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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.
or does it sound like the CEO was basically forced to go along with this idea or it would look like he was a victim of mutiny? I mean he already heads up a company where employee theft or "shrink" as they like to call it is extremely high. Given the chance I bet any employee of Best Buy would gladly stab anyone at the Top just to make a quick buck.
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.
The local best Buy has gotten crappier over the last few years.
They've gone from almost always having what I am looking for to almost never having what I am looking for.
A simple USB mouse? Nope, just wireless and the $70 gamer mice. Off to Staples
A new PC game? Nope, ours never seems to have games on release. Off to Eb Games
A cheap cable? Nope, just a $50 Geek Squad version. Off to Wal-mart for the $10 version
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Employees will have time to chase you into the parking lot in a desparate attempt to get you to agree to that extended warranty. Hell, they might even follow you home, bitches!
I hate rigid schedules. They create traffic jams.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
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
...that little issue when I go in there with my step-dad to get him a laptop and I know more than the guy selling it to us.
1. They need to ensure more than one register is open when there are 20 people on line.
2. They need to ensure that the people they hire for the different departments actually know something about what they are selling. Not what they memorized from the training. Actual KNOWLEDGE.
Living With a Nerd
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.
Good for them; it sounds like it's working out so far, and if the employees like it, then roll with it.
But, at the risk of sounding like one of the old fogeys the article talks about, it's not for me, and for the reasons those old fogeys mention.
a) I work better when at work. I don't like to work at home; one of the nice things about my 5 mile commute is that, if I have to get any significant work done "after hours," I can drive to the office and do it. My focus is better when I don't have my fiancee, my cats, my 360, my Wii, my stereo, my television, etc. around all tempting me to spend time with them, instead. Moreover, I don't want to be available for routine work 24/7 - I'm already "on call" for crises all the time, but it's with the understanding that I'm only to be bothered if it really is a crisis.
b) There is a value to meetings - at least, some of them. We'd all love to completely ditch the useless all staff meetings that are pretty much just a productivity black hole, but some meetings are valuable. In my office, we have one weekly meeting just of the technology team - it's a tight group and a focused meeting. It's on the schedule from 1:00 - 2:00, but we've only actually been in the meeting until 2:00 once since I've been here. We all have pretty specialized jobs, but they all inter-relate. I'm the DBA, for example, and Dave is the storage architect. It's good to touch base on a regular basis to keep up with what's going on outside our fairly narrow areas.
c) I'm not good on the phone. My hearing isn't what it could be, and I spend too much mental power on making sure I'm hearing what the other person is saying to really be processing well. Face to face, I can use rudimentary lip reading and body language to "fill in the gaps" without the mental effort.
This, of course, is just the way I work - for people who don't have my hangups, this is a great system. But I'd end up working somewhere else, most likely.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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
I work at a local newspaper, and we've already got this implemented!
I work as late as necessary, as long as I work 8 hours (starting at 9 AM or earlier). Heck, the day before thanksgiving, I got to work from 9 AM until 12:20 AM Thanksgiving day! YEAH! I even go to SKIP MY LUNCH BREAK! As long as the paper gets done, they don't care how late I work! Well, if the paper is done, they usually want me to leave, or clock out, since they really don't want to pay overtime..
Sarcasm aside, this is great. Wouldn't work in my industry, seeing as how we are usually pretty crunched for time as is.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
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 am one of those mindless drones in a call center, and I approve of this message.
Living With a Nerd
...this is opposed to the old standby "Work All Days Evenly". A new ROWE vs WADE.
FLR
Best Buy has employees?
You mean those blue shirted people who just stand around?
They *work* there? :-o
But what if your customers were using this ROWE system. How would you cope?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
I'm posting this anonymously because I'd rather not have what I'm about to say get back to where I work:
I don't do jack shit at work.
