Have we mentioned that we’re very pleased about how our book turned out?

Well, we are pleased, especially with the stories that bookend the chapters. These “Voices from a ROWE” really make the book, because it’s not just what we say and think about ROWE, but what real people have experienced with ROWE.

Just check out this excerpt from Ami’s section:

A ROWE gives everyone the power to question value. It doesn’t take long for you to realize how strange it is that we weren’t going this before. Why weren’t we constantly questioning before? You have ten people in a meeting but only two people talking back and forth. Why am I here? Because I received an invitation. Outlook has ruined productivity. It’s just a joke. So what if someone is quadruple booked? You used to think that person was important. But now you look at that person and wonder what kind of value they could possibly be adding?

Now we’re in different places working at different times so communication sharpens. You get clearer about expectations and deadlines. And you are constantly figuring out the best way to work with one another, which is funny because you think you’re doing that already, but you’re not. That’s the paradox of ROWE. You used to think that we all have to get together to get this work done. Now maybe the answer is that we have to all separate to get things done. Then when we are together it’s strategic instead of assumed. It’s purposeful.

You see, friends, we’re not the only ones who are crazy about ROWE.

Those of you that have read the book, which “Voice from a ROWE” was your favorite? 

A friend of ours recently told us a story that made our jaws drop. He was visiting one of his vendors and happened to have a copy of the book with him. When he showed it to the people there, they were very excited about the prospect of a ROWE. It seems that they have a very strict punctuality policy—if you don’t punch in on time, you get docked 10% of your pay.

When employees complained about fairness, management put an ingenious (and cruel) spin on it. They told people to think of the policy as a “punctuality bonus”. If you punched in on time, you’d get your 10% bump, even if it really just brought you up to your normal salary.

*Sigh*

We hear stories like these and it makes us wonder what would happen if the leadership at that company were exposed to the ROWE mindset. Work cultures are slow to change, and we doubt this place will become a good place to work without a lot of struggle, but maybe, just maybe we could make work suck just a little less at this company.

You probably have your own horror stories, about a company policy, a manager’s outdated notions about time, or coworkers who Sludge like crazy. You can probably also see how a Results-Only Work Environment would change the culture of your work.

So we want to hear from you. Post a comment (five lines maximum) about why you want or need ROWE. We’ll award a copy of the book to the best entry. If you’d like, we’ll also send a copy to your boss, manager or member of the executive team. We can’t promise to score that “punctuality bonus” for you, but maybe we can help plant the seed that will make those kinds of policies go away.

We were pleased to see this post at Episcopal Cafe for two reasons. First, we love hearing other people’s Sludge examples. Lying about being in a meeting because you want to finish your chicken avocado salad is a new one for us, even if the reason behind the lie makes sense. This anecdote is an example of Sludge Anticipation, which is any time you have a socially acceptable excuse ready to cover your ass for when you’re doing something that is socially unacceptable at work. (Like enjoying food when you “should” be working.)

The second reason we were happy to see this post is because ROWE started at a corporation, but the basic principles behind it (that people are adults who should be trusted to do their work and then left alone to live their lives) could apply to other areas of our life. In our conversations with employees at Best Buy, we often heard stories about how the ROWE mindset had started to influence the other aspects of people’s lives.

We know it’s early to be talking about the second wave of ROWE, but then again, why not? And so we’d like to put a question to you:

If you lived in a Results-Only world, how might your life be different? What would your day be like if you had a Results-Only marriage, family, neighborhood association, school board, etc.?

Looking back, we wonder if we asked too much of you in our Design Your Day post. We appreciate those who took the time to put some thought into their ideal day, but we’re taking another run at the same idea with this post. But first, this thought:

One of the great business benefits of a ROWE is that it naturally eliminates low-value work. (Think of the “TPS Reports” in the movie Office Space - you know what we mean.) Low-value work is one of the by-products of a traditional work environment. If time and physical presence are as important as meeting goals and expectations, then having work that keeps you “busy” but doesn’t make you productive is completely acceptable. Most traditional workplaces would rather have you present and accounted for (and running a meaningless report that no one reads) than off doing whatever.

