Girl Scouts Gone ROWE!

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Reprinted from Jessica’s “The Practical Business Radical” column in The Business Press

When the economy falters, it is time for companies to get serious. Employees need to focus – to not waste time on any fun, non-work related activities. Every minute of the day is important to the company’s bottom line. If the company is going to survive the downturn in the economy, everyone’s behavior needs to reflect the gravity of the situation.

This advice sounds good in all ways except one: it is wrong. While it is true that during an economic downturn companies need to pay more attention to their bottom lines, companies who choose to pay that attention by getting more serious and somber are actually doing themselves a disservice. During difficult financial times, life becomes more stressful for just about everyone, both in their work lives and in their personal lives. Making work less fun when the stress level is already high is like turning up the heat on a pressure cooker. The result can be a volatile mix that erodes the foundation a company needs to be successful.

What if, instead, companies added more fun to their workplaces? What if they held parades, gave silly awards, dressed up on occasion, had karaoke contests, had themed potluck lunches, watched a movie together during work hours, or had office Olympics? All of this may sound like goofing off. It may seem that instead of helping employees focus on work, it is encouraging them to waste time on other activities. It may seem counterintuitive to some people in management positions, but there is evidence that fun and success have a strong connection in the workplace.

In their book, The Levity Effect, authors Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher lay down the facts that connect company success to levity in the workplace. Levity, to the authors, is not about being silly or distracting, but about being light and having a sense of humor. When they interviewed the head of the annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” survey published in Fortune magazine, they discovered that there was a direct correlation between strong positive company cultures and strong financial returns. In addition, they found that fun at work can have a positive impact on recruitment and retention, employee creativity, and a number of other key factors in company success.

Somehow, as employees, we know those facts already, but as soon as we get promoted to a managerial position, we lose that natural sense. We knew as an employee that we liked work more when we were having fun. That having fun made us more productive and creative and made us feel more loyal to and engaged with our company. As soon as our hats switch from “employee” to “boss” we often start reverting to sayings in the unwritten rules of management: You have a serious job to do and it therefore should be taken seriously. If you are having too much fun, then you must not be working. These statements on the surface may sound correct, but when you look back to when you felt most motivated or productive as an employee, it was usually when work was also fun.

Adding fun to work gives employees the sense that work is adding more to their lives than just a paycheck, which leads to higher levels of employee engagement. In the best situation, employees are inspired to work hard and deliver on their results because they truly love the company they work for. It is hard to imagine that level of love and loyalty being present in a company that discourages fun.

There is so much to say about the connection between success and fun that it filled up a whole book (The Levity Effect) and will be the focus of continued discussion in this column. Adding levity to the workplace doesn’t require that you be a stand-up comedian or that you have a lifelong supply of great one-liners. It starts with a ready smile and creating a work environment where laughter and lightness are encouraged. As Hal Rosenbluth, CEO of Rosenbluth International (the nation’s largest travel services company) says in The Levity Effect: “I know our company is doing well when I walk around and hear people laughing. The enjoyment translates into performance.”

- Submitted by Jessica

January 28th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Reprinted from Jessica’s “The Practical Business Radical” column in The Business Press

Looking back over the columns I have written in the past few months, a reader could get the impression that I put the majority of responsibility for productivity, profits, and overall company success on the shoulders of the people who manage the company. This impression is, in fact, largely accurate. I am very much pro-employee. Not only is being pro-employee the humane way to conduct business, but there is also a compelling business case for creating and maintaining a work environment that leads to happy, engaged employees: increased productivity, innovation, and profits, to name a few. I expect a lot of management (which in my case also means that I expect a lot of myself), but that does not mean that I do not have any expectations of employees.

My first expectation is that employees understand that simply showing up is not enough. If showing up were equivalent to a grade in school, it would be an F. No company is going to perform well if it gives employees too much credit for simply being there. Especially in knowledge-worker based work environments, even showing up on time is not necessarily a big cause for celebration. Employee A could always be the first one in the building and the last one to leave, but provide awful customer service and deliver lackluster work. Employee B could come and go with less consistency, but provide outstanding service and incredible work. In many companies, it would be Employee A who would get rewarded, while Employee B might be chastised for not being on time. Showing up is not what employees should get credit for. The bigger question for employees is: what are they actually doing when they are at work and how well are they doing it?

