BusinessWeek recently featured Best Buy in an article titled “Smashing The Clock”. Reporter Michelle Conlin interviewed Best Buy’s top brass about Best Buy’s work-life balance program called ROWE, or “Results-Only Work Environment”. Under ROWE, Best Buy allows members of its corporate staff to work anytime from anywhere as long as the work gets done.
The ROWE program, begun 2 years ago, boasts “no fixed schedules, no mandatory meetings and no requirement of physical presence” for most workers (all 4,000 corporate staffers will be on ROWE in 2007 when the program becomes an official part of the company policy).
According to Best Buy officials and consultants at CultureRx productivity is up 35% and voluntary turnover is down as much as 90% in participating departments. There’s also plenty of anecdoctal proof that the program is working–staffers leaving early to pick up their kids, calling in from fishing cabins and managers rolling out of bed late and leaving early.
But, despite Best Buy’s apparently favorable results, and despite the fact that IBM and other tech firms have already implemented similar efforts, no employer has been able to successfully implement a “clockless” program for its entire workforce. Why?
The truth is that the location-less, clock-free, uber-flexible workforce is a dream, one that will not soon be reality. Here’s why.
Work is work, and you can’t take the work out of work. All of the work-life balance efforts undertaken in the last 5 years or so have been fruitless because they seek to make people happy about working by attempting to convince them that they can have a rich, full home life without work getting in the way, and still enjoy the benefits of the partner track and the platinum retirement package.
The truth is that the clockless workforce will never work because…
Most companies cannot support (or survive) a clockless workforce due to the nature of their product (try serving McD’s burgers from the window of your girlfriend’s house)
Most clients won’t accept it (some people still need to see a teller to make a bank deposit),
It’s simply too expensive to provide home office and communications equipment and field support to a slew of wandering workers
And, finally, all workers are not created equal
It’s this final truth that damns most work-life balance efforts. We all have different lives, different responsibilities, different stressors and different work ethics. Therefore, designing a work-life program that will allow all of us to pick up our kids, visit our grandmas, walk our dogs, see a doctor, go snowboarding, or whatever it is that fills our personal lives is next to impossible. And, the idea that we can all be trusted to balance our own lives and still get the work done by its due date, is nearly incredulous.
And that leads us to what some might argue is a solution–management. Unfortunately, the management and administrative hours it would take to hold all workers equally accountable for completing the work is insurmountable for most employers, especially since these hours are hours spent not selling product to customers.
I wish Best Buy, IBM, AT&T and all of the employers who make the “Best Places to Work” lists, all of the luck in the working world. Goodness knows I would love to work the rest of my days from a cabin cruiser on the Bay. I am hopeful everytime a new work-life balance tale is spun. But, alas, I think the clockless workforce is still a world away. The best we can hope for is that a few corporate types will be able to take sabaticals every 5 years or work from home a few days a week, or leave early for their daughters’ recitals. The rest of the working masses will have to get promoted or start their own business to realize the clockless workforce dream.
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