Last week’s Business Week covered Best Buy’s interesting venture about moving beyond flex time. The complete article is here. A 13 minute podcast interview of the author can be found here. Best Buy now allows about 60% of their corporate staff at their Minnesota Corporate Campus to schedule work as they see fit. Called ROWE (results-only work environment), the system focuses on specific metrics to determine each employee’s contribution. Time at the office is not considered as part of the evaluation. Whether the employee chooses to work at home, on the road, or at the corporate campus is up to the employee. A quote from the article: “This is like TiVo for your work.” The article does a decent job of trying to describe the difference between basic flex time and Best Buy’s approach. And why flex time is harder to implement (hint: think culture).
How well would this work in Extension settings? Our OSU Extension Center at Lima is currently allowing specialists to work from virtual settings. This could be their home, car, other offices or Starbucks. So far it seems to be working fairly well. We are completing an internal study of the process and hope to share it later in 2007. My guess is that many Extension offices already use some form of flex time, but could also use virtual settings to increase productivity and employee satisfaction.
It will be useful to look at some of the tech companies as they develop systems to address a “post-geographic” office. The tech companies seem to be on the cutting edge of developing these systems to meet employee needs and reduce turnover. Best Buy hopes to use a similar model with its retail stores next year. That will be an interesting experiment to watch.