If just showing up equates to an F, then doing the bare minimum level of work would be a C. Companies that employ a lot of “C” level employees are going to gravitate more towards mediocrity than excellence. Whether for-profit or non-profit, to be successful companies consistently need to innovate and find ways to do more with less. This requires that employees give more than an average amount of energy, creativity, and passion to a job. I expect the employees that work for our company to treat their job as more than “just a job”. If they can not get excited about the work they do, then there is no reason for them to work for us.

At my company, we take those basic expectations of employees a step further – twelve steps further in fact. As our organizational culture evolved over the past couple of years, it became clear that we were developing a strong value system around which our employees naturally rallied. Taking a cue from Zappos.com, we decided that we needed to formalize those values and write them down. We asked our employees for input on our core values and using the Zappos.com core values as inspiration, we came up with a list of 12 core values that all employees (management included) are expected to live by.

We expect every employee to: Deliver “WOW!” Through Service; Create Fun and a little Wackiness; Drive and Embrace Change; Be Creative, Open-Minded, and Adventurous; Be Passionate and Determined; Be Curious and Motivated to Learn; Add an Ounce of Sparkle to Everything; Build Open and Honest Relationships; Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit; Do More with Less; Be Generous; and Be Humble.

To demonstrate our commitment to our core values, we’ve now integrated them into our hiring and interviewing processes, our employee management and annual review processes, and our daily work. Every employee, from the receptionist to the CEO, is expected to follow those same twelve values. Like anyone trying to live and work by a set of guidelines, we are not always perfect at it, but it gives us something to strive for and align around. At least we know that we do not settle for just showing up.

- Submitted by Jessica

January 21st, 2010 | Tags: business, CEO, core values, employee, expectations, Results-Only Work Environment, ROWE | Category: Benefits of ROWE | Leave a comment

Reprinted from Jessica’s “The Practical Business Radical” column in The Business Press

Every weekday morning, hundreds of thousands of people around the country are doing the same thing. As they sit in their cars, running thirty minutes late for work because their five year-old threw up on their shoes five minutes before they left, they start thinking. Not thinking about what they have to do that day or what they hope to accomplish over the next few months at work, but about what excuse they are going to give their boss for being thirty minutes late.

The story about their kid throwing up on their shoes does not seem acceptable. They run down the list of socially acceptable excuses. Flat tire? No, they used that excuse last week. Accident on the freeway? No, the boss drives the same route and is obsessed with traffic reports. Stayed up until three o’clock in the morning working on a great new idea for growing sales by 50%? No, that does not work either. The boss only cares about whether you are on time or not. The fact that you stayed up until three am working is your problem.

What a great way to run a business. Force grown-up employees waste hours of time coming up with “dog ate my homework” type excuses because corporate America can not figure out a better way to measure an individual’s contributions to the company beyond how many hours their butts are in their seats.

The fact that wasting time creating acceptable excuses is okay but being thirty minutes late is not says something about what a company values. Forcing employees to create excuses also does not make any sense as a business practice. It wastes time. All that time spent in the car coming up with the right excuse could have been spent thinking about something important.

Excuse creation also happens to create tremendous stress. First coming up with an excuse, then worrying about whether you are actually going to need it or not, then spending the whole day wondering whether your boss actually bought the excuse, then wondering if when you boss gives you a particularly tough assignment whether it is punishment for your lateness that in the end was ineffectively covered up by a poorly chosen excuse that your boss did not buy. We waste time and energy with all of that (instead of actually getting work done) just because society has decided to collectively pretend that during working hours no one has any family drama, no personal crises, and no kids throwing up on their shoes.

You might be thinking to yourself: “but there are lots of jobs where being on time matters.” You are right. If you are an airline pilot, the passengers would likely get upset if you did not show up until an hour after their flight was supposed to leave. If a worker on an assembly line is running thirty minutes behind, it can cause problems while the manager scrambles to find someone to fill in while they wait. The same issues are not there however for most knowledge-based jobs. Most of the time nothing horrible is going to happen if you are late. If the only thing that is expecting you is your cubicle, then what is the rush?

