ROWE: Good Buy or Good Bye?

by HEATHER MCCULLIGH | Jan 14th, 2010 | Performance Management |

One of the hottest HR topics we expect to see being discussed in 2010 revolves around an item in our Raging Debates Forum – the concept of ROWE. As Sean wrote here a few months ago,

The ROWE is a management strategy espoused by companies like Best Buy where employees are paid for results – and have complete control over their schedules. The idea is that employees do what they want, when they want. The company isn’t concerned with when or where the work gets done, as long as it gets done.

But it’s not always that simple. Blogger Lance Haun astutely points out how ROWE works really well for a knowledge-based office environment, but not for many other workplaces:

Do you have a pure knowledge worker environment? ROWE will work fine under this scenario. Police, firemen, hourly associates and manufacturing though? No.

Libby Sartain agrees with Haun, and goes further in her blog to point out ROWE as a potential legal mine field if not managed correctly:

I… wondered about how Best Buy handles this environment and stays in compliance with the FLSA. A recent article from Business Week online, pulling heavily from Adrienne Fox’s article at SHRM Online, reports that the Gap Outlet is now migrating the headquarters to a ROWE environment and seeing great results. (Anecdotally, when I checked with people I know who work for Best Buy, I found that the people on ROWE are headquarters staff versus retail and exempt from the FLSA.)

While ROWE has the potential to be a catchy concept, it is one that will surely evolve and be fleshed out over time. We’ll be watching the issue closely this year and reporting back on what we find. We hope you will too!

Regardless of how you feel about ROWE, I think David Creelman’s below comments on how ROWE gets to the heart of good management deserves some consideration:

ROWE is part common sense and part dangerous fantasy. The good part of this idea is that managers should tell employees what needs to get done, not micro-manage in telling them how to do it. The silly part of this idea is if managers think that it will be easy to define clear results for all jobs. ROWE still calls for massive amounts of judgment as to whether an employee is getting appropriate results or not. But that is the manager’s job: to apply judgment while drawing on whatever objective evidence is available.

This really gets at an understanding of what a manager’s job is. A manager is someone who has to be deeply engaged in the work of his or her people so that they are in a position to make wise judgments.

Do you agree that ROWE could shed more light on how managers work than on employees? Share your thoughts on the Raging Debates Forum so we can continue the debate!

  • Dan Callahan

    ROWE gets at the issue of the definition of work in 21st century Internet-enabled and email-choked America. Is work being at your desk moving emails around for a set amount of time in case someone needs to reach you. Or is it collaboration through new tools and strategies that solves problems and enables success. ROWE raises this issue, the most important one of our working lives. The companies that embrace ROWE are not only willing to ask the question, but deal with the implications of the answer.

  • http://cuberules.com Scot Herrick

    Of course ROWE requires that management really, seriously clarify outcomes. But, why isn’t management doing that now?

    We spend way too much time focusing on the time spent on the job and not the results of the job. Management contributes to that because they don’t have clarity around what results are needed for success from each employee and their strengths to provide it.

    And, employees don’t have great results because the expectation is time in the cube, not results. ROWE focuses on accountability both from the manager and from the employee.

    Sure, it won’t work for Firefighters in the “must be physically present for a fire” sense. But it does for everything else.

    If your biggest measure of success is 14-hours in the chair, more power to you. I’d rather go for real business results and have a life. That’s what is compelling about ROWE.

    Should be interesting to watch how it implements in these environments.

  • ROWE Fan

    Raging debate? Wow…

    This is just commonsense stuff.

    Know why you’re hiring someone.
    Hire someone great.
    Let them know what they’re supposed to do (tasks & responsibilities).
    Communicate regularly.
    Evaluate performance.

    Is it really necessary to add in there “make sure they’re in their seat for 40 hours?”

    If your job is to help customers who are shopping in a store, clearly you have to be at the store to do that. If your job is writing reports and sending e-mails, it may not require being at a certain place. It’s just doing what needs to be done in a way that makes sense to get the job done, without being weighted down with a bunch of restrictions that don’t have anything to do with outcomes.

  • Dan

    “Do you agree that ROWE could shed more light on how managers work than on employees?”

    Disagree: it’s imperative that managers AND employees focus on results and results only. There are many ingrained assumptions about how work gets done that prevent work from being done well. If these are not addressed, the workplace is likely far from an efficient and productive environment.

    Do you get your best ideas when you stare at your fluorescent-lighted cube wall?

    Are you able to crunch through a lot of work on a busy day if the previous day, having little work, you were bored out of your mind waiting for the clock to run out?

    Does your mind function beautifully from 9-5?

    Does your body or brain function the same way as your co-worker’s? And is it your or your manager’s job to find out what makes you efficient and productive?

    How creative can you be if the status quo is not to enjoy your work?

    How well can you handle the guilt and pressure when working in a non-standard way?

    I’m sure there are many, many more…

  • William

    I have been using a home grown form of ROWE for the last 3 years, granted I have only one employee but I feel that with a clear communication of expectations on both the employee’s part and the owner/management’s part ROWE makes sense in just about every position I have ever been employed in (I have been gainfully employed for almost 40 yrs) that includes manufacturing,resturant, retail, accounting…I don’t beleive I have ever been in a employed position that the idea of ‘tell me what you want done and your suggestion of how to do it, then get out of the way and let me get the job done’ worked more often than not.

    There are results that can only be arrived at efficently in a single manner and there are results which can be arrived at in number of different manners…and if as a owner/manager you lose sight of this you will just be repeating what you do day-in day-out and sooner or later you will be replaced with a computer because what a computer does best is repetative work.