As I scoured the business and social science literature looking for places where work cultures were shifting out of the stultifying rigidity of a “Mad Men” episode, I came across workplaces implementing a Results-Only Environment, or ROWE, and wanted to know more. Jody Thompson, along with her partner, Cali Ressler, created ROWE at Best Buy headquarters. The two have since gone on to found their own company, Culture RX, that trains managers and workers to work in an entirely new way.

Their website says it best:

Cali & Jody created ROWE based on the belief that the traditional solution of flexible schedules is not the answer to managing life’s many twists and turns. Bottom line? Work sucks. So they’re on a mission to fix it. Today, Cali & Jody are leading a global movement to forever change the way we work and live. (www.gorowe.com)
Here’s an edited transcript of my conversation with Jody.

BFS: Tell me how you see the state of current workplace cultures?

JT: We’re managing the wrong things. People can manage themselves. What we’re not clear on is this: what is the work and how do we measure it? In the last 60 years, we’ve created all these rules about how keep people in line – who’s getting time off, and what’s not fair. In the midst of all this, nobody knows what the heck they’re supposed to be doing. But they know if they put in the time, usually 40 hours, and show up in the right outfit, then they get paid. So we are stuck in Industrial Age thinking and it’s the 21st century.

BFS: What about the push in some workplaces for for flexible work?

JT: Flexibility is the new “F word.” Flexibility is never going to work because managers control it. Our message is NOT flexibility. Our message is RESULTS. And everybody having COMPLETE and UTTER control over every second of their lives.

If you talk about flexibility, you can argue til you’re blue in the face about why some people can have it and others can’t, like a receptionist. A zookeeper. A surgeon. Or you can say, ‘You’ve only been here a year, you can’t have flexibility until you’ve been here here two years. You can make a million subjective reasons why someone can’t be flexible. That’s where you create anxiety, stress, and people feeling resentful and guilty.

They just feel INSANE, because what they’re trying to do is manage their lives and somebody ELSE is giving them the reasons why they can’t do it. Anytime you’re in a system where you have to ask permission, or let somebody know where you are, I’m now going to use a naughty word, you’re f***ed.

BFS: So how does ROWE work?

JT: The basic definition is, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.

We were working with a government agency implementing ROWE in (Minnesota’s) Hennipen County’s Human Services and Public Health Department. For one pilot, we worked with a team of six people. The job of those six people was to make sure the people of Hennipen county who needed a place to sleep, or food, were able to apply for it and get it

When we started ROWE with them, it was like coming into the most bitter group. They were fighting: ‘So and so got to work form home, and I don’t get to work from home.’ They were behind by 1,500 applications. So that meant 1,500 families were struggling and not getting what they needed. But what the six people were worried about was who gets to leave early, who gets to leave late and who gets to work at home. And that’s the problem with flexibility, they don’t focus on what matters. Everyone complained they were overworked. They said they were never going to get their work done unless they had 12 people, double the staff.

We started our training by asking: ‘What is your job?’ They said: ‘Our job is to complete applications.’ That is NOT their job. That is an activity.

I said, ‘Let me understand this. When you go home at night, do you get to eat dinner? D you have health insurance? Do you get to sleep in a bed?’ And they all said, ‘Well, yeah.’ So I said, ‘Your JOB is not completing applications. Your JOB is, when you go home at night, the citizens of Hennipen County have what you have. Your JOB is to make sure that no kid is sleeping on the street.’

It was like they all had this moment of clarity.

In three weeks, they went from being 1,500 applications to 132 behind. And they didn’t do it b/c they were talking about who gets to work from home. We told the manager, ‘You have to stay out of the way. Let them do their thing.’ Now, they never are behind. They’re always caught up. They figured out how to stay open later two nights a week without adding any cost to bottom line.

So many of us are not focused on the altruistic motives for what we’re doing our jobs FOR.

Most people think that work is a place you go. Work isn’t a place you go. It’s something you do. The key is, you have to figure out what the work IS. And once you do that, the key to making ROWE work is Sludge. Or what we call Sludge Eradication.

BFS: Sludge?

JT: People have a belief about what work looks like and when it should happen: people come in early and stay late. Anyone who comes in late, leaves early, takes long lunch or works from home one day a week, they’re counter culture. Anybody doing something else other than what we believe is the RIGHT way to work sets up our whole system to start judging them. SLUDGE is judging other people for how they spend their time.