Instead of punishing employees for having their personal lives creep into their work lives, companies should find ways to make it easier for employees to manage life and work in one seamless stream. Even in the cases of the assembly line worker or the airline pilot, what if companies figured out how to help their employees handle life’s challenges, instead making them feel guilty and stressed?

This is not about disrespecting other people’s time by never showing up when you are supposed to. It is about changing the structure of work from a focus on time as the most significant measure of an employee’s contribution, to a focus on what actually matters: whether an employee is contributing to the success of the business through the results they deliver. It is about “my kid threw up on my shoes” no longer being needed as an excuse because no one cares if you are 30 minutes late as long as you are still getting your work done. It is time for a paradigm shift away from employees being forced to waste time on excuses. Don’t they have more important things to do?

- Submitted by Jessica

December 17th, 2009 | Tags: business practices, excuses, late for work, Results-Only Work Environment, ROWE | Category: ROWE Basics, Why We Need ROWE | Leave a comment

Reprinted from Jessica’s column “The Practical Business Radical” in The Business Press

Drop the words “flexwork” or “telecommuting” into any conversation and all of a sudden the person listening to you has strange visions of an office gone awry: cubicles gathering dust. Crickets chirping in empty hallways. Employees passing each other like ships in a foggy night. Somehow it is assumed that when you change the standard world order of work, the entire workplace assumes a position in an alternative universe.

After having heard about our switch to a results-only work environment (ROWE), a colleague of mine from another company came to visit our offices. She told me later that she was surprised to find staff dressed in normal clothes (she had somehow expected everyone to be wearing pajamas and fuzzy slippers). She was surprised to see cars in the parking lot. She was surprised to find cubicles, offices, and conference rooms buzzing with activity. Instead of broken, malfunctioning teams, she saw staff laughing and working together with an amazing level of cohesiveness.

It may sound counterintuitive, but giving employees the opportunity to control their time and work outside the office whenever they want actually improves teamwork. In observing our ROWE, it appears that this phenomenon has a number of explanations. On the most fundamental level, because an employee’s performance in a ROWE is based on their ability to achieve their results, they have to successfully work with other members of their team to achieve those results.

In addition, when you build a work environment where all employees are treated equally and all employees are trusted, you also start looking differently at how teams are constructed in the first place. Since switching to ROWE, our teams are increasingly made up of multiple levels of staff (i.e. director, administrative assistant, membership staff) and have less of a feeling of hierarchy because everyone has the same basic rights. Directors, for instance, are not the only ones with the privilege to work outside the office. This creates a truer sense of team because all members feel that they are on a more level playing field.

ROWE also requires increased communication among staff of all levels and in all departments. Since no one can necessarily count on being able to walk down the hall between 8 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. (the hours our building is physically open) and find who they need, staff get used to communicating with each other in advance and planning meetings with a true purpose and directive. Staff let each other know when they will be in the office and when they will not, providing alternative methods for contact, such as a cell phone number for text messaging or phone calls. Since switching to ROWE, it is not uncommon for me to be on the phone with one of our staff at 11 pm on a Sunday night or text messaging with them on a Saturday morning because that is when it is most convenient for both of us to connect. Communication in general feels much more personal, directed and purposeful.

Finally, our company’s sense of team has been heightened through the cross- training we now undertake as a key part of our results-only work environment to ensure that we can provide high-quality customer service no matter who is available. By ensuring that we have staff throughout the office cross-trained in key functions, there is a much greater sense of everyone working toward the same goal and understanding what everyone else does. Our customers were surprised a few weeks ago to see me standing behind the counter in our retail shop ringing up their purchases and answering their questions about merchandise. In our organization there is no such thing as being too high up to do a job – we all work together to make sure that our customers are being served.

