Imagine a workplace where no one cares when you arrive, whether you come in at all, or how long you sit at your desk. The only thing that matters is whether the work gets done. No mandatory meetings, no fixed hours, no credit for looking busy. This is not a thought experiment. A major American retailer ran it for real, and the results are worth knowing precisely because they are mixed.
What is a Results-Only Work Environment?
A Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, was developed at Best Buy by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Its principle is radical in its simplicity: judge people solely on results, not on hours, location, or presence.1 Every meeting is optional. There are no schedules. You are accountable for outcomes and nothing else. It is the organisational embodiment of the idea that what matters is what you produce, not how visibly you suffer producing it.
Did it work?
By most measures, yes. Research on Best Buy’s ROWE, led by the sociologist Phyllis Moen, found substantial gains: higher productivity, lower voluntary turnover, and improvements in employees’ sleep, health, and morale.2 People given control over how they worked produced more and felt better, which is exactly what the theory predicts and what the four-day-week trials independently confirm.
What is the catch in the data?
Here intellectual honesty requires care, because the ROWE evidence contains a finding that complicates the simple story. Moen’s research found that employees did not necessarily work fewer hours under ROWE. What they gained was control over when and where they worked, not automatically a shorter week.2 This matters enormously for the argument of this book. Autonomy and results-based judgment are powerful, and they clearly improve wellbeing, but they do not, on their own, guarantee that reclaimed efficiency is taken as time. Freedom over your schedule is not the same as fewer hours in it. Without a deliberate choice to bank the gains as time, autonomy can simply mean doing the same volume of work at hours of your choosing.
Why did it end?
ROWE at Best Buy did not die because it failed. It died because leadership changed. In 2013, a new chief executive ended the programme, prioritising in-office presence during a business turnaround.3 That is the second sobering lesson. A results-based culture, however well it performs, can depend on the support of whoever is in charge, and a single change at the top can reverse it overnight. Cultural progress built on management goodwill is fragile, which is part of why durable change tends to require structure and policy, not just enlightened bosses.
What should you take from the ROWE story?
Two things, held together honestly. First, ROWE is genuine proof of concept that judging work by results rather than hours can raise productivity and wellbeing at the same time. The fear that removing presence requirements would cause output to collapse is not borne out; the opposite tends to happen. Second, autonomy is necessary but not sufficient. Being trusted on results frees you from the tyranny of visible hours, but it does not automatically convert into a lighter week unless you, or a policy, deliberately make it so. ROWE removes the obstacle. It does not, by itself, take the gain as time.
For an individual, the lesson is to pursue results-based standing wherever you can, because it is the foundation of working on your own terms, while remembering that the foundation is not the whole house. You still have to choose, explicitly, to spend the freedom on time rather than letting it refill with work. Best Buy proved the model works. It also proved, twice over, that proving a model works is not the same as making it last.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Results-Only Work Environment?
A Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, judges employees solely on results rather than hours, location, or presence. Meetings are optional and there are no fixed schedules; what matters is whether the work gets done.
Did ROWE work at Best Buy?
Largely yes. Research found higher productivity, lower voluntary turnover, and improved health and morale. A notable caveat from the data is that employees did not necessarily work fewer hours, but gained control over when and where they worked.
Why did Best Buy end ROWE?
A new chief executive ended it in 2013, prioritising in-office presence during a business turnaround, which shows that results-based cultures can depend on leadership support and are vulnerable to reversal.
About the author
Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (Portfolio, 2008): the Results-Only Work Environment developed at Best Buy, judging employees solely on results rather than hours, location, or presence. ↩
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Research on Best Buy’s ROWE by Phyllis Moen (University of Minnesota): gains in productivity and reductions in voluntary turnover, with improved sleep, health, and morale; notably, employees did not necessarily work fewer hours but gained control over when and where they worked. ↩ ↩2
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Best Buy ended ROWE in 2013 under a new chief executive prioritising in-office presence during a business turnaround (contemporaneous reporting, including the Star Tribune and Harvard Business Review). ↩