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Best Buy Institutes Extreme Flex Time
s31523 writes "The company I work at has a flex time policy where basically, you can come in and leave within a window of time, as long as you are in the office during 'core' hours (10am-2pm). Best Buy has gone extreme, they have completely banished traditional views of office hours. Citing a preference for results over time invested, the company has completely done away with schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles." From the article: "Another thing about this experiment: It wasn't imposed from the top down. It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages. The Best Buy chief aims to keep innovating even when something is ostensibly working. '[The 'results-only work environment'] was an idea born and nurtured by a handful of passionate employees,' he says. 'It wasn't created as the result of some edict.'" Sheesh. I work from home and even I have a schedule. Here's hoping it catches on.
Best Buy still sucks.
For some (hopefully most) people, this is ideal. They'll work when they find themselves to be most productive, which in turn, makes the company more productive. However, you'll always get a few individuals who take advantage of such a policy, and in some environments, they spoil it for the rest of us.
From the bottom up? So does this mean the clerks at best buy can come in whenever now? And have been for years? Somehow I think this definition of 'bottom' is ... innaccurate.
Also, some info missing from the summary.. Zonk's schedule follows:
8:00 am-4:00 pm - Bash Sony.
The weird thing to consider is how much people end up working. I've found what when I'm working hard on a project and I approach it without a schedule, I end up working for a few extra hours without even noticing. It means that people keep their morale up while still maybe being willing to work more hours. Basically, this is taking salaried work to a whole new level: they acknowledge that people have responsibilities to maintain and judge them based on whether or not the job is done, rather than whether or not they are in the office at a given time. I say bravo. What will be weird is seeing if they can implement this in retail stores like one of the later paragraphs suggests.
I hate rigid schedules. They create traffic jams.
Leonid S. Knyshov
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ROWE, Results Only Work Environment. A.K.A. "Git-R-Dun". I'd be more efficient if I could leave sooner.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
I can't count how many times I've heard lip-service paid to 'results-only' performance reviews. It's a bunch of crap. Managers will still reward people they like and punish people they don't, regardless of performance. Schedules and 'face-time' will always have a huge impact on performance reviews and rewards, simply because if you work 8pm - 4am and work miracles, nobody will know that you were the one doing everything. For all they know (regardless of any paperwork saying you were responsible), it was the office gnomes that with their magical faerie dust that did all of the work.
Like a lot of things, 'results-only' is great in theory, but almost impossible to implement in practice due to human nature.
I usually work in research and I find this paradigm to be extremely appealing. The 9-5 think in research is complete bull. You don't get more insightful or innovative while being force to sit at your desk staring at a screen
Umm if they had actual knowledge I highly doubt they would be working the floor at a best buy for minimum wage.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Please let me rephrase
Everyone at the C level has been on extreme flex time for year. It's hard to notice your staff isn't working 8 - 6 when you aren't.
This seems ideal for programmers like myself. I've got regular hours now, but in the beginning we had no set hours. That didn't mean less hours--often it meant 12+ hour days, but there was no question about when the time at which the work was done, as long as it was done in a timely manner. I've never experienced extreme flex where hours were not insane for other reasons.
Anyway, it seems like this would work well as long as there are still some deadlines--get that new module coded by the end of the month, and it shouldn't matter that you finished in 3 weeks and took the last week off. Management can consider that last week a reward for effective work. They might decide you can handle more work on the next cycle, which can create an incentive for you to "fill out the month". So, management has to understand that dynamic, and not punish people for efficiency.
On the other side of the equation, workers have to not deploy "filling out" and other obvious means of abuse. It seems like this has a better chance to work well if the employees are incentivised with something other than salary; namely, stock options. Then they are only hurting themselves if they hurt the comnpany, in theory. Of course, we all know that a division of a large corporation can perform well while the company overall performs poorly. That dilutes the stock option incentive, so it seems like incentives for a whole department could help (complete that upgrade in a week, the whole division gets extra pay or options).
In order for it to work well, you need mature, self-directing workers.
You also need workers with output that can be measured. I suspect that there are an awful lot of workers with no real output in our economy, or output that can't be measured (I'm pointing the finger at you, mid-level PHBs). A system like this could weed those guys out! OTOH, you can't apply a system like this to jobs like call-center technicians, floor sales, or even sales managers. A big part of those jobs is simply "being available". The fact that a sales rep hasn't taken a call or helped a customer for a few hours doesn't mean he wasn't doing his job--there was just no input he could act on to creat output.
I've worked in this kind of environment for about five years. It started during my PhD, and then continued when I decided that I would stay within academia. The most important thing is how you measure output; measuring time in the office is a shitty metric that doesn't gain you anything. The article sounds as if Best Buy have this angle nailed, so they can measure productivity even if their staff are flitting in and out. In academia it's easy - you keep an eye on how many papers someone delivers.
