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Flexibility to the Fullest: Throwing out the rules of work - part 1 of 2; Best Buy frees corporate employees to work wherever they want, whenever they want-as long as they reel in results.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Patrick J. Kiger

A workforce experiment at best buy's corporate headquarters allows employees to decide how, when and where they get the job done. The electronics retailer hopes the results-focused program will reshape the workplace, foster work/life balance and, perhaps most important, deliver a big financial payoff by boosting productivity and cutting turnover.

Back when he worked in a conventional corporate office for a previous employer, Best Buy employee relations manager Steve Hance admits he sometimes got through long, unproductive meetings by fantasizing about fishing or hunting. But since he began working for the Richfield, Minnesota-based national electronics retailing chain in March 2005, the outdoorsman no longer has to daydream.

Instead, when Hance participates in a morning teleconference with his co-workers or in-house clients, he sometimes is calling in via cell phone from his fishing boat on a lake or from the woods where he's spent the hours since dawn stalking wild turkeys. "No one at Best Buy really knows where I am,'' he explains. "Nor do they really care.''

Gone are the days when Hance needed to spend morning until night seated in a cubicle surrounded by papers and charts he'd carefully arranged to ensure that co-workers and bosses who peeked in would see he was hard at work. At Best Buy, he's free to set his own schedule, to work wherever he wants-whether it's a desk at headquarters or a table in a coffee...