I'm a beginning programmer at my place of business (a facility that's part of a Fortune 500 company). I manage and build small web applications for internal use. I'm given a general time table for when it needs to be done, and pick a date within that time table to have it done by. My projects are done on time, and usually have more useful features than intially requested. But I only work maybe four (on average) of the eight or so hours I have to be at work. The rest of the time is spent fiddling around on Slashdot and other places, while looking behind my back to make sure I'm not being watched.
Personally, I find it to be a complete waste of time. Sure, I could pick up some extra projects, or do some research on the side, or move my due dates up by weeks, but I don't see much of a future with this company (maybe two or three more years, at best), so I have no incentive. I would, however, work harder at work if I knew I wouldn't be there so long.
This is the way I see it: If a person is paid salary, why do they have to be there for exactly 40 hours a week? If they can do all of their work in 20 hours, why force them to stick around? If an employee has more freedom to choose when they come and go, they'll have higher moral and thus better work output because they feel they have more control over their job and life (and they would). If they wanted to take a Friday off to see a kid at their sports game, they wouldn't have to worry about filling out forms or requesting time off- they just make sure their work is done the first four days, and inform people they'll be gone the fifth.
Obviously, this kind of situation wouldn't work for all industries. Sales reps, for instance, would probably need to be in during certain hours so they can work with other companies and customers that still do the 9-5 shtick.
But in this age where information can be shared instantly, where cell phones allow us to be reached almost anywhere and laptops to work from a range of places, why should we be constrained to one desk for a specified set of time if we can be as, if not more, productive without those chains?
I hope this experiment works.
ROWE works best in environments where you have a lot of little tasks with very small overlap (highly parallel in nature). For our group, most projects involve between 10 and 60 hours with about a dozen sub-tasks. Which means that each of us will typically be the only person working on a particular project, but that others can easily step in and finish other sub-tasks when we're behind. We'll also typically be juggling anywhere between 2-4 projects at the same time, in various states of completion.
Our coordinator typically does "leveling" every 1-3 days where we take a quick look at what tasks are due soon, what projects need priority in the queue, and what expected ETAs are. He also sets the final decision on what gets priority and what can be shuffled off to another day.
An example would be my current week where I just finished up a 60-80 hour job. As far as we know, there's nothing else big in the pipeline until after the holidays. So after taking a day or two to recuperate and run errands, I get to put on one of my other hats and work on system administration tasks. I might end up doing another small 8 hour job next week, but I should be able to spend most of my time setting up the new DB and web servers.
We've been doing ROWE-style scheduling for almost 7 years now. Having 100% telecommuters helps in changing the focus from seat-time to result-oriented. Off-hand, I'd say that 25%-33% of our workforce works from offsite at least once a week and about 20% work offsite the majority of the time (or full-time). And I'm constantly working on implementing technologies that allow us that flexibility without giving up security.
Communication tech is pretty critical. Home workers need a dedicated phone number (either dedicated line, distinct ring, or cell phone). Broadband is also a requirement. A corporate chat server (Jabber/XMPP), e-mail server (IMAP, WebMail, and POP3) are needed to allow for instant communication without using the phone or using e-mail for unsynchronized communication. Some workers can make do with dedicated desktop machines at home, others will require laptops, others can simply remote into their work machines.
Another tool that is very useful is some sort of project / task tracking system. There needs to be a way that people working on a project (and mgmt) can see where a project stands. Version control systems (Subversion, etc) are also very important because they decentralize file storage while keeping people in sync.
I don't know that you ultimately save money with telecommuters. It's typically a very large gain for the employee because they're not wasting 30-120 minutes per day in traffic. But if the company needs to buy a laptop every few years, pay for broadband, pay for other communication tools, etc, the cost savings can be marginal. The budget for a remote worker will be somewhere between $200/mo and $500/mo, depending on technical needs. But frankly, I think that's a reasonable price to spend to get a huge morale boost.
(I guess it depends on what you pay for office space and how much wastage time you think there is due to office distractions.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
"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...