Meetings can be tricky, but it comes down to people finding spots in their calendars that overlap. This is harder when person A tends to work 8-4 and person B tends to work 5-12 but people just make allowances and come in early / late. Community isn't such an issue. When people are going through a patch of working with each other their daily schedules tends to synchronise, and then destabilise again afterwards. There is plenty of email / IM for people to set things up, and the habit of expecting an instant response is easy to break. It does take more personal disciple and timekeeping to make it work - but the rewards are worth it.
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okay, first of all, i am all for telecommuting. if you need an office, fine go to the office, if you don't.. save the company a dollar or two and stay at home. second, meetings? they're mandatory. if you want everyone at a meeting at 8am, give 24 hours notice and specify if they have to be present or merely on the phone (exceptions expected, don't bitch if it happens.. you get to work from home, better than 90% of the world). third, make sure everyone is reachable between certain hours. you will have a happy workforce. you will also have an obedient taskforce, since a job where you can telecommute is rare and high in demand and i'm sure a telecommuter would not want to give up his/her job to return to a 8-5 cubicle hell position.
one of my previous jobs were like this (fortune 100 company) and productivity was high. as my company grows larger i plan on implementing the same policy and save money in the process.
"One member of a geek squad was insulted when I said that the person who does a diagnostic should be qualified to do one -- not someone who just came in from the parking lot from collecting carriages."
I work in the warehouse for an electronics retail store, and I'm the one who "collects carriages." I consider myself a geek and do quite well with repairing computers; I simply prefer not to deal with people who have no respect for other human beings. I'd rather push carts than walk in circles trying to convince a customer I know what I'm talking about. I've turned down numerous sales position offers for precisely this reason.
Secondly, if you know so much about computers, why are you visiting the Geek Squad to begin with?
Retail/sales positions are terrible. Not because of management or low pay, but because of rude, inconsiderate and impatient customers. Each day, countless customers approach me--a non-sales employee--asking questions about products in whichever department I happen to be working in at the time (or even walking through while carrying a large, heavy box of some sort.) Nine times out of ten they immediately become visibly irritated when I politely explain that I'm going to find a sales associate to assist them. Sometimes I help them, such as with headphones, CD-Rs, etc. but when someone says "I want to buy a computer" I find the appropriate employee to help them because I have other tasks at hand... and it's not my job to begin with.
Sure, some (arguably many) sales associates are incompetent morons, but I still find it difficult to grasp that customers don't realize it's nearly impossible to know everything about every product in a large department store such as Best Buy. It's difficult enough knowing everything about a single department, much less the entire store. Go ahead and try learning everything there is to know about the 75+ different televisions sold at a given Best Buy location, including remembering the subtle differences between models of the same size and brand. Keep in mind that many of the televisions sold are not on display and you'll probably never see anything but the nearly generic brown boxes they are in, so visual cues are almost useless. There are no cheat-sheets or sales manuals listing the products in a department, and there are few brochures, if any. The same method applies to computers, car audio, etc. I don't envy anyone in a sales position at a retail electronics store.
My solution would be to set "On Call Hours" and work from home. Or carry a good cell phone and try not to leave serviced areas. Someone has a problem, they call, and if you can't solve it over the phone, you go. You're done, you go back to what you were doing, or the next incident. Only problem is if you're on the way home with groceries...
If your staff can do their weekly work in 20 hours a week, you are irresonsibly under-utilizing them and don't understand the value of your employees.
As a matter of professional integrity, you should take those 20 extra hours and do more projects, produce more, do better documentation, do things people remember. You should deliver your projects earlier, and do more work than those around you.
Why, even if you aren't staying there? It's a small world. You never know when your current supervisor/manager/whatever, or another employee is someday the person on the other end of an interview, or in a position to recommend hiring at a nother job. Respect is everything.
The kind of situation you describe works fine when people are driven and responsible; it falls apart when poeple just want ot do the bare mimimum they are asked, then forget about work. The occasional break because work was completed ahead of schedule is fine.. but if everyone is only working at half capacity, you have either a motivational problem, a management problem, or both.
There are no cheat-sheets or sales manuals listing the products in a department, and there are few brochures, if any. ...and the people with the initiative to dig out the manuals from the floor-display boxes or download them from the manufacturer's website to read them on their lunch break aren't willing to work for the wages Best Buy offers.
But how hard would it be for them to offer bonuses, incremental pay raises, or free loot for employees who passed some basic knowledge-assessment tests?
"Take the High-Definition Assessment Test, Earn $100"
"Learn the Difference Between Macs and PCs, Get a 25 cents / hour raise"
I could go on and on, but the point is, it's not hard to offer incentives for your employees to learn. They're just too cheap to do it.