The Perfect Gift For Your Boss: Work Sucks And How To Fix It

Ask anyone who owns their own business and they will tell you all the things they miss about working for a major corporation: regular paychecks, discounted health care, paid vacations, and all those other perks that come with being part of a Fortune 500 organization.

However, even with the regular paycheck and health care benefits, most business owners will say that it would be hard to work for a major corporation again because they'd miss their freedom.

That's why I was so shocked to learn that Best Buy has implemented a program that Timothy Ferris, author of the
Four Hour Work Week calls" the most radical workplace experiment the Fortune 500 have ever seen."

It's called the ROWE Concept: Results Only Work Environment. Businessweek featured the concept in 2006 with a piece called Smashing The Clock

One afternoon last year, Chap Achen, who oversees online orders at Best Buy Co. (BBY ), shut down his computer, stood up from his desk, and announced that he was leaving for the day. It was around 2 p.m., and most of Achen's staff were slumped over their keyboards, deep in a post-lunch, LCD-lit trance. "See you tomorrow," said Achen. "I'm going to a matinee."

Under normal circumstances, an early-afternoon departure would have been totally un-Achen. After all, this was a 37-year-old corporate comer whose wife laughs in his face when he utters the words "work-life balance." But at Best Buy's Minneapolis headquarters, similar incidents of strangeness were breaking out all over the ultramodern campus. In employee relations, Steve Hance had suddenly started going hunting on workdays, a Remington 12-gauge in one hand, a Verizon LG (VZ ) in the other. In the retail training department, e-learning specialist Mark Wells was spending his days bombing around the country following rocker Dave Matthews. Single mother Kelly McDevitt, an online promotions manager, started leaving at 2:30 p.m. to pick up her 11-year-old son Calvin from school. Scott Jauman, a Six Sigma black belt, began spending a third of his time at his Northwoods cabin.

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.

Read more about this experiment and how its increased productivity at Best Buy by nearly 40% and reduced turnover by 90% in some divisions at my blog post on BlogHer.

You can also check out the blog of Work Suck's authors Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson as they talk to the many skeptics who say it can't be done in my office.