Well, with the number of employees at their stores, I think they have enough overlap to allow this for store employees, too.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
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.
Well, don't forget, if you are on 24/7 'call'....make sure and get paid for it. If it involved people with 'beeper time'....you get paid when carrying the beeper even if not working.
That is the price for them having the ability to intrude on your time.
Remember...NEVER work for free.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The company I do programming for has a similar policy. I can start work any time of the day I want as long as I get in the full 16 hours.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
My former employer really needs to read that article. I was originally hired by a small toy manufacturer that had a really cool culture and I also had a really good boss that didn't care if I got in at 9:30 or 10:00 instead of 9:00 sharp so long as the work was done. Then they were bought by a much larger, publicly traded corporation and everything went to hell. The office was moved from downtown Chicago (where most employees lived) to the western suburbs (my commute went from seven minutes to an hour), the starting hour was moved up to 8:00 am (7:00 in the summer) and I was assigned to a boss that followed HR's policies to the letter and would complain if I got in fifteen minutes late two days in a row. HR explicitly stated that everyone (except the execs of course) was required to be in the office at the same time so that we were all working together. No consideration was given to people (like me) who could do their work from anywhere in the world (I was responsible for the administration and development of their B2B commerce website) and who met with other groups in the company very unfrequently. My former boss actually gave a colleague of mine grief because he was coming in late due to going through a divorce and having to meet with his attorney in the mornings.
In the end I think those sorts of policies simply encouraged resentment by employees; it didn't help matters that some employees were already quite upset at having to work for new management. My friend who was going through the divorce had enough and just called in one day and said he wouldn't be coming in anymore. I ended up leaving because I was sick of having to get up at 5:30 am to make it to the office by 7:00 when I could have just done my work from my home office. Why should I keep punishing myself to benefit that sort of company when I can easily get another job that is more employee friendly?
of course the slackers aren't going to produce more. They will simply be fired for not being productive. that's the beauty of a results-based system.
This has been my philosophy for years. I once worked for a company where I did more real work in 6 hours than every other employee did in 2 days. The owner of the company still felt that I was cheating him if I wasn't at work for the whole 8 hours despite my results and productivity. There was never a situation that required me to be there when I wasn't And I had remote access. The owner of the company's response to my productivity was to pile on more work and force me to punch a clock.
I have since had several other similar experiences.
the bottom line is, I'm paid to do a job. what does it matter what hours I keep as long as I'm productive and available?
Corporations are locked into this 9-5 mentality. That has bred the clockwatcher.
Clockwatchers generally keep their jobs because the do the bare minimum.
It's always the productive employees who get shit on. Moving to a results-based system means the clockwatchers will have to do more or get fired. This is a win-win situation.
The early-birds get to come in at the butt-crack of dawn and get a jump on things. while the productive people can walk in at the crack of 10 or 11 and do all their work in 5 or 6 hours and go home. Some employees might even opt to work later if their work isn't critical to business hours.
Now, I'm lucky enough to have my own business. My customers see me on my schedule. It's great.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I worked at a regional hospital chain for 2 years.
.. 8 hours a day. Didn't matter if you worked or not -- you just had to be there.
.. Why? Because I wasn't there. No matter that I started being 65% more productive working FEWER hours..
What really blew was that they expected you in your seat
Some weeks I worked 40 hours. Some weeks I worked closer to 65. Nights, weekends. Anything to get the projects / fixes / whatever done.
Problem was, in my 40 hour week, there were times that I only WORKED 15-20 hours. The rest of the time was walking from place to place, moving candy from a dish in one department to another, playing on the 'net, or just doing nothing at all and trying to keep from falling asleep.
Towards the end, I started coming in when I wanted. I still got ALL my projects finished on time, helped my co-workers on stuff - and only worked 15-20 hours a week.
Boss called me in and fired me
Aah well he was a jerk (still is, from what I hear)..
= Grow a brain...