"Results-Only Work Environment" - does it work? Have you seen it? Would you try it?

Great Debates
1

Someone at the office mentioned the so-called Results-Only Work Environment, a type of management which is 100% geared toward whether or not an employee can or cannot get their work done and ignores core work hours, timesheets, comp time, arrival times, lunch periods, vacation balances, and sick leave and lets employees do whatever they want as long as they can somehow get the work done. Supposedly there are advantages and disadvantages to this, and it has shown some promise with IT people who can crunch code at the times and hours they do it best, without having to worry about getting to work “on time”, or making sure that they work 8 hours a day, no more, no less.

This sounds like something that would be awesome to try, especially among software developers where creative juices can flow outside of 9-5. Problem is, most of the jobs I’ve had have been managed by clockheads who think in terms of 8 hours a day, obsessive-compulsive tracking of leave balances, and don’t let employees go home early if they get their work done but subtly threaten them if they go home after 8 hours without getting their work done (but don’t dare try reporting extra hours on your timesheet). In theory, employees under ROWE are fully salaried and have an unlimited leave balance and can decide to spend the first half of every month at the beach and then the last two months working frantic 17 hour workdays to get everything done. Employees are evaluated only on whether the work got done. Employees on ROWE can drift on and off duty at will, step out for a jog, and work late without asking for permission, just get your action items done.

Does this work? Anyone seen it? Would you be willing to give it a try, either as a manager or worker?

2

How do you coordinate any teams within the company? Any group efforts would seem to be a logistical nightmare.

3

I’m living that dream now. I set my own hours, have my own office and assistant, and no one cares how often I’m there (excepting infrequently scheduled conference calls) as long as the results come in. I earn no vacation nor sick leave. I simply take what I need and think I can afford.

4

I guess any kind of coordinating with others would be part and parcel of “getting one’s work done”.

In some workplaces and some situations, even many “group efforts” require no real face time. Do a task, e-mail a deliverable to the group, get feedback, rinse, repeat.

5

You could have deadlines. E.g. Bill has to have the TQR system up and running by March 5 so Ann can start working on the Level 2 Enhancements to it, but Bill isn’t necessarily working 8 hour days in the office on the TQR system, he might be chilling in Hawaii during the week sipping rum while taking an occasional break from the beach to work on TQR, then doing 13 hour workdays on the weekends, but he managed to deliver by March 5 so Ann can get her stuff done.

6

It won’t ever work on any meaningful scale - the corporate bureaucracy is far to engrained. We’ve been told for decades that “work from home” will be coming Real Soon Now ™, but you can’t manage people if they’re not in their cubicle farm with managers sending them emails ever five minutes demanding more production updates instead of more production (oh wait, they want that too). Also, think of all the poor HR people, trainers, middle-managers and such that would lose their jobs if people were able to just work willy-nilly.

7

Not only that, but anything involving coordination benefits from being able to rely on having everyone in more or less the same place at the same time. I mean, if I need something done in the next couple of weeks, I’d be pretty hacked if the guy who does that is off at the beach for the next 2 weeks, and then working like his hair is on fire for the last half of the month and doing a cruddy job.

I do think that there could be a lot more leeway given in terms of showing up late and leaving early if things aren’t super-busy, and I also think that the way that most companies handle vacation/sick time is kind of insulting to salaried employees, because it assumes that we’ll run roughshod over both if given half a chance.

And trust me, firing off an email and waiting for feedback does NOT replace getting up and walking to someone’s cube/office and straightening things out face to face.

8

I’ve read about this and even heard Best Buy corporate offices putting it into practice years ago (ironically when the company started to have major problems).
I always wondered if it was a nightmare for controlling headcount and assigning workload. How do you decide where to cut workforce when needed? How do you address departments requesting extra bodies?

9

Sometimes a group bull session is necessary to work out problems. How do you do this if one person is at the office, one is shopping, one is on a small vacation, one is sleeping etc.?

