any organizations are pitching their flexible work programs, but no company has taken the idea as far as Best Buy Co. Inc.

    Corporate employees of the Minneapolis-based electronics retailer can work anytime, anywhere. Meetings are optional. There are no schedules.

    This might sound like chaos, but it’s actually a carefully crafted program called the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE.

    Best Buy began implementing the program in 2002, and so far it seems to make business sense.

    From 2003 to 2007, 3,000 Best Buy employees—80% of the corporate work force—migrated to ROWE. From 2005 to 2007, productivity jumped 41% and voluntary turnover fell to 8% from 12%. In some corporate divisions, voluntary turnover dropped as much as 90% during that two-year period.

    "That’s year-over-year dollar savings of $16 million annually from turnover alone," said Jody Thompson, a former HR manager at Best Buy.

    ROWE is the brainchild of Ms. Thompson and Cali Ressler, both of whom were human resources managers at Best Buy in 2002. At that time, Ms. Ressler and Ms. Thompson were charged with making a flexible work program from the corporate office available to everyone.

    "We realized that the flexible work program was successful in that employee engagement was up, productivity was higher, but the problem was the participants were being viewed as 'not working,' " Ms. Ressler said.

    Participants of flexible work arrangements often encounter negative reactions from managers, colleagues or even family members who don’t view them as really working because they aren't in the office working traditional hours, Ms. Ressler and Ms. Thompson said.

    So the two set out to create a program in which everyone would be evaluated based solely on their results, not on how long they worked.

    "The issue with flexible work is that it’s still about a schedule, and ROWE is not about schedules. It's about cultural change," Ms. Thompson said.

    Changing a culture is much more difficult than simply changing people’s schedules, so Ms. Ressler and Ms. Thompson, who now run a consulting company called CultureRx, have created a program to help companies implement ROWE. The transition to ROWE can take as long as six months, and there are numerous steps to the process, Ms. Thompson said.

    At Best Buy, Ms. Thompson and Ms. Ressler started out by conducting a "culture audit," to establish a baseline for how employees perceive their work environment. They repeated the audit four months later.

    In the meantime, executives held leadership education to get all of Best Buy’s executives on board with what ROWE was about.

    In the second phase of the transition, Ms. Ressler and Ms. Thompson brought in all corporate employees and talked to them about the philosophy of ROWE. The second phase included training on how managers could still maintain control in the ROWE model.

    In the third phase, teams were left to their own devices. Ms. Ressler and Ms. Thompson followed up four months later with a culture check to see how everyone was doing.

    Fifteen companies have bought ROWE kits from CultureRx. J.A. Counter & Associates Inc., a 20-employee investment management company in Richmond, Wis., migrated completely to ROWE.

    And CultureRx is in discussions with an undisclosed Fortune 100 company to implement ROWE. Ms. Ressler and Ms. Thompson insist they aren’t discouraged that large employers aren’t yet breaking down their doors to implement ROWE.

    "We know that it will take two or three decades for ROWE to become status quo," Ms. Thompson said. "But social change takes time."

—Crain's Benefits Outlook Online,  November 2008