If you are having trouble building cohesive teams in your workplace, do not waste your money on expensive team building experts. Trust falls and ropes courses will not magically make happy teams appear if there are still fundamental differences in how different levels of employees are trusted and in how employees view their role as part of the organization’s overall team. Instead, put your assumptions aside and do something counterintuitive. What assumptions about work will you challenge?

- Submitted by Jessica

December 10th, 2009 | Tags: flexwork, Girl Scouts, Results-Only Work Environment, ROWE, team building, teamwork, telecommuting | Category: Benefits of ROWE, Girl Scouts Gone ROWE, ROWE Basics, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Reprinted from Jessica’s “The Practical Business Radical” column in The Business Press

What do my previous columns about trust, the lowest common denominator phenomenon and sacred cows have in common? All three are excuses that companies turn to in an attempt to reason their way out of what they see as risky innovation. Maintaining the status quo is much more comfortable than change. Believing that given the opportunity, employees will do bad instead of good (lack of trust), believing that one bad outcome warrants rule-writing overkill (the lowest common denominator phenomenon) and believing that the best way to do something is the way you’ve always done it (sacred cows), are all surefire ways to keep your business from achieving its potential. These are the “yeah, buts” we use to talk ourselves out of progress.

We all get bogged down by “yeah, but.” Saying “yeah, but” gives us a way out. It gives us an excuse for not taking action and for not taking any risks. Putting off decision making and risk taking seems much safer than venturing out into the unknown. And yet stopping progress because of “yeah, but” is the most unsafe thing to do.

Many people find the concept of Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) radical. The idea of allowing employees to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done, seems to go against everything they’ve ever learned about how a business is supposed to be managed. For someone hearing about ROWE for the first time, it is almost impossible to listen without starting a mental list of “yeah, buts” in their heads.

What is the most common “yeah, but” reaction? Most people ask: “How will I know if people are getting their work done?” This concern is founded on the fact that most of us are trained to believe that if we see someone sitting at a desk, they are most likely working. Most non-ROWE business environments judge how much work is being done largely on how much time a person is in the office – showing up early and leaving late must mean that someone is a better employee. These superficial judgments in fact mean nothing. Being physically present doesn’t actually mean that you are doing anything of value. In a ROWE, managers know if employees are doing their jobs because they have a comprehensive list of date-driven measureable results that need to be accomplished. This is much better way of judging whether work is being done than simply looking at the clock.

Another common reaction is “yeah, but won’t people take advantage of the freedom they are given?” Of course people could try to take advantage of a system that puts control of time in their hands, and someone inevitably will. However, those people who take advantage of the system most likely won’t deliver any results, and therefore won’t last very long as employees.

What’s my favorite “yeah, but” about ROWE? Six months ago, while I was explaining ROWE to another non-profit CEO, before I could even finish she shot back at me with this comment: “Yeah, but I actually need my people to work.” This is my favorite “yeah, but” because it shows such a lack of fundamental understanding of what makes employees want to perform well for the company they work for. Yes, you can rule with an iron fist – strict hours, no use of social media while at work, no extended lunch breaks – but you will most likely have an unhappy, unproductive workforce who does little beyond what is required for them to keep their jobs. Give employees control of their time and they will not only do the minimum work required, they will do more. Feeling that their organization trusts them and believes in their value encourages employees to invest more energy and creative thinking into the business.

You can find a “yeah, but” as a counterpoint to every progressive idea that’s ever been dreamed up. Questioning innovation isn’t a bad thing if it drives you to more thorough conviction that the risk you are about to take is going to be worth it. Just don’t get sucked into the “yeah, but” black hole and stay there.

Jessica H. Lawrence is the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, a non-profit serving 15,000 girls and 5,000 adult volunteers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. She can be reached at jlawrence@gssgc.org.

- Submitted by Jessica

December 3rd, 2009 | Tags: Business Press, Girl Scouts, Results-Only Work Environment, ROWE | Category: ROWE Basics, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Reprinted from Jessica’s “The Practical Business Radical” column in The Business Press

Everyday, companies around the country fall into a trap. Instead of setting policies and procedures that reflect a high level of trust in their employees, they settle for something less. Policies and procedures are built around the minority of employees who can not be trusted, instead of being built around the majority of employees who can. This is the phenomenon of the lowest common denominator.

