As my job hunt progresses, I've been chatting with a few friends in the tech industry about their work environments, and what they liked best and worse about their jobs. One of the biggest complaints are team members who don't pull their weight and they hardly work an entire work week.
This got me thinking a bit because evaluating how good a team member / programmer is can be difficult. For example, say you have two programmers, and they're both assigned to program something. One of the programmers is a genius and finishes the task in 3 days, and for the rest of the week, he is seen lounging around and not doing much work. The other programmer is a novice, and he finishes his task in 5 days. Who is the better programmer? A lot of people in the company might have the perception that the guy who worked hard for the full 5 days was the better programmer. The other programmer who took 3 days to accomplish his work might be seen as a slacker.
In either case, I've read about an interesting work environment called "Results Only Work Environment" or ROWE that drastically changes the way work is done and evaluated. Here's an excerpt from BusinessWeek Online entitled, "
Smashing The Clock."
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.
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.
Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM, 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.
But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. [...]
Best Buy was afflicted by stress, burnout, and high turnover. The hope was that ROWE, by freeing employees to make their own work-life decisions, could boost morale and productivity and keep the service initiative on track.
It seems to be working. Since the program's implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen drastically, CultureRx says. Meanwhile, Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE. Employee engagement, which measures employee satisfaction and is often a barometer for retention, is way up too, according to the Gallup Organization, which audits corporate cultures.