10

Except for paid time off, that’s how things work where I work. People are expected to be available for meetings during core hours, but not necessarily on campus. One guy on my team lives in another state. Another works from home almost every day. Nobody cares, because they get the work done. Of course, things are set up so most of us can do most of our work from any location.

It’s up to the team member to do what’s needed for both the member’s goals and the team’s goals. Sometimes that means coming in for a meeting when it’s inconvenient.

We continue to estimate work load and schedules assuming a 40-hr work week (haha, that’s a myth, I doubt many of us work fewer than 50 on average – but that is already factored into the past results that we use to make predictions.)

If someone’s going to be unavailable for more than a day or two, it needs to be scheduled in advance, and we get a fixed number of paid time off per year regardless of reason. That works great for healthy people, not quite so well for people with chronic health issues.

In general, it works pretty well. Productivity has little to do with the number of hours spent sitting in the cubicle – at least, for what we do, which is software engineering.

11

You schedule it.

12

It works very well with my contractors.

13

I think people are missing the point over this idea.

The guy that wants to spend 10 months at the beach and make it up in 2 months? His manager is not going to be ok with that. The guy that refuses to work anytime other than 2AM-8AM and won’t meet with team members? His manager is not going to be ok with that.

The system works well as long as people don’t abuse it. If they do abuse it, the manager has to be on top of things enough to tell them to knock it off, or have the balls to fire them. It works when you have a team you trust. If you don’t have that team, fire the people you don’t trust (why did you hire them in the first place?) and get people you can trust.

14

I’ve been doing it for 16 years or so (except for vacation - which is limited - but which I can take any time I want, pretty much.)

Work from home is fine if you don’t interact with anyone. I’d hate it because people are in and out of my office all the time and I’m in and out of theirs. Email is fine but there are times when the bandwidth of seeing people wins big.
Good managers support their people, and have no problems with this kind of structure. I work in Silicon Valley and no one pays attention to when we come and leave - but my impression is that lots of people spend more than the official time at work, and go look at their mail at home also.

I wouldn’t stay five minutes in the kind of place you describe, and the best engineers wouldn’t either. People like this do exist, but it doesn’t end well.

15

It would seem that this could work in limited circumstances. How would it work for a receptionist, for example? It doesn’t help the company if she’s there from midnight to 8am. Or how about a janitor. Can he be gone for three months letting the building get squalid, only to clean for 20 hours per day for a month straight?

Even professionals have outside client/customer obligations. Mrs. Jones needs surgery right now, not next month. A lawyer can’t tell the judge, jury, and witnesses to show up Sunday morning from 3:30am to 6:30am for trial.

16

Ah yes, you see, there’s the rub - you’re an engineer, I’m an office drone (although a very knowledgeable and experienced drone, an expert in my field (mortgage banking) I daresay). And there are a damn sight more of me than there are of you - but I’m glad someone is living the dream. :slight_smile:

17

I’ve got two one hour meetings per month that are scheduled for all the nursing staff…and I’m the only one besides my supervisor who’s been showing up to them since I started there almost 2 years ago.

All the rest of my schedule is up to me. I do have to meet with each patient according to what their doctor and I agree is necessary - usually one or two days a week, sometimes more - but what day and time is up to me. I am required by Medicare to stay an hour. Paperwork, I do when I want, where I want. There in the patient’s home (that’s when I do simple, short paperwork directly relevant to that visit), at the office or at my own home. Conferences with therapists and doctors are done by phone, whenever I call them or they call me. I can fax or mail my paperwork in to the office if I want; I prefer to take it in once a week or once every two weeks.

I’m not paid by the hour, but by the visit. So the less time I spend doing all that paperwork, the more I make “per hour”. I love it. I love the freedom, the flexibility and the autonomy. I like being able to pick up my kid from school, and to surf the Dope while filling out mindless forms. I love making my day as long or as short as I need to in order to have a life and maintain my mental and physical health - I can’t fathom the 12 hours shifts that hospital nurses do.