All companies at some point fall prey to the lowest common denominator trap: A handful of employees dress inappropriately, so a strict dress code is put in place. One employee takes advantage of a liberal paid time off policy, so the policy is made more restrictive. One incident of a soda being spilled on a computer keyboard, and now all food and beverages are banned from all workstations. One person sends an inappropriate e-mail to a group of customers, and now no one is allowed to send e-mails to customers without approval from the communications department or the CEO first.

Companies fall into the trap of the lowest common denominator because it is the easy way out. Making policies more strict and procedures less flexible makes the people in charge feel better because something concrete has been done and they’ve freed themselves from any potential blame in future incidents. This is a good thing when you are talking about something like preventing another Enron. Most of the time though, the issues are not on the scale of Enron and the impact of catering to the lowest common denominator has a significantly more negative effect than if nothing were done at all.

Why is the lowest common denominator trap bad for companies? Because it kills everything vital to keeping a company alive: employee engagement, empowerment, creativity, innovation, motivation, and happiness. If employees know that a failure is likely to lead to reprimand and a more restrictive policy, then they will not take any risks. If an employee knows that being creative comes with a high likelihood of losing all opportunities to be creative in the future, then innovation will not even be attempted. If a company forces its best employees to follow policies and procedures geared toward its worst employees, the great employees will either come down to the level of policy that has been created or simply leave.

Companies who avoid the lowest common denominator trap end up on lists of the best companies to work for and are some of the most successful companies in the world. Google actively encourages its engineers to spend twenty percent of their time experimenting with company-related projects that intrigue them, even if they are outside of their normal scope of work. Gmail, Google News, and a number of other innovations at Google were born out of that “twenty percent time”.

Zappos.com, another company on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For 2009” list, empowers their customer service representatives by allowing them to manage calls from customers without scripts or maximum call times. The representatives can also make decisions about upgrading to overnight shipping, matching a competitors’ price, or even sending flowers to a customer who just lost a loved one without running it by their supervisors first. The amazing level of employee empowerment at Zappos.com does make a difference. With Zappos.com recently reaching one billion dollars in annual sales (and having seen it for myself recently at Zappos.com headquarters in Las Vegas), it is clear how trusting employees creates a more engaged, happy, and effective workforce.

At my own organization, the level of trust we have in our employees dramatically increased a year ago when we empowered them to have control of their time in a Results-Only Work Environment. Giving employees the opportunity to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done, was a leap of faith. People outside of our organization were skeptical and assumed our trust would be taken advantage of. Not only have our employees proven the skeptics wrong, but they have become more engaged, productive, innovative, and happy as a result.

The next time you find yourself teetering on the edge, ready to fall into the lowest common denominator trap, stop. Instead of lowering the bar, raise it. Treat employees as trustworthy, hardworking, intelligent human beings and they will more often then not live up to your expectations. Those who don’t are probably not the type of people you want working at your company anyway.

Jessica H. Lawrence is the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, a non-profit serving 15,000 girls and 5,000 adult volunteers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. She can be reached at jlawrence@gssgc.org.

- Submitted by Jessica

November 26th, 2009 | Tags: business, Girl Scouts, Google, innovation, ROWE, Zappos | Category: Girl Scouts Gone ROWE, ROWE Basics, Why We Need ROWE | Comments (2)

Reprinted from Jessica’s “The Practical Business Radical” column in The Business Press

Businesses are havens for abstract rules of trust: Only select employees get keys to the front door. Only employees of a certain rank are given the option of having a laptop so that they can work from home. These rules tell an employee everything they need to know about who a company trusts and who it doesn’t. All too often the line that divides the two groups cuts across the pay scale, with the employees on the higher end of the scale being trusted more than those on the lower end. Wherever that unofficial line of trust is, employees can see it and feel it as if it were a bright red line painted straight through the office.

