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Part Two
The Three Elements
CHAPTER 4
Autonomy I’ve seen the future—and it works. It works in around-the-clock bursts in Sydney, Australia. It works on guerrilla-style side projects in Mountain View, California. And it works whenever it damn well pleases in Charlottesville, Virginia. The reason why it works is because of how it works. On the edges of the economy— slowly, but inexorably—old-fashioned ideas of management are giving way to a newfangled emphasis on self-direction.
That’s why, a little past noon on a rainy Friday in Charlottesville, only a third of CEO Jeff Gunther’s employees have shown up for work. But Gunther— entrepreneur, manager, capitalist—is neither worried nor annoyed. In fact, he’s as calm and focused as a monk. Maybe that’s because he didn’t roll into the office himself until about an hour ago. Or maybe that’s because he knows his crew isn’t shirking. They’re working—just on their own terms.
At the beginning of the year, Gunther launched an experiment in autonomy at Meddius, one of a trio of companies he runs. He turned the company, which creates computer software and hardware to help hospitals integrate their information systems, into a ROWE—a r esults-only work environment.
ROWEs are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy. ROWE’s principles marry the commonsense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the cage- rattling radicalism of Saul Alinsky. In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time—or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.
That appealed to Gunther, who’s in his early thirties. “Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work. That’s why he’d always tried to give employees a long leash. But as Meddius expanded, and as Gunther began exploring new office space, he started wondering whether talented, grown-up employees doing sophisticated work needed a leash of any length. So at the company’s holiday dinner in December 2008, he made an announcement: For the first ninety days of the new year, the entire twenty-two-person operation would try an experiment. It would become a ROWE.
“In the beginning, people didn’t take to it,” Gunther says. The office filled up around nine A.M. and emptied out in the early evening, just as before. A few staffers had come out of extremely controlling environments and weren’t accustomed to this kind of leeway. (At one employee’s previous company, staff had to arrive each day by eight A.M. If someone was late, even by a few minutes, the employee had to write an explanation for everyone else to read.) But after a few weeks, most people found their groove. Productivity rose. Stress declined. And although two employees struggled with the freedom and left, by the end of the test period Gunther decided to go with ROWE permanently.
“Some people (outside of the company) thought I was crazy,” he says. “They wondered, ‘How can you know what your employees are doing if they’re not here?’ ” But in his view, the team was accomplishing more under this new arrangement. One reason: They were focused on the work itself rather than on whether someone would call them a slacker for leaving at three P.M. to watch a daughter’s soccer game. And since the bulk of his staff consists of software developers, designers, and others doing high-level creative work, that was essential. “For them, it’s all about craftsmanship. And they need a lot of autonomy.”
People still had specific goals they had to reach—for example, completing a project by a certain time or ringing up a particular number of sales. And if they needed help, Gunther was there to assist. But he decided against tying those goals to compensation. “That creates a culture that says it’s all about the money and not enough about the work.” Money, he believes, is only “a threshold motivator.” People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is
more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employees’ spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE’s staunchest advocates.
“More companies will migrate to this as more business owners my age come up. My dad’s generation views human beings as human resources. They’re the two-by-fours you need to build your house,” he says. “For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners.” And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.
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