It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution.

What is it?

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical -- if risky -- experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

They are going to do this not only at corporate, but also at the retail outlets.

Every so often I see articles on changing work environments like this come up. I am very happy to see experiments like this happening in the corporate workplace.

Reading this made me think of the place where Decius and I worked "before all hell broke lose"... We both managed trans-continental teams. Our direct reports were in the states, but all the people we had to coordinate projects with were sprinkled across several Asian countries. Every country's management handled it's own staff, but we drove most project goals. It was all stress, frequent flier miles, and a clock that never stopped.

In the states, the engineering staff showed up around 10am-11am. We'd show up at the office, address any immediate concerns for a few hours, and do lunch. Lunch was a strategy session with food. Most of my average day in the states was working with the product development group. The phone conferences with the Asian offices started around 6:30pm. Getting out of the office was always hard, and we always aimed to get out around 9pm, because food became hard to come by in SF after 10pm. At that point, work quasi-resumed at home in the form of phone calls and poking at laptops. Decius had this worse than I did. His phone rang off the hook with technical problems overseas that couldn't wait. I tended to just sit on the couch poking out lists and responding to emails. The workday didn't really end, it just phased itself out slowly.

Overseas, my average day started at 8am. I'd roll out of bed, as my prearranged breakfast arrived, and start parsing in and hammering out emails. Almost all my collaboration with the US would happen before I left the hotel. Sometime around 10pm, I'd shower and head off to the office with the day's objectives lined out. The overseas offices shut off like a switch around 6pm. Completely different work culture. After 6pm, most of our time was spent with sales and professional services folks. Half social, half work. I'd get back to the hotel, late, and start on the morning email barrage for about an hour or two before passing out. I liked my wake-up period to be spent proof reading, eating, and hitting numerous send buttons.

In short, the vast majority of the day was work focused. The time that got cut out for non-work carried the flavor of "I don't give a fuck" extreme excess. The job was fun and exciting, but highly stressful.

All this lead to what was referred to as "the perception problem". The executive team would show up at the office (US or overseas), and say "where are the engineers?" The answer was boolean. Either "elsewhere, and working" or "elsewhere, and unconscious". The execs left the office like clockwork at 6pm, so they never saw that we were there long after. I theorized that they tried to be home at the point when the overlap period between the overseas offices hit, so they could do phone conferences there, while we favored the office for that. In short, there was a reverse of preferred work locations at critical times, leading to false perceptions.

At one point, the CEO sent out an email complaining about not seeing people at the office. The timing was horrible.. It was after a day when several of us were working at the office till about 10pm, one of those days when we had to settle for a pizza delivery for dinner upon arriving home. The effect was completely demoralizing. The same general thing repeated a few times.. We pushed back against this successfully in the states, but overseas, we were forced to show up at the office every day bright and shinny at 8am. The result wasn't more productivity. The result was a ton of animosity. We knew how to manage our time to get the most done, and we didn't need anyone telling us how.

The VP who ran the engineering department knew we were putting out. He went to bat for us with the execs who perceived things differently. He worked with us, not just walked by our section, so he knew what the reality was.

As this article points out, the hard part is measuring productivity. People who are not directly engaged with personnel don't have a clue who is pulling their weight and who isn't. Even in situations where everyone is sharing the same work space, it's hard to determine who is working and who just appears to be working. You can only see what is happening, not what isn't happening. Especially in environments where peoples' work schedule doesn't line up with each other.

Salaried environments that don't follow a traditional work schedule are often not conducive to any kind of logging either. If you regularly take phone calls about work related issues after after leaving the office, logging every one of them is a royal pain in the ass. Unless it's a matter of externally billable time, like at a law firm or a consulting operation, it doesn't really make much sense. You can take 30 minutes of calls, spend another 10 minutes logging them, and wind up with a list of descriptions that doesn't in any way reflect the importance of the calls. What about IM and mobile text messaging? How would you effectively log that time?

There is a degree to which it's easy to measure screen-time working on projects. There is another degree to which it is very hard to measure technical leadership, because most of it comes in the form of discussions, on-the-go interaction, research, and time putting thought into problems.

I've been out of the corporate workplace for a few years now.. My perspective might be whack.. What do other folks think about this? What's the best way to measure performance in the non-traditional work environment?

Smashing The Clock