Tag Archives: ROWE

I have been reading a lot about ROWE (results-oriented work environment). If you want to know more about what ROWE is all about, the Bamboo Project blog has a nice article with pointers to more information. The article “Smashing the Clock” in Business Week was the one that got me started thinking about it in the first place.

When I talk about ROWE with other people at my company, I come up against a lot of confusion about what it is exactly. ROWE is not telecommuting or flex time. It is tying work directly to results. So there is no need to work the 8-hour day if you can get the desired results in less. There is no need to come in to the office if you can get the desired results from some other location. The employee is treated as an adult and trusted to determine what is the best way for them to achieve the results they are being asked for. ROWE is all about turning the factory worker mentality that has dominated corporate life for so long on its head.

The best analogy I have seen is in this article on Brazen Careerist, which compared ROWE to college. In most college experiences, the student is given clearly defined expectations. You have to take a certain number of credits, usually in a prescribed selection of subject areas, and achieve a certain level of performance in each. However, it is up to the student to determine how to meet those expectations: which classes to take, what their schedule will be like, when and how much to study, even whether to attend class on a given day. I had one class in college that I stopped going to altogether, but I was still able to achieve the desired result — an A grade — and nobody, including the professor, cared that I wasn’t physically in class as long as I was doing the work to make that A.

In the workplace, ROWE hinges on giving employees very clear expectations and then leaving it up to them to figure out how to achieve those results. If your job is to be on the helpdesk and one of your expectations is that you will be available to support users and fix their computers during certain peak hours, then you probably have to come in during those hours. Otherwise, you won’t be meeting your job expectations. In the ROWE paradigm, those of us who are supervisors have to be more willing to give clear feedback to employees on their performance, listen to them if they say that the expected results are unreasonable, and even fire employees who are not able to meet the results we expect. If there are slackers in the system, the system won’t work — but do we really want slackers on our teams, anyway?

The problem with my industry is that our work is tied to hours — hours that we can bill to various projects. The whole idea behind ROWE is that you don’t work a set number of hours; you work as long and when you need to in order to get the work done.

That being said, I doubt I’ll go completely anarchist and slash my working time down to 20 hours per week without letting my company know. Rather, I’d like to stop keeping track of how much time I work per day. I’ve noticed that when I work according to my natural rhythms, on some days I’ll work 9 or 10 hours, some days I’ll work 6 or 7. It’s rare that I work exactly 8 hours on the dot, but I think I’m giving the organization a decent amount of time for their money, and I’m certainly achieving the results they need, according to the feedback I’m getting. And that’s not even counting the time I’m not precisely working, but I am thinking about work and formulating ideas, such as in the shower or on a walk with the dog, or the times I quickly read email or dash off a note to someone “off the clock.”

So for purposes of billing, I’ve decided to call time worked during a day a “workday,” equivalent to 8 hours, so I can stop tracking exactly how many hours I work. Each day that I work, I’ll charge 8 hours on my timesheet. Of course, if I work very little in a day, I’ll go ahead and charge leave time to keep things fair. I figure that with this loose system, it will all come out relatively even. I’m salaried, so I don’t get overtime. The only thing we’ll lose is a record of how long it takes me to do something, but my years in project management have taught me that this kind of data is generally useless. You usually have a sense of about how long something will take anyway, and since no project is like any other, you can’t say that because it took you X hours to design the website last time, it will take the same amount this time.

I obviously can’t tell my team that it’s okay for them not to work 40 hours in a week (although that group has more of a problem with working too much than too little). But I can tell them that it’s okay for them to schedule their weeks in order to be most productive and achieve the best results. Development often requires high-focus work that is not conducive to the interruptions of the office environment. While collaboration is a requirement, we don’t need to collaborate 8 hours a day, and a lot of it can be done remotely. So what I plan to tell them is that, depending on the needs of their projects, they can choose to stay home or come in whenever they like, as long as they remain available to the rest of the team even when working remotely. And I plan to give them very clear job responsibilities so they know exactly what is expected of them.

The only way this will work is with clear expectations and frequent feedback. People working in a ROWE environment have to be willing to take responsibility for achieving the results and they have to be accountable to the entire team. This is not about going off to do your own thing without regard for the needs of the team or the organization. It is about enabling people to manage their own work lives so they can produce their best results.