#888 2005 · Best Buy (ROWE, Cali Ressler & Jody Thompson) · Consumer electronics retail / corporate HQ

Best Buy stopped measuring presence and only results counted — turnover plunged 90%

the problem

flexible-work perks exist, but the worker who uses them reads as less committed

background

By the early 2000s American employers offered flexibility as a perk, yet nearly every scheme still ran on presence underneath. Flextime shifted start and end hours but still expected a desk; telework allowed some days home but billed the rest as office time. Worse, taking advantage marked you: the person who left early or worked remotely was read as less committed, so the perk was paid for by the worker who used it, in the career coin of lost credibility.

Best Buy's corporate staff worked under an assembly-line legacy — hours logged, face time noticed, meeting attendance a signal of dedication. In 2004-2005 HR staff Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson began working out a system where hours were not tracked at all and physical attendance was entirely voluntary; by late 2006 hundreds of corporate departments had adopted the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, under which even showing up to meetings was optional so long as targets were met.

what everyone would do

The standard fix was to expand flexibility: sharper flextime rules, more generous telework, headcount thresholds for remote days — all of which still left the presence metric intact and therefore kept penalizing the worker who deviated from the visible norm.

what they saw

Ressler and Thompson saw that the flexible-work worker is punished not by policy but by being read as different from the never-deviating norm. Delete the clock from evaluation and the 'deviation' disappears; a universal default where everyone's work is judged by output alone carries no stigma for anyone.

the move

Best Buy abolished the measure of presence for its corporate staff: under ROWE, employees were free to work when and where they wanted so long as their targets were met, hours were not counted, and even physical attendance at meetings was not compulsory — as the program's slogan put it, 'Each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.'

why it works

When evaluation measures only output, being present or absent carries no signal, so no worker is marked as less committed for arranging work around life — the cost that had been subtly taxing flexibility vanished. Because flexibility stopped being a deviation to hide, employees stopped pretending to be in the office and arranged themselves around actual work, cutting unproductive presence and the friction of managing a second, secret schedule. With output the only currency, hours collapsed toward what the work required rather than what the routine demanded, which is how productivity rose 41% while voluntary turnover dropped 90%: people stayed because the job stopped taxing their lives.

the payoff

ROWE-team productivity rose 41% (2005-07), turnover fell 90%, ~$16M/yr saved — Best Buy's own internal figures, not an independent audit.

where it breaks

It needs output that can genuinely be measured and trusted — collaborative, role-bound, presence-intensive, or judgment-based work where results are hard to isolate loses the mechanism's footing. It needs managers willing to be evaluated on outcomes rather than visible busyness, and leaders who will not quietly re-import the clock for cultural signaling: Best Buy's own program died not on evidence but when turnaround CEO Joly wanted the visible discipline of an office. The reported figures are Best Buy's self-measured numbers, not an independent audit, so the 41%/90% should be read as company-claimed.

what came after

ROWE influenced the modern distributed-work movement and the academic literature on time control, but Best Buy itself ended it in March 2013 when turnaround CEO Hubert Joly axed the program during the same period Yahoo's Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting — a reminder that a results-based clock-blind system still lives or dies by whether leadership trusts it.

references

[1]TIME — Finding Freedom at WorkTIME, 2008time.com
[2]ICFAI — Best Buy's 'Results Only Work Environment': Changing the Productivity Paradigm? (HROB092)ICFAI Business School Case Development Centre, 2007ibscdc.org
[3]HBR — The End of 'Results Only' at Best Buy Is Bad NewsHarvard Business Review, 2013hbr.org