This article reminded me of the episode of This American Life on the NUMMI plant on increasing employee productivity. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson are developing a new plan called the Results-Only Work Environment, ROWE for short, at Best Buy. They are wondering what will happen if they judged employees only on their work and not how they did it. This means that people are allowed to work from home, whenever they feel like it, all meetings would be optional, even if you had been invited, and no one would judge you for how much time you spent in the office, as long as you got the work done that you needed to do. Managers would set overall expectations, such as increase sales by 10%, but no micromanaging would be done, such as keeping track of hours.
Since I will (hopefully) become employed one day, this article made me think about the opportunity cost of working a full time job and other things I could be doing with my life. With ROWE employees are not tied down to their desk and are able to better allocate their time between work and leisure. The opportunity cost of leisure time, for example if you were to take a week off to travel somewhere, would not be as high with ROWE. As long as you are accomplishing your work you don’t have to worry about how many hours you would be sacrificing to spend in the office. Under the old system, you would be judged by your boss and co-workers for missing a day of work, however with the new system you would solely be judged on your results. Another trade-off employees benefit from with this new plan is the time they spent commuting. Workers could use the time they travel to and from work and trade it to spend time with their kids or sleep. Managers would also could better allocate their time to focusing on the expectations and not micromanage the employees, such as checking on who is in the office, who is late and who is working extra hours. Overall, a lot of time would be saved and could be put to better use, this can be seen by looking at the opportunity costs.
Of course, the big question with this plan is does giving employees more freedom increase productivity? According to the article, Best Buy has seen an increase of 41% in productivity because of the new plan. By allowing the employees to working from home they are less likely to become distracted, take longer breaks, and don’t waste time commuting to the office. I don’t think this would be true for everyone since each person has a different work environment that works best for them. I would probably be more productive working from home, since I easily become distracted if I’m working around others. This plan would allow for those who work better at home to have that option, but many might take advantage of the new plan to have more leisure time and not provide the expected results.
I think one issue with this system is that it creates an incentive for people to find new ways to get work done as quickly as possible to gain as much leisure time as possible. When you are required to be in an office for 40 hrs/week there is less incentive to rush through tasks and projects than if you can go home at any time. If results are measured in one way, workers may find other ways to cut corners. If quantity is measured, than quality will suffer and vice versa. This seems like a very effective system otherwise to me.
Personally I think a job working from home would be less productive for me, and I’m sure there are others out there who work the way I do. Often the best work is accomplished through collaboration, and even though our levels of technology are top-notch (not only can you call fellow employees on the phone, but you can Skype, Google doc, etc), it’s nearly always most convenient just to be together in person and not jump through hoops with the technology. Even at Carleton when I have group work, I’m far more inclined to meet my group mates at Sayles or at the library than I am to Skype them, even though I have these resources. Time is more productive when you work together (depending on the person), so I think the increase in productivity claimed by this article would depend mostly on the kind of job.
It seems like the genius of ROWE is the way it re-formulates the incentive structure of working. Instead of the negative incentive entailed by being micro-managed and constantly watched by a superior, ROWE establishes a positive incentive system in which productivity is rewarded with leisure time. It is also a system in which everyone manages themselves, meaning less time needs to be spent managing other people. It seems like ROWE points to a shift in the business world from the traditional office-desk configuration to a less centralized, and even globalized configuration.
ROWE definitely seems like an interesting experiment, and its effectiveness is obviously going to be judged by its results, not by its expectations. But I have to imagine this system would make manager’s jobs far more difficult – they wouldn’t be able to directly interact with employees as easily, and despite the speed of communication today, it’s also dependent on the person on the other end picking up. Companies that require a lot of coordination and have codependent employees to run might have problems with this system, simply because it can be easier to work things out if there are bodies in the room; that being said, less tightly-run firms could likewise benefit from allowing employees to work on their own schedule.