Kiss your commute goodbye
ROWE or Results Only Work Environment is a way of setting up workplaces so that no specific worktime is mandated and nobody needs to come into the office as long as they are getting the results required of them.
This isn’t just a pipedream that only ultra-hip high-tech startups are pulling off either. NPR reports that the Human Services and Public Health Department of Hennepin County, in Minneapolis, Minn., US have been doing this with great results.
The state of Minnesota signed a contract for the program last year as part of a campaign to reduce rush hour traffic on 35W in Minneapolis. Nationwide, 3 percent of businesses now say they have a ROWE, though as far as participants here in Hennepin County know, theirs is the first public agency to adopt it. Many are ecstatic at the way it’s working so far
In a northern suburb of Minneapolis, county program manager Kara Terry has made her kitchen table a home office. Nearly every evening after dinner she brings out her laptop, typing away as she oversees her three sons doing their homework. They are in elementary and middle school, and Terry says she’s never been able to spend so much time with them.
This works because people can fit their working hours to their biological rhythms (we all know that guy who gets in late every day and is half-sleep past noon but up all night), they have more energy if they don’t have to commute for hours each day and if they know they have the time to spend with friends and family they are much more likely to be focused on their work during the hours they choose to do it.
“There’s this belief that if you’re at work, you’re doing work — and people are not,” says co-creator Jody Thompson.
“Before we started ROWE,” she says, “we were about two, 2 1/2 weeks out on processing. We are now down to five days or less,” she says. People were just more productive.
If your job is suitable for ROWE, why not casually slip a mention of it to your boss? I’m sure he’d like to see his family more himself.
