Beyond ROWE: Why Results-Only Work Isn’t Always a Win
Results-only work environments (ROWE) sound like a workplace utopia until you experience one. Some elements of the traditional workplace are helpful in setting boundaries, and when they’re removed, it doesn’t result in the unfettered upside for staff many managers fear, but in something that is perhaps even worse for the organization.
While most workplaces pay by the hour, a ROWE focuses on outputs and outcomes. The idea behind this approach is to let people work on their own terms, with their performance measured on their results, not their timesheets.
The idea behind ROWE is to give employees high autonomy to decide how they achieve their performance metrics. This way, they can work when and where they do their best work and find the ideas that will contribute the most to the outcomes. Employees who get a say in their work tend to be more motivated and creative.
In some ways, a results-only workplace allows employees to have similar drivers as a small business founder. They can choose when and how they work and are motivated to achieve good outcomes.
The Benefits of ROWE
The key elements of the ROWE approach involve setting clear and stable goals, having a high-trust culture, and giving employees autonomy and flexibility to deliver results. Flexibility means people can choose when and where they do their best work, and focusing on a clear goal helps them select tasks most likely to impact the outcome.
This brings some key benefits:
- When goals are clear, people choose the right tasks to complete.
- Flexibility is good for employee well-being and satisfaction, and also benefits employers as people can work when they have the most energy to bring to the task.
- Workplaces with high-trust/low-blame cultures have better information flow and are more attractive to talented people.
- Everyone is motivated to remove waste from the work, which can amplify the outcomes.
The Drawbacks of ROWE
The downside of a results-only approach is ever-present but can have a smaller or more significant impact depending on the situation. The downsides are less visible for traction tasks where the task-to-outcome relationship has been established. The drawbacks of discovery tasks can be highly troublesome.
- Many valuable activities don’t impact the outcome in the short term and may not happen, making it harder to sustain the results over the long term.
- Working to individual results may discourage collaboration, and people who need help may not get it quickly.
- Knowledge involves some wicked problems, where the outcome resists many improvement attempts, but the work still produces something highly valuable: knowledge.
- Though the flexibility of ROWE may be intended to promote a better work/life balance, if the results aren’t coming, it may encourage hustle culture and burnout.
The Unavoidable Prerequisite Is Culture
ROWEs are designed for high-trust/low-blame cultures, or generative cultures that use Ron Westrum’s classification. Without high levels of psychological safety and excellent communication, ROWEs cause constant friction. Employees feel stretched too far, and managers constantly worry that people aren’t working.
The fundamental assumption at the heart of ROWE is that employees want to do good work. If you don’t believe this, it’s not for you. The second crucial assumption is that your organization understands its mission. It’s able to describe success and translate it into meaningful goals that connect all the way from individual to team and department to the organization’s goals.
Some organizations can ride the wave of ROWE and successfully manage the drawbacks. Managers need to pay attention to problem signals. A drop in information flow or quality and signs of tiredness from a team member may suggest they’re struggling. They also need to watch out for collaboration issues, which can be caused if goals don’t align across individuals and teams, or if someone is working at capacity and can’t help other team members.
Organizations must tackle culture first before introducing other initiatives to improve the working environment. Whenever a new approach is attempted in cultures with low trust and high blame, it fails. Until the culture moves meaningfully into the healthy zone, all attempts to improve will fail to make a lasting impact.
Knowledge Work
Even with a sound culture, knowledge work produces wicked problems where the outcome resists many improvement attempts. You may have discovered a law of nature for your business, or you may eventually be able to crack the nut wide open. While your team is battling a seemingly immovable number, they still produce something highly valuable: knowledge.
Imagine you have a software product that your existing users love, but only 10% of potential customers who start a free trial complete the steps demonstrating the software’s value. You might make this trial activation rate a result-only outcome. A team or individual could try many approaches that all make little or no impact. Eventually, they could overcome the challenge and double the rate, bringing twice as much new business revenue into your organization in one sudden flood of success.
In a ROWE, sustaining effort against a crucial outcome can be hard. The system requires managers to measure people against results, and these results arrive sporadically. You might try to smooth things by choosing a goal like monthly revenue, but this doesn’t reflect the unique challenge of the activation team. Selecting a general goal means the numbers move based on many individual and team contributions, so results are unclear.
With the bespoke measurement of activation rate, the problem is whether the organization’s leaders dare to persist with a necessarily experimental approach when the results lag far behind the work or come in lumpy installments instead of a smooth climb.
What Does Enough Look Like
An eight-hour work day isn’t just an expectation from an employer that you’ll dedicate a solid working day to their ambitions. It also serves the employee by signalling when a job is too much for one person.
When GitHub provided employees with the benefit of unlimited holiday, people were unsure how much they could take. They often erred on the side of caution, taking less time off than if they were given a fixed allowance. Removing the expectation of dedicating several hours might not decrease the number of hours, but result in employees all trying to avoid becoming the person who worked the least. This would increase burnout, resulting in lower-quality ideas, poor productivity, and bad organizational outcomes.
Installing Pressure Valves
If you plan on trialling a ROWE, write down the values and behaviors you hope to encourage. If you detect unanticipated behaviors, you’ll need to create a break-glass process. If someone is working 80-hour weeks or hasn’t taken leave in six months, an alarm should sound. What you do to protect employees from bad outcomes also protects your organization.
You’ll also need to recognize when a team or individual is working on a wicked problem and consider breaking out of the results-only mode when the outcomes don’t provide a responsive indication of the challenge at hand.
The most crucial part of ROWE is having a solid playbook for handling situations where someone isn’t achieving the expected results. You have to bring a genuine curiosity and a strong desire to understand why the results aren’t being achieved. You may discover a lag in the responsiveness of your measure, or find out their efforts are working. Still, some other factor is working against the improvement (for example, you’re winning lots of new business, but also have high churn).
Handling results issues is where ROWE can cause widespread damage. If you decide someone has to go because they can’t get the results, what knock-on effects will this have on people’s willingness to take up that challenge? ROWEs can quickly poison a chalice in this situation.
Access the Benefits Without the Drawbacks
You can achieve many of the benefits ascribed to ROWEs without abandoning the 40-hour work week. You can offer employees the flexibility to choose when and where they do their best work, be clear about how their work contributes to the organization’s desired outcomes, and be understanding when an employee needs to handle a personal emergency.
With a healthy balance of freedom and responsibility, you can give employees the space they need to produce their best work. Few things are as motivating as feeling like you’re knocking it out of the park most days.
You can have a flexible, high-trust, results-oriented workplace without introducing uncertainty around expectations.
