Best Buy is headquartered in my hometown, Minneapolis. Over the years I have known many people who have worked there. It had the reputation of having a toxic work environment.

Being a customer in one of their stores wasn't much better --- the customer service was abominable.

Over the past couple of years I have noticed a huge change when I go into a store. The customer service is great.

I finally learned why things were so much better at Best Buy last week when I was driving to a meeting and happened to catch an interview with Cali Ressler and Jody THompson who were talking about their Book Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It.

I was absolutely fallbergasted at what they said was going on at Best Buy. It sounded like a company I could work for.

In 2001, a 24 year old Best Buy employee ,Cali Ressler, was invited to help develop a program that would make Best Buy a company that talented people would want to work for.

Employees were surveyed and according to the Intro to Why Work Sucks "the overwhelming response was, Just Trust me with me time. Trust me to do my job and I will deliver results and be a happier employee to boot."

As they write in the intro to their book, " Our beliefs about work--forty hours, Monday through Friday, eight to five are outdated, outmoded, out to lunch. Every day people go to work and waste their time, their company's time, and their lives in a system based on assumptions--about how work gets done and what work looks like--that don't apply in today's global, 24/7 economy."

In her review of the book, Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom writes,

Two online friends of mine, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, have just released a new book based on their popular Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) concept, which they pioneered with electronics giant Best Buy a few years ago. What at first started as an underground movement and later gained the wholehearted support of the CEO, ROWE increased Best Buy’s productivity by 41 percent and reduced turnover by 90 percent in some divisions. In a ROWE company or department, employees can do whatever they want whenever they want, as long as business objectives are achieved. As Cali and Jody put it, there’s no more begging for permission to watch your kid play soccer. No more cramming errands into the weekend, or waiting until retirement to take up your hobbies again. You make the decisions about what you do and where you do it, every minute of every day.

In 2006 Businessweek featured the ROWE concept in an article called Smashing The Clock-

There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It's O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid.[...] But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. "This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work," says the program's co-founder, Jody Thompson. By the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Starting in February, the new work environment will become an official part of Best Buy's recruiting pitch as well as its orientation for new hires. And the company plans to take its clockless campaign to its stores--a high-stakes challenge that no company has tried before in a retail environment.

Michele Martin at the Bamboo Project Blog has been writing about the ROWE Concept for several years.

I've thought a lot lately about the need for more organizations to move to a ROWE environment. Every day my husband leaves the house and drives 30 minutes to an office where he works on a computer and talks on the phone--two things that I do from my own home office without the commute.

We're spending $200+ per month on gas and adding to the incredible pollution load in our area so that he can go to another location to do something he could easily do from home. Not to mention the loss of time for the commute and the time he spends talking to co-workers and going to useless meetings. And the ridiculous "make work" activities that go on, like having to do a certain number of phone calls per week, regardless of what those calls accomplish.

This isn't just his workplace, though--this is where and how a LOT of people work. What I find really interesting is that we finally have technology that makes it possible for us to do most work anytime, anywhere, yet we continue to stick with our same old paradigms of working in a particular location during certain hours. We also stick by our belief that time is the best measure of what we do, rather than results.

At Create Business Growth, Janelle explains that Going Bedouin is out outgrowth of the ROWE Concept

Going bedouin is a concept that evolved out of the idea of having a results-only work environment (ROWE). ROWE seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal is to judge performance not on an employee’s presence or hours that they put in, but rather, on their output. According to CTO and founder of Coghead, Greg Olsen, the goal of going bedouin is to create a low inertia business that takes less capital to get started and that can react with greater agility to changing conditions.

To learn more about the ROWE concept, check out Cali and Jody's Blog where they deal with with the skeptics. From their blog:

A friend of ours has a “Work Sucks” magnet on his car. When his boss saw it, he said, “Bob, I’m really disappointed in you for having that on your car.” Our friend didn’t think anything of it, but his boss kept commenting on the magnet throughout the day. When he went out in the parking lot at the end of the day, our friend noticed that his boss had taped a note to the magnet, altering its message. It now reads:

“Work is really good and I love my boss”

We’re grownups. And, as grownups, we are not afraid to recognize (and correct) our mistakes.

From this point forward, work is really good and everyone loves their boss.

Elana writes about business culture at FunnyBusiness