When our organization first looked at creating a work environment that is anchored by trust, we had no idea how much we would need to change. Prior to starting our current Results-Only Work Environment, we had created a telecommuting policy that we were extremely proud of. For the first time in our organization’s history, we were going to allow employees to work from home. Employees were required to submit a form asking for permission to work from home on a certain day and had to sign off that they understood the rules: they couldn’t work from home more than one day per week; if they missed their telecommuting day for any reason they had to get special permission to make it up on a different day; and they were only permitted to telecommute if they were at a certain level or in a certain type of position. Instead of showing our employees that we trusted them, our attempt at adding flexibility to the work environment only served to highlight our glaring lack of trust. When you create a benefit, the people who notice it the most are the ones who don’t have it.

It was one our non-exempt employees who dramatically changed our organizational perspective on trust. She questioned our telecommuting policy, wondering why the highest paid employees had the option to telecommute and thus save money on gas (which at the time was getting close to five dollars a gallon), while the lowest paid employees were not given any option to work from home. This insightful observation led us to ask ourselves two key questions: was our level of trust in our employees directly connected to how much an employee was paid and what title they had? If so, what reasoning did we use to justify that disparity in trust? The brutal truth was that we did have unfair lines drawn, dividing those we trusted from those we didn’t. And the justification? We had none. The only explanation that could be found was that we had always done it that way.

Why does it matter whether or not companies trust their employees? Employees who are not trusted are less engaged and are more likely to be cynical about everything from organizational change to how much they can trust the leaders of the organization themselves. Employees who are not trusted are less likely to take appropriate risks, test out new ideas, and put themselves on the line to help their company thrive. With survival in business hinging on innovation and an ability to change, creating an environment where employees only feel safe coloring inside the lines can lead to disaster. As William L. McKnight, former CEO of 3M said: “If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.”

Our turning point was implementing a Results-Only Work Environment. The fences came down and the abstract dividing lines between who was trusted and who was not were erased. All of our employees are now trusted to make decisions about when and where they need to work in order to best achieve their results. They are trusted to take as much vacation time as they need, when they need it. They are trusted to make good decisions about how they manage their time, what meetings they attend, and how often they need to communicate with their colleagues. This level of trust has led to more engaged, passionate, innovative employees who are proud of their role in fulfilling our organization’s mission. You can improve your entire organization simply by trusting your employees. The world has enough sheep. What fences are you going to take down?

Jessica H. Lawrence is the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, a non-profit serving 15,000 girls and 5,000 adult volunteers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. She can be reached at jlawrence@gssgc.org.

- Submitted by Jessica

November 19th, 2009 | Tags: business, Girl Scouts, Jessica Lawrence, Results-Only Work Environment, ROWE, trust | Category: ROWE Basics, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Reprinted from Jessica’s “The Practical Business Radical” column in The Business Press

Work life balance does not exist. Very rarely do our lives have a balanced scale of fifty percent work, fifty percent life. The underlying concept that work and life are separate entities is in and of itself wrong. Work is in fact part of life and life shouldn’t be relegated to something we do when we’re not working. There should be a seamless connection between the two. Interestingly, the structure of most workplaces promotes keeping work and life separate. This forced separation is detrimental.

In traditional workplaces, managing by time (show up at 9 a.m., leave at 5 p.m.) and place (the office is the only place to work) often creates a power struggle between the company and the employee. The employee knows they have to work, but because the company controls their time for 40 hours per week, they only want to work during the required time and then want to be in charge of their life and completely own their hours away from work. This dynamic doesn’t create engaged, passionate employees, it inhibits them. What would happen if employees were instead put in control of their own time all of the time? This is where the conversation about the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) picks up from my previous column.

ROWE breaks down the barrier between work and life by putting time control and relegation in the hands of employees. Even if an employee already enjoys the work they do and the company they work for, changing the dynamic of who has the power to control time brings employee engagement and productivity up to a new level. Employees are now free to work when they feel creative (even if it is at two o’clock in the morning) and free to work where they will be most productive (even if it is in a coffee shop). Because the power dynamic is gone, they can manage their work life and personal life together, reducing the stress created when those two parts of life butt heads. An employee who needs to get his car fixed or take her child to the dentist is no longer stressed or overwhelmed. Employees can take care of those things anytime they want because they can work anytime they need to as well. This arrangement works for both the company and the employee because there is a shared understanding of what the concrete measures for performance are: results only.