I do my work well, and on time and my supervisor loves me. She hates almost everyone else. They don’t turn things in in a timely manner, don’t show up to meetings, don’t respond to her emails…if we had more staff, she’d be firing at least half our current nurses. But we need to hire more competent nurses first, because I can’t cover our entire patient census.

So that’s what I see: if you have good employees, it’s good. If your employees are irresponsible and don’t respect you, it’s very hard to control them when they’re not in your office space.

18

I suspect this isn’t entirely accurate, and in a moment, you’ll see why. I have always worked places that allowed a great deal of flexibility in working hours. Often ,our involuntary clientele are not available for home visits during standard working hours or there’s some reason to make the visit before or after business hours.That’s absolutely fine and acceptable. However, the flexibility is not for the employee’s convenience, but for getting the work done. People often forget that .I’m sure you have never decided to visit a patient at 3 am as you were on way home from a bar done the street from the patient’s home - but I know people who have done just that. If we went to a purely ROWE environment, there would be a lot more people setting their schedule for their own convenience and ignoring all other factors.

19

My patients are all homebound, so apart from doctor’s appointments (and many of them have home visiting physicians), they’re home. I set a routine time with them (or rather, time window: aim to be there by noon, tell 'em “noon to two” and then you’re never late if you’re stuck in traffic or dealing with a crisis :wink: ) That’s for my own sanity and theirs, but many nurses don’t. They show up when they show up (and then wonder why their patients are grumpy and unprepared).

Of course I don’t routinely make home visits at 3am, but there’s nothing *prohibiting *it other than I don’t want to. It wouldn’t make sense for most of my work, and I work in some very shady neighborhoods where I start getting nervous around 3pm, never mind after dark. But many nurses will work a 7-7 shift at a hospital and then do 2 or 3 home visits on their way home, well after business hours. Their choice, I guess…I couldn’t handle that schedule, and I wouldn’t feel safe.

I do a lot of paperwork at 3 am though, especially when the insomnia hits. Lots of faxing, although I’m kind enough not to do phone calls then, except sometimes to my supervisor who also has insomnia!

No, I don’t have pure freedom and flexibility, but I do have a lot. The paperwork and care coordination parts of my job (which are about 70% of the job duties and time spent) is pretty pure ROWE: get it done by the deadline, they don’t care when or where. And I suspect that these ROWE jobs don’t have pure freedom and flexibility, either, but a lot more than traditional 9-5s. Everyone’s got deadlines and teams to coordinate with…my team happens to include the patient - in other jobs, that would be the client.

(While I was typing this, my 9am patient called; she’s got an eye doctor appointment she forget to tell me about so has to cancel. OK, so I think, “Should we skip this week and do a Missed Visit report? Do I want to see her tomorrow? No, that will make me too late to pick the kiddo up from school and I don’t feel like asking her dad to do it. Friday? Nah, already got 6 visits, my brain starts to turn to mush about then. Saturday? Sure, why not? I’ll be in her neighborhood on my way to a party, I’ll stop in and see her first.” <—that’s not pure freedom, but it’s a heck of a lot more than many people have.)

But I understand that my kind of work isn’t quite what is meant when people are talking about ROWE. I mostly told you all that so I could explain my point of view in that last paragraph: that it works well if you have good employees, and not so well if you don’t. It’s a lot easier to supervise borderline or even bad employees if you can actually look them in the eye on a regular basis and hold out your hand for that report that’s due today.

20

This. We have something like this system where I work, except that it was implemented by management too weak to deal with individual cases of abuse.

For example, one person spends all day gazing at his mobile phone - so, rather than take him aside and dress him down, they implement a blanket rule saying nobody is to use their own phones during office hours, The effect is just that people who weren’t abusing the system now feel burdened, and the guy who was the initial problem simply ignores the new rule and carries on unpunished.

So in the case of results-based environment the abusers arrive late, leave early and spend time idling whilst the conscientious people take up the slack. The idlers may look busy (for the five hours they’re actually here) - they may even argue that they are busy, but of course, they’re not putting in the hours, so when they’re not here, someone else does it. They get away with doing two thirds of a job.