Work whenever I want? Yes please

June 1, 2012 – 11:16AM
The Age

Taking clock-watching out of the equation can produce happier employees.

Imagine being employed by a company that lets you work whenever you want. You can work a one-hour week or a 50-hour week. You can take a 10-minute lunch or a 10-hour lunch. You can turn up at 7am or you can rock up at 3pm. You can work whatever hours you like … and still get paid a full-time wage. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it actually exists.

It was a trend that was started in 2004 by Best Buy, a retail chain in the US. The organisation introduced a system in their head office of 3000 workers called ROWE – Results Only Work Environment. In essence, it meant one thing: employees were judged on their performance, not their presence. The result was a 35 per cent increase in productivity as employees started working at more convenient times and during periods when they were more energetic.

Since then, ROWE – or variations of it – has been rolled out in just a few companies. It is an innovation so radical, for now at least, that the vast majority of businesses prefer to stick with what they know, the nine-to-five grind. Only the brave attempt it, and one of those that’s taken the plunge in Australia has been BigCommerce, a fast-growing SME of 65 employees, specialising in online stores.

BigCommerce’s co-founder and co-CEO is Eddie Machaalani. I asked him why he put such an extreme version of flexibility in place. “From day one we set about creating a supreme company culture in order to attract the best talent and keep our people happy,” he said.

“We wanted to create a performance-driven culture. Performance doesn’t start at 9am and end at 5pm. Sometimes it starts at 10am, sometimes it ends on Saturday morning. Who cares what time you start? As long as you attend meetings that you’re a part of and you’re delivering what’s expected of you, then hey, sleep in a little every once in a while. We don’t mind.”

It really is a remarkable perspective for an employer to adopt – especially an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs often have the most invested in an organisation’s success and notoriously end up being control freaks. One of the ways they assert that control is by enforcing strict hours of work.

Many employers fear that if they took the gamble and implemented a 100 per cent flexible workplace, employees will take advantage of it. But at BigCommerce, where even sick days aren’t tracked, the opposite occurred.

“We have people coming in earlier and working harder,” says Machaalani. “We have people asking for laptops so they can knock out some code over the weekend. We’ve had to ask people to go home because they had a headache because they didn’t want to waste the day at home. It’s amazing what trust and respect can do to your culture.”

At Best Buy, ROWE was the brainwave of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, who wrote a book, Work Sucks and How to Fix It, in which they outline the essential factors for its success. These include:

Invest in technology so that it’s easy for employees to work remotely
Disregard the concept of time and abandon compulsory meetings
Trust employees and give them autonomy to achieve their objectives

It’s true that ROWE wouldn’t work in retail environments, factory floors, or building sites, all of which require people to be present. But it is suited to office environments that consist of task-based and project work.

As Eddie Machaalani summarises: “In order to be the best at what we do, we need A-players, and we need lots of them. You don’t attract A-players by being like every other company – you need to stand out from the pack.”

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