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the women who first launched ROWE at Best Buy, created the following 13 ROWE Guideposts to provide a framework for implementing ROWE within any company:

1. People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s time.

2. Employees have the freedom to work any way they want.

3. Every day feels like Saturday.

4. People have an unlimited amount of “paid time off” as long as the work gets done.

5. Work isn’t a place that you go – it’s something you do.

6. Arriving at the workplace at 2:00pm is not considered coming in late. Leaving the workplace at 2:00pm is not considered leaving early.

7. Nobody talks about how many hours they work.

8. Every meeting is optional.

9. It’s okay to grocery shop on a Wednesday morning, catch a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, or take a nap on a Thursday afternoon.

10. There are no work schedules.

11. Nobody feels guilty, overworked, or stressed-out.

12. There aren’t any last-minute fire drills.

13. There is no judgment about how you spend your time.

Forget work life balance. The guideposts are about one thing: control of time. Give employees control of their time, and they will reward the company they work for with increased productivity, efficiency, engagement and loyalty. Which one of the guideposts would you have a hard time following? Which guideposts do you disagree with?

Jessica H. Lawrence is the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, a non-profit serving 15,000 girls and 5,000 adult volunteers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. She can be reached at jlawrence@gssgc.org.

Join the conversation on the Women in Business blog at http://business.inlandsocal.com and hear Jessica speak more in depth about the concept of ROWE guideposts.

- Submitted by Jessica

November 12th, 2009 | Tags: flex work, Girl Scouts, Results-Only Work Environment, ROWE, work life balance | Category: Benefits of ROWE, Girl Scouts Gone ROWE, ROWE Basics, Why We Need ROWE | Leave a comment

Since migrating to a Results-Only Work Environment our meeting culture has slowly but surely changed. In the past, when I had a meeting scheduled with an employee or a group of employees, I would feel that I didn’t have the right to ask for the meeting to be changed unless I had a really, really good reason. And a “good reason” in the past wasn’t that I needed to wait for the washing machine repair man or finally got an appointment at the dentist after waiting for months. A “good reason” was that I had an important last minute meeting with the board chair or we had a true emergency at the office. Even after we first migrated to ROWE, I  felt that if I had a meeting on the calendar with someone, it meant that I had to drive all the way into to the office to meet with them, even if they were the only reason I was coming into the office that day. I still felt that people would view me as not being responsible if I didn’t keep my commitment to meet on that day at that time.

One day, I caught myself about to drive into the office to participate in a conference call. And I thought to myself “hellllloooo, you have a phone at home and a cell phone, you could participate in this conference call from anywhere.”  Now I look at my schedule with a much more analytical eye: if I had scheduled a meeting with someone and it turns out to be the only meeting on my schedule that day, I ask if we can have the meeting via conference call or reschedule for a different day when I already have other meetings on my schedule and I’m going to be in the office anyway.

My new-found comfort in doing this is directly related to the fact that ROWE empowers all employees to make the same decisions and requests. It’s not just because I’m the CEO that I get to request that a meeting be changed – other employees make the same requests and everyone finds a way to be accommodating to everyone else’s needs. And the truly amazing thing is that none of us have to spend hours coming up with “good reasons” for why we want to have a meeting changed or not attend a meeting at all. No one has to say “can we reschedule because the cable guy is coming to fix my tv during that time?”  All they have to say is “can we reschedule?”

The other huge thing that has changed is everyone’s assumptions surrounding why someone isn’t at a meeting. Instead of assuming awful things about people when they’re absent – like that they’re a slacker or that they were irresponsible and forgot, we now assume that someone has a good reason for not being there, and that in fact they are probably doing something that is important and is going to have a bigger impact on achieving their results. This organizational shift in mindset – from negative assumptions to positive assumptions – has helped our culture evolve into a work environment that feels more like friends and family then employees and managers.

- Submitted by Jessica

September 21st, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment