Telework Exchange

At a White House Forum on workplace flexibility in late March of this year, John Berry, Director, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), announced a new initiative to implement the "Results Only Work Environment" or ROWE on an experimental basis within his organization. Four hundred OPM staffers, including those in Berry's own office, will be transitioned into ROWE.

It is trendy, cool, and sexy…and which one of us hasn't thought on occasion that "I need a new job" and wished that we had a "silver bullet" to make it all okay? Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson claim to have discovered the silver bullet and it is ROWE. In researching what ROWE entails, I discovered that it is founded on principles that should be in place within any healthy organization: an understanding of each individual employee's role within the organization, respect for each employee's personal commitment to perform to the best of their ability, and lastly, trust that each employee will, in fact, produce what they are accountable for. Who can argue with that?

In the ideal workplace, every manager would understand and have carefully defined what their employees are tasked with doing and would treat employees fairly and, naturally, with respect and trust. How many of us have worked in the ideal workplace?

After going through a "migration" process which I'll describe shortly, employees are set free. All members of the organization – managers, this means you too – can come and go as they please. Work anytime, work anywhere as long as the results the organization requires of each person are being achieved. Nirvana!

How will this align with a Federal work environment and culture? The answer has yet to be determined. On the one hand, the Federal government has offered various forms of flexible work arrangements since the late 1970s. The idea of flexibility is not new. Further, the government has been promoting telework for 20 years now. These factors will facilitate implementation of a more progressive flexible work environment.

What may throw a wrench into the works are a few of the distinctions between a private-sector retail company like Best Buy – where Ressler and Thompson worked and first implemented ROWE – and a public-sector organization, like OPM. OPM is bound by Federal laws that are in place to protect the best interests of Federal workers and the taxpaying public. After all, OPM uses funds appropriated by Congress – that is, taxpayer money – to operate. Because of this, there are Federal regulations that carefully define hours of work, pay, and compensation. How the concept of a free-for-all work environment can be reconciled with very structured regulations on work hours, pay, and compensation is anyone's guess.

The danger in a free-for-all work environment lies in the potential for losing the delineation between work and personal life. How does someone turn off the work clock completely? When you have no boundaries, you have no boundaries. Is this really a good thing? If managers don't know when you are "at work," isn't it reasonable for them to assume you are at work whenever they want to contact you… at night, on the weekends, when you are sick, etc.?

On the positive side, ROWE promises to take work teams through a migration process that will require managers and employees alike to commit to ROWE (thereby, creating a sense of team work and buy in), to define what deliverables each employee is expected to produce and the related deadlines (hopefully, to include methods of tracking results), as well as, surfacing and letting go of what Ressler and Thompson call, "sludge." What is sludge? It is the destructive, nasty workplace negativity that surfaces when one of us is jealous of someone else. For example, "I wish I had kids like she does so that I could leave work early on Wednesdays..." Let's face it, every workplace has sludge and every workplace would benefit by ridding themselves of it.

Getting back to the original question, can ROWE work for the Feds? It is too early to tell and it is certainly worth a try. Telework expansion and overall workplace flexibility can only benefit from a focus on defining results employees are accountable for, tracking the achievement of results, and encouraging an open atmosphere of trust and respect. Even if all the ROWE principles are not transferable to the Federal service, moving in the direction of a results-focused workplace will be an improvement.

About the Author
Our guest columnist, Kathy Kadilak, retired from the Department of Justice in March 2007, after more than 12 years leading the agency's worklife and telework initiatives and more than 29 years of Federal service. For the past three years, she has been engaged in telework consulting activities and freelance writing on telework and other worklife-related issues. She is the past President of the Metropolitan Washington Work/Life Coalition and the former Vice President of the Mid-Atlantic Telework Advisory Council.