When we say a ROWE naturally eliminates low-value work, what we mean is that you don’t need an efficiency expert to tell you when you’re wasting your time. Even today, you know (and we know you know) what parts of your job serve little or no purpose. People aren’t stupid. They can feel busy work in their bones. And the only reason why people don’t challenge the busy work is because there is no incentive. It’s not like you’re going to get that extra time for yourself. Chances are your boss would just come up with something else for you to do to make sure they’re getting forty hours out of you.

In a ROWE, because you put results first, you’re allowed to test any task to see if it’s necessary. Outcomes drive tasks instead of tasks driving outcomes. If your boss says, “I need those TPS reports by Monday” you have a right (even an obligation) to ask if those TPS really need to be done by Monday, or if they even need to be done at all. If something isn’t driving results, then it’s bad for business. So why do it?

So we’ll put this idea to you in the form of a question. What task that is part of your job would you eliminate? What do you have to do (every day, every week, every month, etc.) that you suspect isn’t serving the greater good? What part of your job would you get rid of that no one would miss?

We were talking with a friend the other day and he wanted to know how the book tour was going. You know, personally. We said that we are energized by the response, and excited that people seem to be engaging with the book, even if they have questions about the contents.

Then he wanted to know what was frustrating about talking about the book. He wanted to know what was the question or concern that we found the most bothersome to answer. In other words, what cheesed us off.

First, nothing really cheeses us off. When we read a blog post comment that calls ROWE a “pipe dream” or us “hippies”, it doesn’t bother us. We’ve heard it all before. And when we hear these comments, we don’t hear the dismissive tone or the casual insult. We hear the sound of someone’s beliefs about work. Beliefs like:

Some people just need supervision

If you give people control over their schedules, they will take advantage

The best collaborations happen face-to-face

And so forth. If these statements were facts (if they had been generated in some kind of Swiss workplace-optimization lab), then we’d worry. But these statements are not facts. They are beliefs that most of us share, but that doesn’t make them true.

However, we do get frustrated when people say things like, “A Results-Only Work Environment sounds great. But it would never work with my job, because you couldn’t measure the results. I do [insert job here] and how do you measure results for that?”

Ironically, this is also the sound of someone’s beliefs about work, although it’s more subtle and much harder for us to answer. The reason why it’s hard for us to answer is that we don’t understand the ins and outs of every job on Earth. We have no idea how to measure results for your job, because we’re not inside your business, tracking its performance goals, jockeying for position with your competitors and trying to survive in your category or field.

But you are inside your business, aren’t you? And your coworkers are. And your boss and upper management and your leaders are. Collectively, you all know what’s important because you’re in the thick of it. If you banded together and had daily, probing questions about what you were trying to accomplish, then you’d know what kind of results your particular job (and every job in the organization) needed to drive.

So the question isn’t, How do you set goals and measure outcomes for [insert job here]? The better question is, Why doesn’t our entire organization have a culture that only cares about results? Why is my boss as concerned about my getting to work on time as she is about whether or not I actually do my job? Why do we have quarterly performance reviews when performance questions come up all the time? Why is 360-degree feedback this huge, elaborate ritual that freaks people out instead of being a natural part of our daily routine?

The answer to those questions is culture. The reason why people can’t even imagine setting goals and measuring results for their job is because the traditional culture of work doesn’t put a premium on results. The traditional culture of work puts a premium on a mixture of results, keeping up appearances and obedience. (Which is fine if you go for that kind of thing.) By putting results first, a ROWE changes everybody’s mindset about work. And when you are only judged on results, the entire organization shifts its focus. You figure out how to set goals and measure results because, quite frankly, it’s all you’ve got.

