J.A. Counter & Associates is one of the proud companies that is officially ROWE - and by that, we mean they’ve gone through the ROWE migration process.  They are an insurance and investment firm in New Richmond, WI, and have been a ROWE for about five months.  Just three months post-migration, ROWE was one of the foundational changes that caused them to experience:

• revenue per full-time employee up 18%
• profit per full-time employee up a whopping 250%
• accuracy rates in the Personal Markets Department up 14.45%, effectively eliminating reprocessing at both the rep/admin and compliance/supervisory levels

We wanted to give you a glimpse inside their ROWE migration through the eyes of Jill Luken, one of their employees:

C&J: How were you first introduced to the fact that J.A. Counter was considering migrating to a ROWE?

Jill: I was somewhat “recruited” to interviewing at JAC, as they had an opening and a friend of mine told JAC about me and they wanted to interview.  From there, I was very hesitant because I really liked my job and wasn’t looking for a new one.  My friend told me I might as well just interview, so I did and I found out about ROWE.  That was the only part about my current job that I had a hard time with - the lack of freedom between 8:30 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.  I had 1/2-hour lunches and was considered late at 8:32 a.m.  When I heard about ROWE and researched more about it, it became one of the reasons I decided to go with JAC!

C&J: As JAC started moving toward ROWE, what were some of the challenges for the entire group and for you personally?

Jill: I think it always resulted back to personal guilt.  Not being at the office, or at least at home working during “normal work hours”, was hard to change.  Our customers and contacts still work normal work hours.  I was still fairly fresh out of college - a year or so - therefore, it’s similar to going to class, going home for some lunch, doing some homework and going back to class later.  Go to a meeting, do work at the office, run home and work from home awhile, maybe head back for another client meeting and just get done what needs to be done (which sometimes takes more than 8 hours).  I think it was a challenge to understand we don’t work any less; you just aren’t “chained” to the desk anymore and required to work there.

C&J: How did you work together to overcome the challenges?

Jill: We really focus on the team aspect and helping/stepping in for each other whenever needed.  We told each other when we were “Sludging” and really started to focus on our own jobs, results, and actions - and made sure we had our customers’ best interests in mind at all times.  A lot of brainstorming!

C&J: What is a day in a ROWE like for you?

Jill: Pretty much the same as a day in the life of non-ROWE but with a sense of freedom, which makes all the difference!  If I need an extra 20 minutes one morning to eat my breakfast, I take it and I have my computer up and my calls transferred and am working while I eat.  I never feel like I am being watched like a hawk, which is a fabulous feeling.

C&J: We know you get a lot of questions about ROWE.  What is your response to anyone who says “A ROWE would be complete chaos.  There need to be guidelines put in place like core hours to make a ROWE run smoothly.”?

Jill: If they say that, they don’t get it.  That would probably be my response!  If you’ve taken the time to understand how ROWE works, you would realize that it has nothing to do with forcing people to do things.  Instead, if we have an issue, we brainstorm and fix it.  Implementing ROWE doesn’t have anything to do with employees not working 8 to 5.  It’s all about having control over what you do at all times of the day.  Your customers come first and in our situation, they work 8 to 5.  We all work to help them during the times they need us, but now instead of not getting services at 5:05 p.m., they can work until 6:00 p.m. and potentially still get serviced!  I’m happy and they’re happy - it’s a win-win.

There are several other companies implementing ROWE and we’ll be coming at you with more stories from the trenches…

If you had to guess, what would be your team’s/department’s biggest challenge with implementing ROWE?

One of the common criticisms we hear about the idea of a Results-Only Work Environment is that it’s anti-relationship. Focusing on results is cold and formal, and the autonomy people have means that they aren’t in the office forming those important (and often intangible) social bonds that make a strong organization tick.

The corollary to this idea is that if you’re not in the office raising your profile, you become a nonentity in the organization. You may deliver results, but you’re a ghost. When it hits the fan, you’re the forgotten one.

We’ll take the second one first. Having control over your time doesn’t mean you go it alone. In a Results-Only Work Environment, people still meet, collaborate, chat, get sidetracked, refocus their efforts, and even have fun.

The difference is that people don’t have to engage in any of those activities in an office during regular busines hours. Quite often, they do. But it’s not required. If you’re the kind of person who puts a premium on interpersonal relationships in the workplace, a ROWE doesn’t make fulfilling your face time dreams harder, just different.

Which brings us to a larger point about how we live today. This article on MSNBC about social networking in the workplace cites a U.K. study that says that workers spend an average of 30 minutes a day on Facebook and MySpace.

[Pause for a moment to judge these people as "slackers".]

Now that we’ve done that, let’s look at what those social networking users are really doing: they’re building relationships. The social impulse that critics of ROWE want to preserve in the workplace is the same impulse that drives people to ”waste time” on MySpace.

We’re social beings. We have to interact to survive. That strong social impulse isn’t something that can be turned on and off at will, or directed toward only constructive activities. Before Facebook, people met at the watercooler. In the future, when whatever strange (and possibly disturbing) technology replaces Facebook, watch as people think back to the “good old days” of social networking.

Technology has changed our world in ways we’re still struggling to comprehend. But no matter what happens, we’re always going to be people. A ROWE makes work look and feel different, but it can’t change who we are.

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ROWE and Why Work Sucks were the topic of an interview we did with PBS Nightly Business Report that aired the other night.  Check out the interview here.

Love this story coming out of Victoria, Australia. Starting today, employers have to make sure they do not “unreasonably refuse” to accommodate an employee’s need to work in a non-traditional way to fulfill their personal responsibilities to their families.  Although we’d like to see the law extend to anyone, whether or not they have family responsbilities, we’ll comment on things as they stand today.

As the last line in the article says, “[w]ork-life balance is a frequently used but not always honoured catch-phrase. From Monday that catch-phrase will be given teeth.”

While we applaud this news, we don’t believe that it’s a magic bullet. It’s one thing to enforce better treatment of employees. It’s another to give those same employers the tools they need to live up to the change.

Here are some thoughts for the good people in Victoria:

1. Don’t panic

Some employers will respond to this news by thinking that the law will open the floodgates for employees to take advantage. Relax. There will always be people who are out to defraud their company, but that’s a small percentage of the population. Most people want to do their jobs and live their lives. Don’t punish the many for the sins of the few.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate

We hope this law encourages employers and employees to communicate better about expectations. People who work “non-traditional hours” still need to get their work done. If the expectations are clear, then they are more likely to succeed, in their lives and in their work. Good communication is the cornerstone of clear expectations.

3. When things go wrong, talk about the work - not the schedule

Even in a traditional work environment, things rarely go smoothly. But if managers are looking to the schedule to fix what’s broken, they will miss out on an opportunity to focus on the work. After all, you can’t solve a problem just by throwing more time at it.

4. Trust people and you will be rewarded

Any kind of discussion about work-life balance is ultimately a discussion about trust. You either trust people will deliver outside a traditional schedule or you don’t.

Our challenge to employers is to take a look at their relationships with their people. If you can’t trust people to deliver without watching them, then what does that say about how you run your business?

If you can trust them to deliver, good for you. Then the question becomes how to maximize that relationship. How far can you take them?

And for those employers who aren’t sure where they stand with their employees, then understanding that relationship should be #1 on your list. Whatever you do, don’t ignore the trust issue. Like it or not, it’s the invisible engine that drives everything.