ROWE and new employees
One of the biggest challenges the Council has experienced with ROWE lately is how it is applicable to new employees. If everyone is free to do what they want when they want as long as the work gets done, then how is it possible to properly train new staff members if they don’t feel like performing work at the same time as the person responsible for training them?
Most people who are new to an organization do their best to demonstrate to the employer that the decision made to hire them was the best possible choice the company could have made. That said, there are occasionally new employees who see ROWE as an opportunity to take advantage, forgetting completely about the part of ROWE that says that the work must still get done.
I feel confident that we’ve been handling this issue appropriately by managing for results versus managing time. It’s just a real challenge to explain this way of working to new staff who appear to be attempting to take advantage of an already great opportunity.
- Submitted by Daniel
July 28th, 2009 at 10:15 am
One of the biggest challenges the Council has experienced with ROWE lately is how it is applicable to new employees. If everyone is free to do what they want when they want as long as the work gets done, then how is it possible to properly train new staff members if they don’t feel like performing work at the same time as the person responsible for training them?
I think the key thing is to remind new employees about the “as long as the work gets done.” If I’m a new employee and part of my job is to touch base with the person who’s training me, or complete work assigned by the person who’s training me, then it’s my responsibility to make sure that happens. The timing is worked out is between those two people. One or the other might need to compromise on the schedule, or they might decide that training can be accomplished with e-mails back and forth if their schedules don’t mesh. Whatever works for the people involved. But if it doesn’t happen, the new employee should be disciplined or spoken to for not meeting their goals (or conversely, if the trainer isn’t training them, then the disciplinary action falls on that employee).
One thing that might help is making sure that performance is reviewed with new employees on a regular basis, even if it’s as simple as a 10-minute meeting or phone call. That way, if goals aren’t being met, you can nip it in the bud before it becomes a bigger problem.
Another thing to note is that when ROWE was initially implemented at Best Buy, the number of involuntary terminations went way up. That suggests that there definitely were people who wanted to slack off and take advantage, and sometimes the only solution for that is firing them. Hopefully, you try everything else in the book before it comes to that point, but it does happen.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:39 pm
[...] Director of Human Resources for the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, talked about their challenge with ROWE and new employees. He worried that new employees may see ROWE as an opportunity to slack off and shared his thoughts [...]