Word: ressler
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...Best Buy's corporate headquarters in Minneapolis was just another cubicle beehive buzzing with nine-to-fivers. Today, the electronics retail giant is leading a workplace revolution. Two employees - Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson - brought about the change by proposing a radical approach to work. Dubbed ROWE, or Results-Only Work Environment, the concept can be boiled down to the following...
...kooky that Best Buy has seen productivity soar 41% between 2005 and 2007 on ROWE teams. Meanwhile, voluntary turnover plunged 90%, saving the company some $16 million a year. Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson has embraced the program and has applied it to 80% of the staff at headquarters. Ressler and Thompson, who have since left Best Buy to found a consulting company called CultureRx, have co-authored a book detailing their experiment. Why Work Sucks - and How to Fix It is due out June 2. They spoke to TIME's Lisa Takeuchi Cullen...
When Jody Thompson, Best Buy's "organizational change" guru, heard about Ressler's work, she pushed the company's management to make total flexibility available to everyone. No one is forced into it; teams sign up when they're ready. Best Buy expects that ROWE one day will apply to the whole company. At the moment, it is working on a version for the 100,000 retail employees in its stores, a much more difficult task because most of those employees are hourly, and their work is regulated by federal...
...pain. Some employees break down and cry in ROWE training sessions. "People in the baby-boom generation realize what they gave up to get ahead in the workplace, and a lot of times it's their families. They realize that it doesn't have to be that way," says Ressler, her eyes tearing up. In particular, men thank her and Thompson, who run the sessions, for giving them permission to spend more time with their families. "They know now they can do it and not be judged," says Thompson...
...Best Buy's hybrid nature--half flexible, half 9 to 5--is stirring conflict too. Ressler and Thompson get desperate e-mails from a handful of ROWE employees--accustomed to freedom--who have moved to jobs in departments that still operate on traditional schedules. "We could have a counseling clinic up all day long," Thompson says. "They feel alone." On the other side, Denise LaMere, a Best Buy corporate strategist, has struggled to figure out how to prove herself in the new environment. "It made me very nervous," LaMere says. Without children, she once had an advantage--she could always...