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Clocking out: Best Buy's novel come-and-go-as-you-please work style is pleasing employees and catching on elsewhere.

Article Excerpt
Jason Dehne's brother called him one day in March and asked if he might like to have lunch and then visit the annual auto show in downtown Minneapolis. Without even checking his schedule, Dehne--a human resource manager of retirement and wealth strategies at Best Buy--agreed to the plan. The brothers spent a blissful Tuesday afternoon walking through showrooms full of the latest vehicles.

The story might not seem unusual if it were not for the fact that Dehne did not need to inform his boss of his whereabouts--he knew his boss could not care less. Nor did he feel guilty about it, since his job allows him to work wherever and whenever he wants as long as he completes projects on a timely basis.

Dehne participates in the consumer electronics retailer's novel Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) program, which allows almost all of its 4,000 corporate employees to have the same freedom.

"Three years ago, if I was going to go to the car show I would have felt so guilty about it, I would have probably first worked the entire day and then left after 6 p.m. to get to the show [for] an hour or two" before closing time, Dehne says. Now, he continues, "people I work with don't know where I am all the time, but they know how to reach me--I have e-mail; I have a cell phone; I have voice mail. I don't report all of my activities, and I don't feel guilty about it anymore."

Begun four years ago at Best Buy's suburban Minneapolis campus, ROWE has been so successful that the company created a division, CultureRx, to promote it to other companies. Meanwhile, Best Buy has started rolling out ROWE to the 100,000 employees in its retail stores. Figuring out just how that will work remains to be seen, however, since retail requires time clocks--anathema to the program's operating philosophy.

Reinventing the Workday

ROWE was created by Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler when they were Best Buy employees; both now serve as principals of CultureRx. They share a passion for shaking up the American workplace and replacing the 9-to-5 paradigm with one that emphasizes freedom for employees and results for employers.

In a time when many white-collar Americans complain of being chained to desks for 50 to 70 hours a week and of having too little time for families and hobbies, CultureRx offers a remedy for the prevailing zeitgeist--a prescription that has attracted the attention of national media such as "60 Minutes," National Public Radio, The New York Times and Business Week.

ROWE enables Best Buy employees whose departments participate in it the opportunity to do their work wherever and whenever they wish. They might play tennis in the morning, go windsurfing on a lake one afternoon, take a two-hour lunch or run a couple of days a week, as Dehne does.

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