction of “Sludge”

As Ressler and Thompson go to great lengths to describe, our twisted notions about what constitutes “hard work” and “commitment” often come out in the form of what they call “Sludge.” Sludge is what happens when your co-worker gets in at 9:45 a.m. and you say, “Well, look who decided to join us!” Sludge is what happens in the break room when Jimmy says to Jenny, “Man, every time I want to stop by Meg’s desk and get a quick answer on something, she’s always out taking care of her kid.”

Here’s the point: if Meg isn’t getting her work done, she should be fired. It doesn’t matter if it’s because family duties overwhelm her or because she sits at her desk and reads Craigslist all day. And, more to the point, in the overwhelming majority of cases where the Megs of the world are getting their work done, no one should have the right to criticize her because she happens to want to pick up her child from school. If she’s delivering results, who cares? Jimmy should send her an e-mail and expect an answer by tomorrow — and, by the way, he shouldn’t handle his work such that it all lives or dies based on whether Meg’s at her desk at a given moment. (What would he do if Meg came down with appendicitis?)

A Vision of a Better Future

A Sludge-free working experience is the major goal of the ROWE, and Ressler and Thompson do a good job of preaching this gospel. They pepper their short book with many first-person tales from workers (at Best Buy and elsewhere) who have suffered under the Old Way and benefited from the ROWE method. At times they may go on too much about Sludge,* or about how ROWE principles should be applied to absolutely everybody everywhere,** but that’s a small price to pay for the bracing dose of fresh thinking that this book delivers.

Transforming your company into a ROWE isn’t as simple as snapping your fingers; indeed, the authors spend plenty of time going over details of how it works, and they have an active consulting business dedicated to implementing ROWE for clients. But the principles behind it are breathtakingly simple:

• Give up your old fetish of constant control.
• Embrace the possibilities of modern technology to untether people from old, tedious ways of working.
• Free people up to do great work — work that truly delivers results.

Crazy, huh?

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Related Posts:

• The Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE): a first look.
• What’s YOUR working day like?

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NOTES:

* Or maybe I’m just lucky to work at Hoover’s, where Sludge must run way below average, at least if Ressler and Thompson’s horror stories from the field are any indication.

** An example kept coming to mind as I read this book: Many years ago, I was responsible for the receptionist staff in a busy office on the campus of my beloved alma mater. Most of these receptionists were undergraduates who took the job as a work-study gig — which was fine by me, since I had done the same thing when I was their age. And most of them had no trouble at all understading the demands of the job. But a couple of them had to be reminded more than once that there was a crucial difference between arriving in the office at 7:59 a.m., which was great, and 8:03 a.m., which was real trouble in that we often had VIPs walking in the door for 8:00 a.m. appointments.

Now, maybe in a ROWE the relentless focus on results would make it clear eventually to new receptionists that they really should be there promptly at 8:00. But in the actual environment of that actual office, we didn’t have time to let them to arrive at their own conclusions about the most results-oriented time to arrive, or to come to the conclusion that it was A-OK to come in at 8:05. Our clientele expected better.

This was especially true since plenty of these kids were 19 years old and had never held an office job before. My experience told me then — and tells me now — that they needed to be told, “You’ve GOT to be here promptly at 8:00.” In fact, I was doing them a favor to clarify that particular expected result, which happened to have everything to do with what time they arrived at work. I hope I never delivered the message unkindly, but I’m don’t think that the trust-everyone-always message of ROWE applied in practical terms in that setting.

That said, I stand prepared to be enlightened.

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