Via Recruiting.com I found this article about Best Buy’s radical approach to work/life balance. Go read it. Seriously. Now. I’ll wait.
There’s a lot of talk about whether the Results-Oriented Work Environment approach will translate to every company, Best Buy’s culture is very young but what about companies where the management is older and has different values, blah blah. These are valid questions, of course, but I think the real lesson that Best Buy has to teach is the importance of being able to look beyond your most basic assumptions about what a “job” is and truly examine what it is you’re paying these people to DO, anyway. The quote about thinking of work as something that is DONE, rather than something that you GO to, every day, during specific hours, ought to become the mantra of every company with more than a lip-service committment to employee work/life balance.
The takeaway here is not “hey, clearly EVERYONE should let their employees skip out on being at the office whenever they want,” but instead, “so at the end of the day, what is it that we actually need our employees to do, and how else can it get done?”
Clearly, there’s a lot of value to face time, and of course there are plenty of perfectly good reasons why employees would need to be physically in an office during traditional business hours. But it seems to me that an approach as radical as ROWE could be adapted to the specific needs of those kinds of teams- who wouldn’t be willing to keep one day at a regular business schedule in order to get their other four days free, for example? Can the company provide VOIP phones that can plug into any network so that people can be available to clients from outside the office?
It’s a big leap of trust, certainly, but it seems to me that even if the specific approach isn’t right for your company, the questions it forces you to ask are worth thinking about no matter what approach you adopt.