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There’s one more aspect of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) that I haven’t touched on yet. And that’s the idea that our jobs don’t require our presence during certain core hours.

This is definitely a controversial notion, even among people who like the idea of ROWE. If people aren’t all together at the same time, how can the team get any work done?

In my post ROWE Vs. TOWE, I made fun of a vice president who sent out an email saying that even though they don’t have enough work to do, everyone still needs to show up at 8:30 sharp. (The complaint wasn’t that people weren’t putting in enough hours, just that they weren’t starting right at 8:30.)

Dot at Deeper Issues commented:

“I say it depends on the business. If all the business’s clients start their day at 8:30, then 9:00 doesn’t work. Also, when people start being late, morale falls.

ROWE is an attractive concept to people who don’t like the 9-to-5, but it’s not for everyone. So many Internet entrepreneurs make the assumption that all employees are potential entrepreneurs, or at least are high-level white collar workers. If your job is answering your boss’s phone, for example, and your boss gets in at 8:30, then for you to arrive at 9:00 is going to mess up his day and possibly miss out on clients who call while he’s on the phone with someone else. If you’re the boss, on the other hand, it may matter less when you get in.”

Yes, it does depend on the job. If you’re performing open heart surgery, you need to be there at the same time as the patient and the rest of your team. There’s no way you can be effective by yourself. But I think this situation isn’t as common as we might think.

First, a slight detour. I had one job where they didn’t use ROWE by a long shot, but they did have an interesting way of dealing with time. This was a government contractor, and the government said we had to work exactly 8 hours a day, on average, for the month. We recorded our start and stop times to the nearest 15 minutes, and put our time in their time tracking application. If there were 21 working days in a month, we had to work exactly 168 hours for the month (21 * 8), though it didn’t have to be exactly 8 hours per day. It could be 7 one day and 9 the next.

They were strict about this. When you arrived at work on the last day of the month, if you had logged 163 hours and you needed 168 for the month, that meant you had to work exactly 5 hours that day, no more, no less. Even if people still needed you, you had to go home after your time was up. The company also had a rule that you had to start each day between 6:00 and 9:00 AM. It was OK to occasionally come in after 9, but you had to call first to let them know.

Do you think this system was good or bad? Take a minute to think about it before reading on.

Overall, I think this system was way better than average. One great thing it did was eliminating sludge. The term “sludge” comes from Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. It means judging people by time. Like if you say “Nice of you to join us” if someone comes in after you, or “Leaving already?” if someone leaves before you, or if you brag “I was the first one in the office today!” Sludge reinforces the false connection between time and results, and it doesn’t help anyone.

At this company, there was no sludge, because everyone worked exactly the same number of hours (unless they used vacation time to cover a shortage). If you saw someone leaving at 1:00, no one would ever judge them for that, because they knew they were still putting in the same amount of time as everyone else. Either they had accumulated extra hours earlier in the month, or they’d make up the hours later in the month.

Not that time is a good way to measure performance, but at least the rules were clear. There was no wondering how long you’d have to stay in your chair with nothing to do in order to look good. The system also kept us from working too much (though there were times when I really wanted to work more).

But there were some bad things about this system. First of all, we had to start between 6 and 9. That’s a pretty huge range, and it worked great for me, but it’s clearly biased in favor of the early birds. A lot of people had a hard time getting in by 9. and were reprimanded for coming in even a few minutes late. I didn’t ask why they couldn’t get in by 9, because it was none of my business. If they had to take their kids to school or whatever, who cares if they came in at 9:05? (BTW, the window used to be 6:30 – 9:30 before they changed it. Some people never stopped grumbling about that.)

Another thing is that one of the managers required his team to work exactly 8 hours every day, because in his opinion no one can be effective for more than 8 hours a day. But his opinion of how people should work is irrelevant. For God’s sake, let your people decide what’s best for them! I can’t believe they let this manager destroy the benefit of the flexible time policy for the people unlucky enough to be on his team. It’s no different from deciding that your team won’t have health insurance or a 401(k), when the rest of the company does. The benefits should be the same for everyone, and not left to the mercy of your manager.

They were fairly close to a ROWE, at least on the time aspect. People would occasionally come in on the weekend, or stay late at night and then take off the next day. It was really great having that much flexibility (unless you had that particular manager, but let’s ignore him).

And yet, they still required people to come in between 6:00 and 9:00. That’s a wide enough range that you might as well get rid of it. Why chew people out for coming in at 9:05 or 5:55? Why would 5 minutes make a difference, when 3 hours in the opposite direction wouldn’t?

But wait, wouldn’t that destroy productivity? If they dropped the 6-9 rule, wouldn’t some people come in at 5:45, and some people come in at 10? Yup, they would. But the benefit people gained from having complete control over their schedule would more than offset any productivity loss. When people love being able to fit their job into their life, they’ll do whatever it takes to keep that job.

