Best Buy is looking for better results. The company, according to the Dec. 11 BusinessWeek cover story, has gone off in a radical direction to recreate its corporate culture and achieve results beyond anything it has accomplished before.
A program called ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) allows workers at the company's headquarters to make decisions on when they come to work, where they do their work, etc. The only thing that matters in the final analysis is results. As the magazine put it, "Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do."
While technology companies have allowed workers to go about doing their jobs without reporting to a physical office, it is not something that you will find in most large corporations and especially those in retailing.
Interestingly, the idea for ROWE didn't come from the top. Best Buy's CEO Brad Anderson, said, "ROWE was an idea born and nurtured by a handful of passionate employees. It wasn't created as the result of some edict."
Mr. Anderson may not have anything to do with the creation of the ROWE program, but he fully supports it. In fact, he was so impressed with the results of the program, Best Buy set up a subsidiary called CultureRx to help other companies duplicate its results.
Since ROWE was initiated, Best Buy has quantified a 35 percent increase in productivity in the departments using it. The average voluntary turnover at the company has decreased and employee engagement is up significantly.
Phyllis Moen, a University of Minnesota sociology professor is studying the ROWE program in a project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She said, "Our whole notion of paid work was developed within an assembly line culture. Showing up was work. Best Buy is recognizing that sitting in a chair is no longer working."
The next big experiment in ROWE will come at store level. Next year, Best Buy will begin testing with managers and hourly workers in stores. How it will work and whether it will succeed remains to be seen. What is known, however, is that Best Buy has a 65 percent turnover rate in its stores. The company, clearly, is willing to try just about anything to fix what's broken.
Discussion Questions: What are your thoughts on Best Buy's ROWE program at the company's headquarters? How do you think the company will go about testing the concept in stores? What would be the keys to making ROWE work in a store environment? What would a successful test at store-level mean for the broad retailing industry?