No Schedules, No Meetings talks about Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), the subject of a new book. Here’s an excerpt that explains why you should put on your “blizzard goggles” before attending a meeting.
One day, before ROWE, Phil was unable to come into work because of a snowstorm, which in Minnesota is perhaps the ultimate in socially acceptable excuses. Phil had six meetings scheduled for that day that were canceled because everyone was having trouble getting to the office. When he returned the next day, four of those meetings were never rescheduled. One was resolved with an e-mail, another with a phone call.
He had spent much of his “snow day” worrying about those six meetings. He was ready to drive in and brave the weather in order to have them. Now that he’s in a ROWE he thinks about that snow day a lot. When an invitation to a meeting comes up or when he’s thinking about scheduling a meeting, he puts on his “blizzard goggles.” Is this meeting really necessary? If there were a snowstorm today, would that meeting fade away, or could it be taken care of with an e-mail, or, would it in fact prove to have genuine value?
Sometimes it takes some snow to put things in perspective. [tx BL]
Related
Hepatitis leave: Ricardo Semler says, “When people tell us they don’t have time to think, we ask them to consider what would happen if they suddenly contracted hepatitis and were forced to spend three months recuperating in bed. Then we tell them to go ahead and do it.”
someone
on 04 Jun 08too bad best buy are often scumbags to their customers. see, e.g., http://consumerist.com/consumer/best-buy/
Don Schenck
on 04 Jun 08They tell them to go ahead and get hepatitis? Wow.
A customer called me on Monday, “Where are you? We need you here; The engineers from the phone company are here!”
I was working at home. By the pool. Oh yeah.
I call the engineer, answer a dozen questions, and it’s done.
Sheesh. I should drive three hours for a ten minute conversation?
Meetings are mostly mental masturbation.
James Vandergrift
on 04 Jun 08With a good suite of collaboration tools like basecamp, protonotes, and bugzilla, the need for synchronous, in-person meetings is greatly diminished. Everyone can still “meet” asynchronously, optimally “listening” and “speaking”.
Dhrumil
on 04 Jun 08Tim Ferris has a good interview with these guys on his 4hourworkweek blog.
Justin
on 04 Jun 08...and thus 37signals fulfilled its true purpose in life. Not to be a leader in technology, but to behave as if they lived in France.
Charles
on 04 Jun 08And I thought “Blizzard Goggles” was a metaphor – would the meeting time be better spent at Dairy Queen?
Bruno Figueiredo
on 04 Jun 08@Justin: and what’s the big problem with France? It’s still one of the world’s top economies and most people don’t have to work to death to be fulfilled in life.
And I agree that most of the times, meetings don’t serve any purpose. I tend to only schedule meetings at the very beginning and end of a project, just to shake hands on it and give it a personal touch. Everything else in between doesn’t need a physical presence.
Burk
on 04 Jun 08Too bad they don’t apply that kind of thinking to their retail stores. I had a part time job in one while finishing grad school. The managers-in-the-trenches had meetings with staff (and each other) constantly. Meetings at 6.30am on Sundays, meetings every Thursday morning, meetings to set the adgena for further meetings, you name it, every meeting cliche’ was expressed in one form or another.
...and it isn’t like Best Buy Corporate doesn’t encourage the endless parade of meetings. They produce custom-made videos to be shown for each one!
Keith
on 04 Jun 08@Burk
Best Buy full of contridictions between corporate and their retail locations? That’s hard to believe!
Honestly I think the example given may not be accurate, but it’s a good principal regardless of the source. I often wonder how many meetings could have been e-mails or just a quick phone call to the key people.
Asking, “Do I REALLY need to do this?” is a hard one to answer because people tend to operate based on the way they were conditioned and numerous meetings are just part of the American corporate culture.
I definitely dig this concept though.
David
on 04 Jun 08OK, I read it. It may indeed be a great program, but the article doesn’t provide a single detail beyond “Results-Only Work Environment”, that what matters is “are people getting their work done”? This is a revelation??? How about giving us some concrete examples of what they did to implement ROWE?
David Andersen
on 04 Jun 08“ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done….At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.”
This is a breath of fresh, rare air. Control freaks and micro managers beware. And anyone who can’t handle the freedom and responsibility of such an environment doesn’t belong there. The fact that almost all business cultures don’t work this way is why I work for myself.
Matt
on 05 Jun 08The authors were on Minnesota Public Radio earlier this week talking about working and ROWE.
Link to the audio
This discussion is closed.