Reworking Work

The experiment is only three years old, and TIME got an exclusive look at how it is going from the managers who have learned not to be control freaks to the hourly workers who no longer have to punch the clock. Entire departments join at once, so that no single employee is left out and made to feel less dedicated. Thus far, nearly half the 3,500 employees at Best Buy's headquarters in Minneapolis, Minn., are part of the effort. Each group finds a different way to keep flexibility from turning into chaos. The public relations team got pagers to make sure someone was always available in an emergency. Janssen got software that turns voice mail into e-mail files accessible from anywhere, making it easier for her to work at home. Many teams realized that they need only one regular weekly or monthly staff meeting, so they got rid of the unproductive ones.

The freedom, employees say, is changing their lives. They don't know if they work fewer hours--they've stopped counting--but they are more productive. That's welcome news for a company that hopes its employees will give it a competitive edge. Along the way, they go through a wrenching reprogramming of their attitudes toward work. What if you didn't get credit for putting in the longest hours? As a manager, how do you establish your authority? As an employee, how do you get ahead? "It takes away everything that you felt was normal," says Owens.

The ROWE experiment started quietly, when Ressler, who manages Best Buy's work-life balance programs, helped a troubled division of the retail group in Minneapolis deal with sinking employee morale. Ressler encouraged the manager to try flexible scheduling, trusting his team to work as it suited them. "He said, 'Well, trust doesn't cost me anything,'" she recalls. The innovation was that the whole team did it together. While the sample size was fewer than 300 employees, the early results were promising. Turnover in the first three months of employment fell from 14% to zero, job satisfaction rose 10%, and their team-performance scores rose 13%.

When Jody Thompson, Best Buy's "organizational change" guru, heard about Ressler's work, she pushed the company's management to make total flexibility available to everyone. No one is forced into it; teams sign up when they're ready. Best Buy expects that ROWE one day will apply to the whole company. At the moment, it is working on a version for the 100,000 retail employees in its stores, a much more difficult task because most of those employees are hourly, and their work is regulated by federal law.

The transition to a flexible workplace in Minneapolis was slow. "There was a lot of trepidation," says Traci Tobias, 36, who manages travel reimbursements for Best Buy. "A lot of, Can I really do this? Do I need to stop and tell someone? What will people think of me?" Each ROWE team had to deal with those fears. "We took baby steps," Tobias says. The first step was an online calendar in which everyone entered exactly where they were at any given time. After a few weeks, the employees abandoned the calendar and now just use an ad hoc combination of out-of-office messages and trust. "There is no typical day," Tobias says. On a recent Wednesday, she slept in, went to a doctor's appointment and arrived in the office around 10 a.m.