Yahoo Finance ran an article today with the following leads:
One afternoon last year, Chap Achen, who oversees online orders at Best Buy Co., shut down his computer, stood up from his desk, and announced that he was leaving for the day. It was around 2 p.m., and most of Achen's staff were slumped over their keyboards, deep in a post-lunch, LCD-lit trance. "See you tomorrow," said Achen. "I'm going to a matinee."
Under normal circumstances, an early-afternoon departure would have been totally un-Achen. After all, this was a 37-year-old corporate comer whose wife laughs in his face when he utters the words "work-life balance." But at Best Buy's Minneapolis headquarters, similar incidents of strangeness were breaking out all over the ultramodern campus. In employee relations, Steve Hance had suddenly started going hunting on workdays, a Remington 12-gauge in one hand, a Verizon LG in the other. In the retail training department, e-learning specialist Mark Wells was spending his days bombing around the country following rocker Dave Matthews. Single mother Kelly McDevitt, an online promotions manager, started leaving at 2:30 p.m. to pick up her 11-year-old son Calvin from school. Scott Jauman, a Six Sigma black belt, began spending a third of his time at his Northwoods cabin.
At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. 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.
My first thoughts were something along the lines of “crap, another one of my secrets to success out the window.” If only corporate America thought like this back when I was a drone, I might still be a drone today. My brother can attest to the fact that I was very fond of saying “as long as I get the work done, why would the care about X…”
I don’t think this will ultimately fly, simply due to a few salient facts:
1) Not every job can be quantified emperically. What about someone from upper management or a personal assistant? Can you grade them on the effectiveness of their job performance? These are mostly ‘gotta be there’ positions because their effect for the company is psychological, principally.
2) Some jobs heartily require presence during business hours. Receptionists, IS/IT departments, etc. For someone in the fix-your-computer (or even worse, the fix-your-server)department to take the day off to hunt and try to phone in a server fix from the middle of a connection poor deer lease in West Texas is what I like to call a Bad Idea (tm).
3) Good morale doesn’t always equate to good performance. There are some business types in which you want to have good morale – media, food service, and some sales based companies. Many times, though, poor morale due to a disconnect between management and staff is healthy for a company. Liken it to when you get pissed off. If you’re like me or people I know, you tend to clean, move around, run, or something to blow off steam, and you do it with a vengence. The balance of morale for a company usually should be kept somewhere between mildly perturbed and just short of friggin’ postal for best results.
/rizzn
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