Hidden Mojo

Business Week has a fabulous article on the organizational movement sweeping through Best Buy.

They’re calling it ROWE, which stands for “results-only work environment”, and the goal is to judge people on performance, not face time. Basically:

Best Buy is recognizing that sitting in a chair is no longer working.

The two subversives who are responsible for the culture-shift are Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler, two HR professionals at Best Buy. Thompson provides the best description about the future of work that I’ve read in months when describing ROWE:

“This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work.”

I love this phrase because it describes how much power customers have in the western world–you can now watch TV, listen to the radio, surf the web, etc when you want… and that’s exactly where work is headed, too.

What’s nuts about the program is that it started at the grassroots level. It’s rare that a company’s culture is not dictated by the structures and incentives that management puts in place. The viral spread of ROWE is testament to the power of Thompson’s and Ressler’s actions and the increased performance they beget.

The experiment quickly gained social networking heat. Waiting in line at Best Buy’s on-site Caribou Coffee (CBOU ), in e-mails, and during drive-by’s at friends’ desks, employees in other parts of the company started hearing about this seeming antidote to megahour agita. A curious culture of haves and have-nots emerged on the Best Buy campus, with those in ROWE sporting special stickers on their laptops as though they were part of some cabal.

Of course, Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson sounds egoless enough to know that he and his C-level execs don’t have all the right ideas, and are comfortable walking the walk to see employees’ new ideas through to fruition:

It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages.

Why is Best Buy trying this now? Says Phyllis Moen, a sociology professor who’s studying Best Buy’s transformation for the NIH:

“Our whole notion of paid work was developed within an assembly line culture. Showing up was work. Best Buy is recognizing that sitting in a chair is no longer working.”

Technology and the nature of knowledge work are pushing this transformation, because it’s better for the people at Best Buy, and it’s better for the company.

How much better? Dig the results:

• productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE
• Voluntary turnover among men dropped from 16.11% to 0
• measurements of job satisfaction and retention were the highest in BestBuy.com’s history
• Orders processed by people who are not working in the office are up 13% to 18% over those who are

The next step is testing ROWE in retail stores, where turnover is a horrific 65%.

The move to emphase results over face time in the workplace is inevitable, and Best Buy will have a big leg up on its competitors when they finally get around to realizing that the folks in Blue and Yellow are eating their lunch. It’s tremendously exciting to learn of such a large company that’s so forward-thinking about experimenting with how work gets done, and the results certainly speak for themselves. I wish Best Buy luck in their continued transition to a Tivo’d Workplace, and with their retail ROWE rollout.