Tired of working 9 to 5? What if you could work when and where you want....

The book "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It" by Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson, tells of the transition at Best Buy's back office to a "Results Only Work Environment" (ROWE) where the focus was on actually producing results, not on hours in the office or how much of your personal life you sacrificed for work. Its a wonderful read, and instills hope in all of those "cube rats" who long for a more balanced approach to life.

Just imagine - what if you never had to leave home to get your work done? What if you could do your work when it suits you, whether in the middle of the night or the mid-afternoon, not when it suits a clock-punching supervisor? What if you could figure out how to accomplish the work required in your job in 20 hours a week, instead of 40, and you got to use all those extra hours for yourself, instead of having your boss just pile more work on you as a reward for being efficient?

In the Industrial Age, we traded our time for a paycheck. That's where the term "punch a clock" was born. In the Knowledge Age, productivity will be rewarded, not just time on the job. Many companies still live in the Industrial Age. Some will live there for decades to come or even longer, until someone figures out how to replace their industrial age work with knowledge work. Robots on assembly lines are a good example of industrial age work being replaced with knowledge work. The person who designs and programs the robots is doing knowledge work.

Many, many companies could follow the example of Best Buy, and I believe over the coming decades they will. According Cali and Jody's book "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It" Best Buy experienced a productivity gain of 37% and a decrease in voluntary turnover approaching 90% when they transitioned to the Knowledge Age and allowed their employees to start integrating their life and work more effectively.

Take the case of Trey, chronicled in "Why Work Sucks." His life in a ROWE involves waking up when the sun is too bright for him to sleep any longer. He checks his emails to make sure there are no pressing issues, gets breakfast (or lunch, depending on the time) or a goes for a workout. He spends the afternoon working in his living room, with the TV on in the background. If his work is not done by supper time, he'll do more at night.

Is he being lazy? Instead of being judged by how many hours he spends working, Trey is judged by whether he is getting his work done. He and the team he is on have gotten smarter about how they do their work. Where they used to produce 10 or 12 ilearning courses per month, they now produce as many as 43. Yet Trey only goes into the office before 10 am 2 or 3 times a month, when he has a meeting he needs to be at. His team is getting more done than is expected of them -- they are happy, their boss is happy, and the company they are working for is benefiting from their increased productivity.

Trey is able to organize his day the way he likes and travel when he wants. THAT is Value Synchronicity. THAT is the wave of the future. Some day all knowledge work will be done that way, because it will provide a competitive edge for the companies that do it that way. But, it will take years, perhaps decades, for cultural attitudes to change, until it is more common to equate value in an employment relationship with productivity instead of simply with presence.

One of the topics I'll return to from time to time is what you can do to move toward a Results Only Work Environment.

To your prosperity.

Keith O Hudson

P.S. Here's a message from Cali and Jody:

Help further the ROWE movement by voting ROWE to be a topic at the 2010 SXSW Conference by going to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2378. SXSW is the conference where new ideas break out in a big way. You'll need to create an account to be able to vote, but it only takes a few seconds. It will look like you can vote without creating an account, but the vote won't count - we've checked on this.