At Giant Leap Systems we follow the “Results-Only Work Environment” (ROWE). Under ROWE, people can do whatever they want, whenever they want as long as the work gets done.
You can literally do whatever you want when you want. You can go grocery shopping at 10 AM on a Tuesday. You can go to watch a movie at 2 PM on a Thursday. You can take a nap a 3 PM on a Monday. You don’t have to ask anybody. You just got to inform your team and people who are dependent on your work and most importantly your work should get done. You can work at a time and place of your choosing. We are taking the approach of flexible time a notch higher. The intention is to make it more meaningful by totally changing the line of thinking from a new way of working to a new way of living.
We got inspired about this idea from “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson”. We always intended to have a culture of total freedom at work. Whatever doubts we would have had were cleared by the above book. Although we did not adopt literally everything from there, we had to tweak a few things here and there to come out with an optimum process that servers our purpose and at the same time achieves our vision in that particular area.
Forming guidelines is simple but walking through them and living up to them is what separates boys from men. In our quest, we started walking on the path with complete belief and ready to fall and get up again while not diminishing our intention a bit on making a success out of it.
Very soon we realized we have work to do as first we got to understand the development environment we work in, which was AGILE SCRUM for most teams. In that case, we had to re-think how we cater to the AGILE ceremonial presence and team communication while following ROWE. We found solutions from the teams themselves and soon the problem was resolved. We also had to work on getting rid of our team’s dysfunctions (The five dysfunctions of a team by Patric Lencioni).
We are now almost around a year into this and the concept is not entirely absorbed and utilized by many. Few people who have adapted to this have greatly benefited themselves and also the company by increasing their productivity. Especially working mothers and people who wanted to pursue a vocation or any self-help training have utilized it very well. Others are still testing the waters and are not entirely convinced about them not losing focus with this kind of unadulterated freedom of choice. We are still continuing with this and intend to encourage more and more of our employees to use the benefits of this system.
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