There has been a lot written on Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) in articles and in the blogs. Everyone seems to have an opinion about this type of work environment and if it could work outside of Best Buy. One article specifically addresses the point of the adaptability of Best Buy’s culture in other companies. I found a couple of points of interest that I would like to share with you.
“Best Buy’s culture is very young,” says Washington, D.C.-based flexibility consultant Paul Rupert of Rupert & Co., who has worked with clients ranging from Wal-Mart to Xerox. “They have a lot of significant managers who are still in their 30s. It’s very appropriate for them, with the breezy style and the humor and the slogans. But the headquarters at a typical company is filled with managers in their 50s and 60s-a different generation.”
Some aspects of ROWE, he thinks, might clash too strongly with the core principles upon which some conservative companies have been built. “You can ridicule an obsession with face time, for example, but some companies have a strong belief that having people at the same place, in the same time, creates synergy that is valuable to the company,” he says. “You’re going to have a hard time changing that.”
Age and generations definitely does play a factor in why companies would have an easier time embracing this culture style. We have written numerous posts (here, here and here)and articles regarding what the different generations look for in their jobs, careers and employers. As Paul Rupert comments, the leaders need to embrace the culture they are trying to implement, which is why Best Buy has been so successful with ROWE. In fact, it has been so successful they are in the midst of trying it out in one of their stores as a pilot program.
I found an interview with Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, on FastCompany.com’s website that really talks to the leadership’s role in making this program work. He was asked if he spent more time in the stores now, and part of his response drives on the importance leadership has in embracing and implementing a new culture:
Actually I’ve spent less time in stores than ever. This strategy [is] so challenging to the infrastructure of the company, so the first work is to get the infrastructure ready to embrace it. Key concepts like servant leadership [have to be enforced] that are very different from the examples we’ve set over a lot of years. That first has to get modeled at the hub of the enterprise.
One of the things I hate about all this terminology is that it has standard meaning which tends to denude the value of the principle. At the fundamental level, at the core, servant leadership is seeing — whatever your job and whatever your title is — that you’re actually in service to the people you lead. That the real measurement of whether you’re effective is if you helped increase the energy of the people who you’re engaging with and leading. If you’ve done that — if the energy level is higher than it was when you started — than you’re probably evidencing some servant leadership.