In this blog series, Fine Point Consulting staff discuss the process, rewards, and challenges of becoming a certified Results-Only Work Environment, an HR management strategy wherein employees are paid for results, rather than the number of hours worked. Certification is expected to be complete sometime this summer (2015).
This week, Leah Roe discusses FPC’s introduction to ROWE and the decision to move forward with certification.
“We were first introduced to the idea of a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) through a podcast featuring Jody Thompson, one of the co-creators of ROWE and co-CEO of the organization that certifies ROWE organizations. We’d been talking internally at Fine Point about moving to a value-pricing model for our services and felt like the ROWE would tie in really nicely with this idea of focusing on outcomes for our clients, rather than hours and minutes.
“When we attended a ROWE conference in Rockford in March, it just solidified our feeling that this was the way to go. We felt like there was finally a structure for the way we had been feeling about work and the way we wanted to work. We’ve always felt that making our clients happy and getting results is far more important than tracking the minutiae of a particular employee’s schedule. With ROWE, employees are responsible for their own measurable results and client satisfaction—when and where the employee chooses to do this is up to them. The ROWE certification gives us the resources and training to help make this methodology work for us.
“A ROWE is particularly well-suited to Fine Point because we’re an outsourced business anyway. As long as we’re delivering results and keeping them happy, our clients don’t really care when or where we’re working. Fine Point is also a young, energetic company, and I think our employees are going to love the amount of freedom this gives them to live their lives.
“It will be interesting to see how the rollout goes as we move through the certification process. Of course, we have those natural concerns about people working too little or too much with a ROWE, or what would happen if one member of our staff hates it, or how we will go about measuring work capacity if someone has too much work or too little. These are good conversations to have, and the ROWE resources have been really helpful in addressing these “what if” scenarios—they’ve really thought of everything.”
Stay tuned for future posts on the ROWE rollout, and be sure to visit Fine Point Consulting for a complete list of the tools and services we use to help businesses succeed.
