Recently I posted about location independency. This is one of the great opportunities that the Internet has given us. But it also means that we need to adopt our management strategy, to match the location independency of our team. The Results Only Work Environment is a proven strategy used by a few very successful companies (large and small) to do just that.
The idea behind R.O.W.E.
R.O.W.E. is a strategy which focuses not on how many hours we make, but on the results we achieve. This means that workers have complete freedom in choosing their hours, and choosing in which way they do their work.
Obviously some jobs don’t allow for completely free choices, but there are strategies to make this work well. An example would be a system where you’d have to make sure, as a team, that the presence rate is at a certain level. This is true for call centers for example. However, if done well, it doesn’t matter whether the call center agent works from the office or from home. Or from the beach on Hawaii for that matter.
What counts is results. And results are measured in happiness of workers, the retention rate of workers/talent, worker productivity, and lastly financial results. The key thing here is that R.O.W.E. focuses on the people, not the finances per se.
Business Culture Shift
The old business culture where we try to make people fit into the 9-5 schedule isn’t working anymore. We are in a global financial crises because our old bonus structure isn’t doing a good job in making good executives, there are traffic jams longer than ever before every day and many, many people are not happy working the job they have. Something needs to change. Now.
I have often stated things as ‘I do not care whether you earn $10.000,- an hour’ and people look at me in amazement, because they don’t understand. What I mean by this is that I only care about results. If I pay you $5.000,- because what you give me as a result is worth $5.000,- to me, does it really matter whether you do that in 30 minutes or 100 hours? No!
This is a very big culture shift for business owners and managers alike. We were taught from pre-school on that there are set times to do almost everything. Especially work. But studies have shown that 9-5 are not good times for everyone. People will be happier when they can pick up the kids at 3 pm from school, without discussion. And as a result people have more fun in their work and yield a higher productivity!
Example Companies
Great examples of companies who have adopted R.O.W.E. like mindsets are Atlassian and Google. Atlassian has gone completely R.O.W.E. and while at first the company had some struggles (people had to get used to it and kept showing up 9-5), eventually everyone was very happy about it. Some employees who couldn’t handle the newly given freedom and responsibility left, but as a result the team is much more in sync now.
The second example is Google. Google has a 20% rule. 20% of your time is spent on doing something that you choose to work on. A pet project for example, or a crazy new idea you have for an online service. People work on these things with all their heart, because it is something they love. Things that have come out of this? Maps and GMail are only two examples of fantastic services that are directly a result from the 20% rule. Isn’t that amazing!?
Go R.O.W.E. too!
If you are intrigued by this, there is a website which explains in more detail what R.O.W.E. is about. They also offer consulting on the topic. As a note, I am completely unrelated to this company, and make no money at all from mentioning them. I just found them via Google when searching for R.O.W.E. implementors, so go ahead and have a look too: www.gorowe.com.
Sun, Jun 13, 2010
Entrepreneurship