Advanced Search

The story appears on

Page A7

January 19, 2016

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Opinion » Foreign Views

Why firms should worry about results, not clocks

By Ginka Toegel | January 19, 2016, Tuesday | Print Edition

In this day and age of hyper connectivity and changing values, it’s a wonder that many of us still work in an office during a fixed window of hours.

Of course for airports, hospitals, shipping companies, retail stores and many other organizations, to run efficiently, they need to have strict schedules and their workforce has to be there.

But what about for the huge number of people working in the knowledge-based economy where their outputs don’t rely on physical presence?

Many business leaders are stuck with the notion that organizations cannot succeed unless people are being watched and told what to do by managers. But it turns out by giving employees unlimited freedom, organizations can often achieve better results. Flexible working systems like ROWE, which stands for Results Only Work Environment, have been grabbing a lot of attention over the last few years. And for good reason.

A number of high-profile companies have adopted similar policies and continue to swear by them. Unilever has an agile working environment. Gap’s headquarters uses ROWE principles. Netflix implements many elements of ROWE with great success.

The Internet and other technology have made it possible to perform certain types of work from anywhere. Many organizations now have to manage teams in different time zones who aren’t at the office at the same time anyway.

In addition, the younger generation entering the workforce now doesn’t expect to spend all of their time in an office. But they are connected at all times, so they think they should be able to work where and when they choose.

Less rigid, better results

For these and many more reasons, demand for less rigid working structures have been on the rise for some time now. Many of these trends are not new but the traditional responses by many large organizations to this increasing complexity in the workforce has been to add even more levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy to their structures to deal with it.

But in a ROWE working environment each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want — as long as the work gets done. They are 100 percent autonomous and 100 percent accountable in equal measures.

People working under a ROWE system can deliver higher productivity because they spend less time commuting, save money on travel and office space. They are absent less, and have higher morale because they can manage their own time. This all adds up to a less burnout too.

The amount of time you put into achieving the results is not important, where and when you do the work is irrelevant, but producing high-quality output on time is. If a staff member is not in the office on a Tuesday afternoon but delivers excellent work on a project on Sunday evening well before the deadline, what does it matter? Likewise, if they need two hours or 20 days to finish what needs to be done, it shouldn’t make any difference.

ROWE also can level the playing field to a certain extent between men and women. Nowadays it’s still more likely that women are the ones with “flexible” hours or who work part time. But once everyone has the same flexibility and the focus is only on results, those who aren’t present full time are no-longer treated as second class work citizens.

Some of the main disadvantages of people not working in a central location on a fixed schedule have to do with social factors. Employees who no longer have to go to the office have less physical interaction with others. Some people can become lonely or isolated if they only collaborate with colleagues through machines.

The perception of others can be negative. But as long as people who are “ROWEing” have a certain amount of contact with their colleagues, they can maintain the good workplace relationships they need to perform well. An article in the Journal of Applied Psychology on a large amount of data puts the magic number at two and a half days per week.

Hostility and skepticism of ROWE can be overcome by a culture change that focuses on results and not time spent.

The three key ingredients necessary to make flexible policies work are buy in from the top, going step by step, and changing the culture.

Ginka Toegel is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership at IMD. She is program director for Mobilizing People and Strategies for Leadership. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.

Foreign Views


 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend