Why Work Sucks (and how to fix it)...
Google "how to look busy at work" (without really working) and the number and variety of hits will surprise you, or maybe not. It's no secret to a lot of corporate employees that they really don't have enough to keep them truly busy and engaged during the work day.
Visit the site Read At Work, you'll find a faux Microsoft desktop and books, short stories, articles, presented in PowerPoint presentations so you can read on the job. Funny? Funnier still is that it's presented by the New Zealand Book Council, not some work hack who is spreading the word to other slackers.
Parkinson's Law states that the "work expands to fill the time available for its completion", meaning that if you have a project and you are given five days to complete it, it will take those five days. But if you are given only 24 hours, you will likely get it done in that time frame. Thus, we probably are working at our cubicle jobs, but not as effectively as possible.
In step Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, HR consultants and the authors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix it. Former Best Buy consultants, they've developed an organizational style called ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) which is used successfully at Best Buy's corporate offices. Cali and Jody contend that the workplace is broken, that we are wasting much of our time (and, thus, our lives) sitting in an office place for a predetermined 8+ hours daily.
Instead they propose, like Daniel H. Pink (Free Agent Nation), that you don't owe your employer your time, you owe them results. At Best Buy, ROWE employees have no fixed schedules, are only in the office when they have to be or want to be and are reviewed based on work results and not how busy they look or late they stay. Essentially, you are a corporate "free-agent" with full benefits and predictable pay.
Best Buy reports that productivity has risen approximately 35 per cent and voluntary turnover has dropped by as much as 90 per cent in certain divisions. They are poised to try ROWE at the retail level next. In a recent teleseminar, Cali and Jody acknowledge that this is Phase 1 of ROWE and Phase 2 will investigate how ALL workers including front-desk receptionists, human resources generalists and other direct service positions can benefit from ROWE. In the meantime, the concept has taken the business world by storm.
With fuel costs prodding businesses to consider more work place flexibility, this could be a prime moment for ROWE type thinking to infiltrate the old school way of thinking about work. Jody Thompson sums it up this way: "Basically, we're rewiring people's brains, getting rid of an old belief system from the 1950s that is no longer relevant to the technologically advanced business world we have now. We want people to stop thinking of work as someplace you go to, five days a week from 8 to 5, and start thinking of work as something you do."
Follow Jorbb on Twitter and Facebook.
Visit the site Read At Work, you'll find a faux Microsoft desktop and books, short stories, articles, presented in PowerPoint presentations so you can read on the job. Funny? Funnier still is that it's presented by the New Zealand Book Council, not some work hack who is spreading the word to other slackers.
Parkinson's Law states that the "work expands to fill the time available for its completion", meaning that if you have a project and you are given five days to complete it, it will take those five days. But if you are given only 24 hours, you will likely get it done in that time frame. Thus, we probably are working at our cubicle jobs, but not as effectively as possible.
In step Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, HR consultants and the authors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix it. Former Best Buy consultants, they've developed an organizational style called ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) which is used successfully at Best Buy's corporate offices. Cali and Jody contend that the workplace is broken, that we are wasting much of our time (and, thus, our lives) sitting in an office place for a predetermined 8+ hours daily.
Instead they propose, like Daniel H. Pink (Free Agent Nation), that you don't owe your employer your time, you owe them results. At Best Buy, ROWE employees have no fixed schedules, are only in the office when they have to be or want to be and are reviewed based on work results and not how busy they look or late they stay. Essentially, you are a corporate "free-agent" with full benefits and predictable pay.
Best Buy reports that productivity has risen approximately 35 per cent and voluntary turnover has dropped by as much as 90 per cent in certain divisions. They are poised to try ROWE at the retail level next. In a recent teleseminar, Cali and Jody acknowledge that this is Phase 1 of ROWE and Phase 2 will investigate how ALL workers including front-desk receptionists, human resources generalists and other direct service positions can benefit from ROWE. In the meantime, the concept has taken the business world by storm.
With fuel costs prodding businesses to consider more work place flexibility, this could be a prime moment for ROWE type thinking to infiltrate the old school way of thinking about work. Jody Thompson sums it up this way: "Basically, we're rewiring people's brains, getting rid of an old belief system from the 1950s that is no longer relevant to the technologically advanced business world we have now. We want people to stop thinking of work as someplace you go to, five days a week from 8 to 5, and start thinking of work as something you do."
Follow Jorbb on Twitter and Facebook.
Labels: productivity, web 2.0
posted by Jorbb @ 11:02 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home