I am a Sr. Marketing Manager and I telecommuted for a major telecom company for 7 years and loved it. I was told I was more productive than those in the office on numerous occasions. Once people are open to the possibilities, good things can happen! It was wonderful!

However, due to various telecom mergers and acquisitions (and being asked by a non-progressive purchasing company to move from Denver to Louisiana), I went back out into the office environment for a company that was not thrilled about telecommuting. Even though I had a hard wall “office”, the environment was completely unproductive and steeped in negative attitude. I tried to get them to break free of the steriotypical “work day”, but that did not work.

So, I put myself back out there on the market and am now searching for a Denver company that values results above prairie dog cubes and stiffling work environments.

I completely support your efforts!

S

I’m just leaving a massive bureaucracy myself, and my personal opinion is that those silly rules actually develop laziness rather than protect against laziness. People who join mission driven organizations, like Fire Departments, Police agencies, etc, do so to make a difference, but they also tend to join the mother of all bureaucratic systems which are all about creation of rules and rule following. Over time, those motivated, engaged individuals learn that they could do their jobs better, but are rarely allowed to do so, because that would mean going outside of the silly rules box. That’s when burnout sets in, and people find ways to cope with their situation in whatever way possible. Sometimes that manifests itself in appearing like laziness.

Its so simple… hire good people, trust them to do their jobs, and leave them alone to do so. If they don’t, fire them.

My brother-in-law is an EMT, and he, as well as my husband and father-in-law, used to run with a local (volunteer) rescue squad. There were weird issues with the schedule because people were required to take so many shifts a month, and some would sign up for more to go “above and beyond” the bare minimum. Which is all well and good, but that made it tough for people who got to the schedule after them to make their required shifts. Especially people who were still in training as EMTs or ambulance drivers and had only the “observer” slot they could fill.

That´s why I like the firefighter example. It moves the focus away from “working at home” to results (putting out a fire).

Nevertheless the question remains: How does the fire department ensure that there are always enough firefighters around? It might not centrally schedule them anymore. And no one has to ask to be covered, because “covering” means to take over some duty. (But there are no usual duties anymore in ROWE, at least no time/space bound duties; just duties to reach results.)

I´d say ROWE pushes the scheduling decisions to the firefighters themselves. It decentralizes the scheduling. They need to take up responsibility in their decision to leave town for the weekend etc. They might need to talk to each other to check if not too many of them will be unavailable on a particular holyday.

And in the end the firefighters themselves might come up with some form of institutionalization of finding out how the coverage can be kept high enough for certain days.

But that´s perfectly ok, I´d say, because then that is a bottom up development. It springs from necessitiy. It´s purpose is clearly visible. The benefit is obvious. Nobody is wielding “power over” the firefighters. They retain their autonomy within the boundaries of the results to achieve.

So, I´d say, on the outside a ROWE organization might not even look much different from a non-ROWE organization.

But if that´s the case then the reason for it looking like it does is completely different. Whatever rules and customs might exist in a ROWE organisation they exists to help getting results while also (!) catering to the autonomy of the employees. And that´s most important.

-Ralf

JACH- I am a big fan of failing big or failing often (I may have ripped that off from Seth Godin; I’m not sure, but I know he advocates something similar).

Failing sucks, but worrying about it gets us nowhere. Putting everything at stake and having it not go perfectly well (fail big) teaches great lessons (the first being “everything” is almost never at stake). Having a string of misses (fail often) leads to the inevitable hits.

Pop stars are always known for their big singles, but how many songs on their albums never run up the charts?

Thanks again, both. I appreciate the support.