Say I came in at 6:30 (which was my usual time), and I started working on something, and I noticed that someone had done something that didn’t look right, so I wanted to ask them about it. If they didn’t come in until 10, wouldn’t that be a problem? Well yeah, it would. But it would also be a problem if they came in at 9 (or 8, or 7).

There will always be times when you’d like to have access to someone who isn’t there. But what’s the solution? Make everyone get to work at exactly the same time? Is it worth pissing off the employees just to have better overlap? (BTW, notice that “poor overlap” means the same thing as “broad coverage.”)

Besides, there’s no way you can eliminate this problem. What if someone’s taking a vacation day, or sick, or at lunch, or in a meeting? How can you ensure that everyone is always there? Should everyone live in the same house and sleep in the same big bed?

I haven’t worked in a ROWE, but according to Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, the employees figure out how to handle situations when someone isn’t there. Since they all love their jobs, they work together to ensure that the work gets done. They act like they have a vested interest in the company, instead of just punching a time card.

When you know you can’t assume that someone will be there whenever you need them, you plan ahead to make sure there won’t be any problems. You also make sure you make effective use of the time you do have with them. In a TOWE (Time-Only Work Environment), if you’re judged by time and everyone’s in their chair all day long, why not just chat with them all day? But in a ROWE, you wouldn’t do that because it negatively impacts results, and results are what you care about.

This is all according to that book, and I can’t say from experience that it really does all work out. But when I worked at that company and came in at 6:30, I did sometimes need someone who wouldn’t come in until 9:00 (if they were even there that day). So what did I do? I worked on something else until they came in. Maybe I sent them an email, or maybe I just spoke to them later. But no one should be unable to get any work done just because a particular person isn’t there. Only bad management could allow that to happen.

There have been times when I haven’t been allowed to take a day off when I was sick, on the grounds that they just needed me too much. But if I was really so critical that the company couldn’t function without me, they should have been paying me a lot more.

OK, now we’re done with the detour, and back to Dot’s comments.

“I say it depends on the business.”

Like I said before, I agree. There are some cases where ROWE won’t work. But there are many more where it will.

“If all the business’s clients start their day at 8:30, then 9:00 doesn’t work.”

I disagree. In most cases, the clients don’t have any reason to care what time the employees get there. For one thing, many employees will have absolutely no interaction with the clients. Another thing is that the nature of the work probably doesn’t require constant real-time interaction.

When I lived in New Jersey, I worked with some people in the U.K. But even though they were 5 hours ahead of us, no one considered moving our schedules 5 hours ahead to match theirs, because it just didn’t matter. There was some overlap in our days, and there was also email and voicemail. That was more than enough.

“Also, when people start being late, morale falls.”

Yes, it does. But why? Because of sludge; judging people by time. If someone comes in at a time that we consider late, we think that they’re not getting their work done. But how do we know that? Why do we think that someone’s arrival time is connected to their performance?

I’m writing this post at 1 AM. Is that “early” or “late,” or does it not matter?

Another thing is that if we see someone coming in at 9:05, we might think, “No fair! If he’s not going to get yelled at, then I should be allowed to come in at 9:05 too!” Yes, you should! You’re an adult, and you’re perfectly capable of determining your own schedule. If people were judged by results instead of by time, you’d trust other people to determine their schedule as well.

“If your job is answering your boss’s phone, for example, and your boss gets in at 8:30, then for you to arrive at 9:00 is going to mess up his day and possibly miss out on clients who call while he’s on the phone with someone else.”

This is where we go back to that idea of the team working together to make sure the work gets done, regardless of who is where at any given time. Answering the phone is a skill and not everyone can do it right, but it’s not like only one person in the whole company can do it.

At that company I mentioned before, there was one person who generally answered the phone. But the 6:00 – 9:00 window applied to her, and she was free to pick her own start time. If she wasn’t the first one in, or she wasn’t the last one to leave, there were some other people who would take on the responsibility of answering the phone.

One day we had two feet of snow, and the plows had to push it all into one lane, making that lane unusable. And this is an area with tons of traffic on a normal day, so it took me three hours to get to work. When I got there, I found that the person answering the phone wasn’t one of the regular people. Someone else had stepped up, even though it wasn’t her assigned job. That’s what happens when people work together with a focus on results.

In the worst case, a call could possibly have gone to voicemail. So what? You can call them back. It’s not such a terrifying apocalypse that it warrants forcing everyone to get to work at the same time.

Are there consequences to not having everyone available all the time? Of course. But you can’t have everyone available all the time, no matter what you do. And if you treat people like adults, letting them choose the schedule that works best for them, a funny thing happens. People actually like their jobs. So they do what it takes to make sure the work gets done. And when employees are motivated, the payoff for the company is tremendous.

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