Reworking Work

Monday, Jul. 18, 2005 By JYOTI THOTTAM/MINNEAPOLIS
JENNIFER JANSSEN, VENDOR RELATIONS: Janssen says the hardest thing about making your own hours is resisting the temptation to work around the clock
BRIDGET BARRETT FOR TIME
Article Tools
Print
Reprints
Sphere
RSS

(4 of 5)
During the first few weeks in ROWE, employees call "sludge" out loud when they hear an offending comment. They try to keep a sense of humor about it--some teams put a dollar into a kitty for every sludge infraction. Yes, it sounds weird, but it can help people break their bad habits, says Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who is studying Best Buy's ROWE employees. "These are all examples of the way we use time to say how valuable we are," she says.

Related Articles

Managers have put up the most resistance. The hardest part of the transition to ROWE, says Tom Blesener, one of the first to go through it, was accepting responsibility for the stress his employees felt. "It was me," he says. "That was hard." Blesener also had to learn how to stop treating his employees as if they were "unruly children," he says. The 44-year-old supervises 27 people who handle the company's extended-warranty services. His 20 hourly employees told him they were sick of punch- ing time clocks. "They felt it was almost inhumane," he says. Now these data-entry clerks and claims processors focus on how many forms they get through in a week, rather than when they do it. They still count their hours (Best Buy has to follow overtime rules), but they have more freedom to schedule their work around their families' needs.

In the end, Blesener had to give up some of his control. When a client needed someone to be available on Saturdays, Blesener left it up to his team to decide how to handle the coverage. Under ROWE, he can't stop by his employees' desks and spring deadlines on them--they might not be there. He now plans his whole team's work more carefully and meets with each of his direct reports weekly. "It requires you to get to know your people on a much deeper level," he says.

Total flexibility may not be for everyone. For instance, Best Buy's legal department so far has resisted the new way of working, partly because the in-house attorneys are worried that it will reduce their pay, says one of them, Jane Kirshbaum, 40. Best Buy's lawyers are compensated in part based on how well they serve their clients--other departments that have legal issues--and they are not connected to any revenue-generating part of the business. Kirshbaum wonders if they will be criticized as unresponsive if they take off one afternoon. She admires the freedom the employees in the ROWE program seem to enjoy. She changed to a four-day schedule after the birth of her second child last year and struggles every day with the push of work and the pull of family. Still, she is not convinced that ROWE will work for her. She already checks e-mail and voice mail on her "day off." Will ROWE push even more work into her down time? Without everyone in the office, she asks, "How do you make sure that the person who's left is not the person who's dumped on?"

Those are serious concerns. In exchange for more autonomy, Best Buy employees give up the guidelines that signal where work ends and leisure begins. Janssen says the hardest adjustment was "not working 24 hours a day. Because you have that ability now. I had to learn when enough is enough." Moen says the old rigid system is comforting for routine-loving workers. ROWE, she says, "could be harder for people who want order in their lives."