The death of the employee: what does flexibility look like?

The Results-Only Work Environment

In 2003, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson developed the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) while working at electronics retailer Best Buy. The system is focused on managing the employee’s results in order to not have to manage the employee’s daily routine. The aim is to make staff completely autonomous, but also accountable. It was adopted by Best Buy, and later by Gap and Yahoo. Ressler and Thompson went on to write Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, offering a framework for better managing staff productivity.

The book includes best practice tips such as making individual staff goals public (both to encourage collaboration and understanding of why someone may be turning down your meeting request), and setting key performance indicators which focus on relevant outcomes rather than specific projects. Just because you complete more projects than anyone else, that doesn’t mean you are adding the most value. The book also identifies many unspoken truths of the modern workplace, such as how we consider people who are doubled-booked to be more important than those who go to fewer meetings, and the impact on productivity of the dreaded “drive by” (when a colleague pops by ‘just for a quick question’).

In fact, the assumed supremacy of teamwork has become a cornerstone of our workplaces and work practices. Team meetings, committees and team-building exercises provide the rituals that underpin an almost religious conviction that we must all work in a state of constant collaboration and groupthink. This is in spite of the fact that research points to brainstorming not being effective and to individuals generating more original ideas when working alone.

A rejection of privacy and solitude is standard. Susan Cain is the author of the New York Times bestseller QUIET: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking. She writes about Apple’s Steve Wozniak and his advice to “work alone”, because most creative and innovative breakthroughs don’t happen when in a committee or team. She suggests we need to refine the ways in which we collaborate, by facilitating an environment which balances spaces in which to collaborate and spaces in which to reflect. And how better to provide that balance than trusting staff to elect when they come in to the office and when they work remotely.

It’s fair to say ROWE later fell out of fashion to some extent, perhaps partly as a result of kneejerk reactions by leaders wanting to go back to basics after the shock of the GFC. The ditching of ROWE by Best Buy and Yahoo in 2013 no doubt arose out changes of leadership and macro problems at those companies, rather than any evidence that the system didn’t work. Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly expressed his reasons for giving up on ROWE here. While the jury’s still out, I suspect that history may not judge Joly and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer too kindly. Their decisions appear to contradict research on the benefits of workplace flexibility for business and productivity, and the generally-accepted evidence that it presents a win-win for employer and employee.

Strategies for workplace flexibility

While there is a widespread trend towards adopting workplace-flexibility programs, in most cases the espoused flexibility is limited to baby steps rather than the paradigm that is required. Research by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency shows that while nearly half of employers have policies on flexible working, only 13% have a strategy for it.

Large corporations are run in the public eye and as such are more risk averse in their decision-making. This provides an opportunity for smaller businesses, who can win the fight for talent by adopting a more progressive and adventurous approach to revolutionising the workplace. London-based media agency the7stars deliberately set out to build engagement and trust with their staff. “We asked, what rules can we get rid of?” says business co-founder Jenny Biggam. The agency shared profit targets with all staff, gave everyone unlimited holidays and allowed staff to choose what hours they worked. “We have few problems with absenteeism – why pull a sickie when you can just take a day off?”

Asleep on the job

Extensive research into our circadian rhythms tells us that our levels of alertness decline after lunch, hitting a low around 3pm, and making the traditional workday not well optimised for productivity. But further research reveals that there are individual variances in circadian cycles, making some of us more disposed towards ‘lark’ or towards ‘owl’ patterns of alertness. Failing to recognise the variances in how people work best can lead to reduced productivity outcomes – no matter how many cups of coffee we drink.

Unfortunately the attachment to the rigid nine-to-five framework remains all too common, and no doubt has its roots in a lack of imagination and inherent aversion to change that seems to pervade so many HR departments and boardrooms. The notion that an employee should not be permitted to work flexibly because some employees who are afforded too much flexibility fail to meet expectations, or are generally harder to manager, is a little like saying that immigrants should not be allowed in the workplace on the grounds that some don’t meet expectations, or are harder to manage due to cultural differences. If a line manager cannot deal with teams working flexibly, surely the problem is the ability of the manager rather than the flexible working model itself?

It’s as if we are replacing common sense and judgement with rules and process. And the problem is, to quote Elon Musk, “that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”

Ironically we trust undergraduates to get through university in a relatively autonomous fashion, making their own decisions about where, when and how they will study and how they use the resources made available to them, and yet upon graduation and entry into the workforce, at a time when they have presumably gained some important insights into their own work style, we remove that autonomy and tell them where, when and how they will complete their tasks.

Australia is likely to fall behind its neighbours in the productivity stakes if we don’t heed the call to review our outdated ways of thinking about work. Research reveals that Australian workplaces are the least flexible of any in the Asia-Pacific region, with 79% of workers saying they are unable to work remotely in their current position, as compared to 59% of Chinese workers, 62% of Indian, 64% of Malaysian and 65% of workers in Hong Kong and New Zealand.