If I see you leaving the office in the afternoon and say, ‘Where are you going? It’s 3 pm?’ Underneath that, I’m saying, ‘Work should go to at least 5 and you’re leaving early. Why do you get to leave early and go flouncing off? I wish I had a kid and could leave early.’ I doesn’t matter that you worked until midnight the night before. All I see is that you got to leave early.

Even if I think it and don’t say anything, it’s still sludge. I’m still stuck in the old system of believing that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t be doing. So we have to break your brain of that, so your brain doesn’t even have that thought anymore. Do you know how hard that is?

Sludge in the workplace is that dirty, gross, judgmental stuff that we have to systematically uncover and eradicate.

There’s sludge justification. When I ask, ‘It’s 3 o’clock, where are you going?’ And you say, ‘Well, I started working early. I worked late last night …’ That doesn’t eradicate sludge, that just keeps it going. It makes you feel guilty and upset.

There’s sludge anticipation, sending out an email, letting everyone know you’re coming in at 10 am, or, if someone asks, saying, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, have a dentist appointment.’

There’s sludge back, or sludge conspiracy, two people talking about you your behind your back, saying, ‘We’re the good workers. We play by the rules. You don’t.’ It doesn’t matter what kind of work you do, it’s rampant in every single workplace.

There’s also management sludge: ‘Well, you’re here early today.’ Rewarding someone, not for results, but for showing up at a time on the clock that looks like early. Or, ‘Let’s give it up for Jill. She gave up time with her family over Thanksgiving to xyz.’ So now I’m going to have to give up Christmas to show I’m dedicated. That’s the game we’re all playing, to get in a favorable position with the boss. That’s not about results.

BFS: So how do you eradicate sludge?

JT: You have to get people to SEE it. The first thing we do, we have everyone get into a room and we have them sludge each other. We talk about why people sludge, how it feels when you’re the one being sludged, and how it has nothing to do with the good work that you do. We get them to realize that there’s only one thing they need to think about: what is my job, and how do I measure it to show that what I’m doing is actually reaching the desired outcome?

Once people learn NOT to play the sludge game anymore, there’s a certain phrase we teach that’s so powerful it completely changes the dynamic of the workplace: “Is there something you need?”

So, now I’m at work, and at 10 am, you come strolling in. And I say, ‘What a slacker. It’s 10 am and you’re just getting in. I wish I could come in late everyday.’

But you’re in a Results-Only Work Environment, so you smile and say, ‘Good morning, Jody, is there something you need?’

Here’s the beauty of the statement: if I need something from you, I need to just ask you for it, that is respectful and that is human. It’s about the work, not where you were at 8 in the morning. And then I either need to tell you what I need, or I’m a big fat sludger and I need to shut up. I’m not the keeper of you. We’re all here to do a job.

Or they may say, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve been walking by your cube for two hours because I need x,y,z for this noon meeting.’ Well, that’s not your problem. You have voicemail and email, they could have contacted you. It’s the 21st century. Not 1952.

BFS: Sociologists Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen studied ROWE at Best Buy. Their studies found that workers had a greater sense of what they called “schedule control.” They felt less time pressure, less work-life conflict, were less likely to leave the company, which they said would save the company in lower turnover costs, lost productivity and the need to hire and retrain new workers. They also found health benefits – ROWE workers were feeling less anxious and worried, they were sleeping more, and more likely to take care of themselves and get to doctors’ appointments than their counterparts in the traditional workplace culture. The sociologists found that ROWE workers were working more intensely, not working longer hours. Given that, how is ROWE being received by business leaders? (In 2013, new Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, ended ROWE, saying he needed ‘all hands on deck’ in the office to shore up the struggling company.)

JT: We’ve worked with child care workers, businesses, governments, call centers. We’ve been asked to take a rock band ROWE, and even a country. What we found is that some people were too afraid to implement ROWE. They felt like they were losing control at the top of the house. So we do workshops in big organizations and come in and work with, say, 30 people. What WE know is that once ROWE is in and there’s 30 people who get it, it goes viral.

ROWE makes everyone feel like an adult, and empowered to be accountable for what they were hired to do. No results, no job. Now, because I’m free, I need to make sure my boss and I work together to be clear about why I was hired and how I make sure I’m doing my work. If you’re doing your job, it’s not about the time on the clock.

Once people are woken up to what work needs to look like, they become a force, they can show more engagement, more productivity and better …. Results. ROWE is an evolution. The power doesn’t come from the top down, but from the middle out.

Life is too short. People’s lives are at stake.