In the first Results-Only Work Environment training sessions, we used to do what we called the Calendar Exercise. In the exercise, we asked people to go up to a calendar we had posted on the wall, and mark down what days they would like to work at the Best Buy campus (green), what days they would like to work off-campus (yellow), and what days they would rather not work (red).

What was cool about the exercise was that there was never a day when people on the team weren’t working. You might think that the majority of people would want the whole weekend off, but in fact there were a number of yellow, and even green, dots on Saturdays and Sundays. There ended up being a lot of red (not working) dots on the weekends, but they were distributed throughout the rest of the week more evenly than you might imagine.

This was one of the factors that helped reassure management about ROWE. They were encouraged to see that people genuinely wanted to contribute (no one went up to the calendar and covered it with red dots). They also noticed that there was never a time when someone wasn’t working. Leaders could see that in an “always on” economy, there could be a huge benefit to having their employees’ efforts spread out across the entire week.

By the time you get to our most recent migration, however, the calendar exercise has long since disappeared. This spring, when we helped transform J.A. Counter & Associates, Inc. from a traditional work environment into a ROWE, we still talked to people about taking control of their time. We still emphasized the importance of doing whatever you want, whenever you want, as long as the work gets done. But we didn’t teach that principle in terms of the calendar.  What changed?

What happened was that one day, one Best Buy employee challenged the nature of the exercise. He stood up and said, “I want to put a green dot on a Wednesday, and a yellow dot, and a red dot.” He explained that he could see how in a ROWE, every day would be slightly different. If he were truly allowed to put results first, then he might decide one hour to the next where he would be and what he would be doing.

His insight was one of the huge turning points in the history of ROWE. From that point forward, we realized that the true power of ROWE was giving people complete freedom to design their day. As long as the work got done, they were free to make decisions about their work and their lives on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour, even minute-to-minute basis.

So here’s our challenge to you: working under the assumption that the logistics have all been worked out, and setting aside whatever overall reservations you have about the feasibility of ROWE, how would you design your day? If you had complete control over your time, what might your day look like? When would it begin? When would you work? Where would you work? What else would you like to accomplish? What might you not have time for now that you would build into your life?

Post your day in the comments, and please, no pooping on other people’s dream day. In a ROWE, we don’t judge people for how they decide to use their time.

It’s not because he featured us on his blog today. (Although we can’t thank him enough for that.) The reason we love Tim is because he embodies one of the core truths behind a Results-Only Work Environment:

It’s your fundamental right to have control over your time.

Just because your company is paying you to produce a certain amount of work, it doesn’t mean that they get to tell you where to be and when. Back in the old days, where work could only happen in a certain place, then making you show up at 8:00 a.m. and sit at your desk for the day made sense. (It sucked, but it made sense.)

Today, technology allows us to break those old norms. It”s ridiculous to rush to work to be there at 8:00 a.m. and then sit at your desk reading the paper for a half hour. (If someone needs you, they can call your cell, right?) It doesn’t make sense to come in to the office at all if you can handle your work from home, or a coffee shop, or wherever. Most of all, it doesn’t make sense to put such a huge premium on the time we spend working. The only thing that should matter is results.

It’s up to all of us to challenge our assumptions about what work looks like. We need more people like Tim to stand up and say, “I have a life. I’m going to contribute what I have to contribute, but once I’ve made that contribution, then I get to choose how to live.” We also need a workplace culture that supports people standing up for their time. (That’s what a ROWE does.) But first we need people to believe that they actually have this right.

So that’s our question of the day. Who owns your time? And if you don’t own your time, do you believe you should?

We were pleased to see this post from Mojo Mom about SWAT (”smart women with available time”) teams. The context is Sue Shellenbarger’s story in the Wall Street Journal about an experimental project (running business simulations) at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler business school. As Mojo Mom notes, these simulations only happen occasionally, “so Kenan-Flagler needed executive-level talent that could assemble at a moment’s notice to work on an intense but brief project.”

