Work when you want

Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles, staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.”

That line from the 1999 movie “Office Space” prompted a mass outcry of “Hell, yeah!” from corporate drones the world over. But its message of a “do what you want, when you want” revolution was just a crazy pipe dream. Right?

Not if you ask Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the authors of a new book called “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.” The Minneapolis consultants are the pioneers behind the “results-only work environment” (ROWE for short), a concept as simple as it is bold. Its premise is this: Forcing people to adhere to a set schedule and equating productivity with hours logged in the workplace is an outdated practice that leads to wasted time and unhappy workers.

So let them do what they want, when and where they want - and everybody wins.

In a ROWE, “you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission or tell anyone where you’re going. You just do it. As long as your work gets done - as long as you get results - then your life is your own.”

No more being treated like a disobedient child by your boss. No more sitting through pointless meetings just to put in “face time,” and watching people whose chief talent is looking busy rise through the ranks. No more working at your office if you’d rather be working from home - or, for that matter, from a box seat at Yankee Stadium.

“Every day, people go to work and waste their time, their companies’ time, and their lives in a system based on assumptions - about how work gets done and what work looks like - that don’t apply in today’s global, 24/7 economy,” they write.

ROWE might be dismissed as the crackpot vision of utopians who’ve inhaled too much toner dust from theoffice printer, except for one thing: It appears to work. When the Minneapolis-based chain Best Buy adopted the practice, not only did workers applaud, but productivity spiked and turnover plummeted.

Ressler, 31, and Thompson, 50, started developing ROWE while working at Best Buy seven years ago. Hoping to make the company more worker-friendly, Best Buy’s leaders surveyed workers to ask what they wanted, and the resounding answer was that they wanted to be trusted to do their jobs. So the two were charged with creating a flexible-schedule program, which started as a pilot, then grew in size and scope when it proved a success. (Today, some 4,000 employees at Best Buy work in a ROWE.)