Author: shun

Best Buy figured out that if employees can just focus on the result of their work, time isn’t necessarily the essence. Time is reporting Best Buy’s shift of focus on how much work is done rather than how much time employees spend at work.

Results-oriented work schedule could actually benefit all parties in question. Employees are happy because they have a flexible schedule; no more panics when something comes up at home — telecommute is always an option. Employers are happy because the moral is up and they actually get more results with the same 40-hour weeks per employee. Vendors feel good because they no longer have to deal with disgruntled or shoddy contracts handled by in-a-hurry-to-get-home-by-5PM employees.

The freedom, employees say, is changing their lives. They don’t know if they work fewer hours–they’ve stopped counting–but they are more productive. That’s welcome news for a company that hopes its employees will give it a competitive edge. Along the way, they go through a wrenching reprogramming of their attitudes toward work. What if you didn’t get credit for putting in the longest hours? As a manager, how do you establish your authority? As an employee, how do you get ahead? “It takes away everything that you felt was normal,” says [Best Buy veteran] Owens.

Stop counting the hours?! Isn’t that the ultimate goal for most companies anyway? Increase everyone’s work hours without anyone noticing. Not that everyone’s out to cheat the company, but when needed, most employees will pitch in additional time and effort to get the job done.

One manager, faced with low moral in her store, was asked to ” try flexible scheduling, trusting his team to work as it suited them.” Well, that magic little word “trust” worked wonders:

Turnover in the first three months of employment fell from 14% to zero, job satisfaction rose 10%, and their team-performance scores rose 13%.

I used to work at a place where trust was to be earned, not something to lose. Managers were micromanaging. And everyone’s presumed to cheat the company until that trust is gained. From a complete stranger-to-stranger point of view, I completely understand the approach. But when someone is hired to perform a certain task, a certain amount of trust should already be there. Otherwise, why hire anyone at all?

A little trust can go a long way.

And here’s another good one:

… as everyone started to rethink their priorities, guess what fell to the bottom of the list? “We spend a lot less time in meetings,” Tobias [a manager] says. They used to have a two-hour weekly staff meeting that often devolved into chit-chat. Now, if they don’t need to meet, they don’t.

I remember days when there were meetings to talk about good times for meetings! And sometimes we met just so that we can meet again later. And really, a lot of those meetings were about the manager’s insecurities on what was really going on. Those who were working on projects all knew what each other’s responsibilities were and held micro meetings on the fly all the time.

The change also has exposed some ugly attitudes among managers. When [Jody] Thompson proposed extending flexibility to hourly workers, the managers resisted, arguing that “there are certain people that need to be managed differently than other people. ‘Because we believe that administrative assistants need to be at their desk to ‘serve’ their bosses,'” she says. That issue is not yet resolved, but Thompson says ROWE is forcing the company to confront it.

Aw man… that sounds all too familiar. But I am glad it’s being portrayed as an “ugly attitudes among managers”.