Mojo Mom was one of the project’s participants. Not only did she rock it, but she knows she rocked it:

“When you think of ’stay-at-home Mom’ versus ‘MBA student,’ a stereotypical image might be minnows swimming with sharks. It was good to confront that image because when it came right down to it, I actually felt more like the shark. Because the MBA students are very smart, we might forget that most of them have not been in the working world for more than a few years. Compared to a twentysomething, I have come to appreciate the life experience I have accumulated through every work and family challenge I have faced.”

We would love to see more statements like this be part of our national conversation about work and life. Having a kid and being a parent is not a business liability.  It’s bad enough that we stigmatize women for not being “available” after they have kids. But we also sell them short for not being as capable. The irony is that having children, like any major life experience, presents challenges that can make you stronger and smarter and better. If we dropped the labels and focused on what people could accomplish, we’d have SWAT (and SMAT) teams all over the place.

We thought we’d give a bump to Kelly Forrister’s recent entry on her Simply GTD (Getting Things Done) blog about David Allen’s 3-Fold nature of work:

Doing Pre-defined Work (choosing from what’s already processed and organized on your lists and calendar)
Doing Work as it Appears (responding to latest, loudest and new opportunities)
Defining Work (your own processing and reviewing time)

We’ve found that in corporate America, the second category gets the most attention. At Best Buy, we called them “fire drills” and, like the name suggests, the “latest, loudest” opportunities were often false alarms. Just like in school, everyone lined up single file, marched where the teachers (we mean leaders) told us to march, and then went back to our regular jobs once the all-clear was sounded.

ROWE changed all that. In a ROWE, every employee has the right (even the obligation) to challenge a request to interrupt their work. Because the focus is on results, people are empowered to ask the kind of questions you ask when you feel a sense of ownership in the business:

Is this perceived emergency a genuine emergency?

If it is, does dropping everything I’m doing right now best serve the results we’re trying to drive, or can it wait?

If it can’t wait, then what can we do in the future to make sure this kind of emergency doesn’t happen again? Can we plan better so we’re not in crisis mode the next time this issue comes up?

This is all commonsense stuff. However, if the people in an organization aren’t using a ROWE mindset, then they don’t get the opportunity to use commonsense. Of course real emergencies are always going to come up. But what if more of the work you did fell into categories one and three? What if you first defined work and then spent your day doing the pre-defined work you established for yourself the day, week or month before?

And for those of you who want to jump on this notion with comments about the chaotic nature of the global, 24/7 economy we have this question:

How much of any of the challenges we face today as businesspeople are perceived challenges? And how many of them are just the same old business concerns with a bright, shiny, technological face on them? In other words, how much of the world is genuinely on fire?

One of the risks of getting wrapped up in your own world is that you get  . . . well . . . wrapped up in your own world. Which is why we are grateful to Tim Walker for his post about relying on your brain instead of relying on technology.

We spend a lot of time talking about how technology frees people to work whenever they want and from anywhere. And it’s true: part of what makes a Results-Only Work Environment so successful is the widespread availability of laptops and cell phones.

But technology isn’t the whole story. In a ROWE, the point isn’t to see who can get the most done over e-mail, or who can stay out of the office the longest, or who can work from the most remote location. Technology gives people the power to live “untethered,” but if they’re not putting results first, then they’re not living up to the promise of ROWE.

A workplace that had zero technology could still be a ROWE. People could still do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work got done. They could still decline meeting invitations where the desired outcome of the meeting wasn’t clear. They could still challenge their boss to give them meaningful goals, rather than thirty things that would be nice to accomplish that year. They could still serve the customer and not the clock.

We call this using the “ROWE mindset.” It’s a way of looking at work and the world and solving problems based on what needs to get done, not our assumptions about how work needs to get done. Technology just makes it all shiny and pretty.