Results only please

Yesterday, I bought Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive. I was inspired to read his work after watching the following video about why money is a poor motivator in the work place.

The whole book was an excellent read, but what really grabbed my attention is the concept of the Results-only Work Environment (ROWE).

Let’s compare and contrast:

Typical office workplace:

• Must be present during “core business hours”.
• Must fill in time sheets to record all work activities – sometimes in excruciating detail.
• Must attend all meetings – even if they will not be useful to your work in anyway.
• Socializing with other employees is not encouraged except for company sponsored “team building” exercises.
• Managerial “babysitters” whose purpose seems to be ensuring you’re there and working.
• Personal or professional development is encouraged so long as you do it outside of work hours.
• Flex-time is available, but it’s not really that flexible. You must still work a 40 hour week and account for all your time.
• Yearly evaluations from people you don’t work with on a daily basis to set meaningless, buzzword filled goals.

ROWE workplace:

• Must get the work done and it must be good quality – when and where you do it doesn’t matter.
• Meetings are for collaborating on or discussing something – no meetings just for the sake of having one.
• Employees can do great work on their own terms.
• Pays employees fairly so they can a) take care of themselves and their families properly without a lot of stress and b) stop worrying about who’s making what and get on with creating something great.

I know which model I prefer.

Does it work for all businesses – yes. Say you have a retail store, it will be open during what is considered “core business hours” generally speaking. It will also likely provide a service or product – and you can still let your employees direct themselves. People who aren’t comfortable on the cash register can work the floor and help people. Employees with a creative eye can set up enticing displays, the diplomats among them can deal with unhappy or difficult customers. And of course, money won’t be an issue with them at work, because you pay them fairly.

I wonder though if the old and stale model is still around because we keep dressing it up with fancy concepts. For instance, let’s look at software companies that use an Agile development process. Agile is meant to stop treating software development like a car-factory (the waterfall method) and let self-directed, cross-functional teams build software in short cycles. This allows for better collaboration and visibility and when done correctly, you have a small piece of working software that could potentially be released to a customer for immediate feedback.

Agile is a fantastic concept and a great environment to work in when done right; otherwise, it’s simply another buzzword used to make the company sound innovative and interesting to people who don’t work there. I have worked at such places – and after the initial excitement of forward momentum, there comes a screeching halt and a feeling of confused betrayal. It seemed like we were moving forward, things were changing, the old ways were being dismantled so new growth and ideas could flourish. But really, it was just a new coat of paint on the same old tired structure. Like lipstick on a pig is the phrase that comes to mind.

When something that should have been great turns out to be riddled with problems and mediocre at best  – people lose heart, become unhappy, demotivated and even angry. This is when people spend their lunch hours surfing Workopolis and cleaning up their resume. This is where employee turnover happens.

Daniel Pink points out that as children we are self-directed, curious and will work at something just for pleasure – but we lose this once we start school or working and we start doing things only because we have to and for the dubious reward of a gold star or a cash bonus at work. We become uninspired people merely collecting  rewards we won’t enjoy.

My goal is to get back to that curious and motivated state. I know I can’t be five again, but I wonder what things I might think up if I just explored what was around me, read more, wrote more and rather than feeling humiliated by my failures, used them as new opportunities.

We need to free ourselves from these schedules and time-sheets and silly carrot-and-stick systems and just engage with the work we’re doing – no matter what that work is. We need time and space to create new ideas and try new things – and this time and freedom could lead to truly innovative ideas that advance our thinking, our way of working and the work itself.

I’ve read all these concepts before and thought “What cheesy, new-agey sounding crap this all is.” But I was wrong to think that – not wrong because I know for a fact this approach won’t work for me, but wrong because I’ve never bothered to try it before.

That changes now.