Daily affirmations of a word mercenary
Best Buy’s corporate headquarters is doing something really cool — they’re completely unleashing their employees and letting them work whenever and however they want. As long as the work gets done.
And now story time. I actually quit my first post-college job because it became clear to me that the company rewarded hours instead of productivity. I watched a coworker get rewarded for putting in an 70-hour-week … 20 hours of which involved retyping a 15-page document rather than ask me to send him the file to edit. (I can only imagine how efficiently the other 50 hours must have been spent.) Did I mention that the coworker was a hunt-n-peck typist? And that he could have spent 10 minutes getting the file from me, but instead he RETYPED THE WHOLE THING? And that then management took him out for a formal steak “thank you” dinner that concluded with overpriced brandy? I quit a couple of months later, and the company went out of business a year after that.
Now I work for a company that understands that they get their best from me when they let me work 32 productive hours a week. Why don’t more employers understand this?
Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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amy
December 7th, 2006 at 5:44 am
The whole face-time thing is one of the big reasons I got out of the office-work world — that, and multi-tasking, which drives me insane. This sounds like it could be really revolutionary — I hope it takes off.
michelle
December 7th, 2006 at 10:18 am
meetings that eat up half your day make me the craziest. i hate when you get to one only to find the person who called it isn’t even prepared. i once had a managing editor show up to the meeting he called, a project kickoff meeting, and say, “so who called this meeting?” sheesh! i think i’ll go blog about this now. lol.
Will Merydith
December 7th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
I used to call Movies.com “Meetings.com”. I started not going to meetings in order to get work done and get home at a decent time and was told by the VP that meetings are not optional, and you need to make up the time to do the work around the meeting.
Well that works well if you’re one of the people who does practically nothing (except schedule meetings), but that didn’t work for me. That was the beginning of the end.
I’ve worked on countless teams were hours worked were worn like a badge of honor regardless of productivity. The problem is really that most managers (and the business environments they work in), have no method for measuring productivity, so they take the easy way out and look at hours “worked”. It’s a bullshit system and is why productive employees eventually move on.
ivy
December 7th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
What do you think about this as a class issue? It is only middle-class and upper-middle-class people who are in jobs that can have this privilige. You can be damn well sure that the peons of Best Buy are still chained to their desks and their receptionist still has to ask to use the bathroom.
Ariel
December 7th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Ivy, I can’t speak for the receptionists, but the article makes it sound like this was a change that didn’t come from the top — it was something started by the underlings. It also sounds like the company looking to bring the idea to the retail outlets as well, which would doubtless include lots of entry level, low-paying jobs.
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.
brodie
December 7th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Uhm, not to be nay-sayer, but it’ll never work on the retail floor. That being said, at the desk job level, it is a great idea for all the reasons mentioned above.
Ariel
December 7th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Brodie, my theory is that only certain retail positions (like stockers) would be truly “clockless.” Because it works to say “As long as that palette is shelved by 8am Tuesday, we don’t care when you do it,” but it doesn’t really work to say “Just make sure 1000 people get rung up on Tuesday.”
Brodie
December 8th, 2006 at 10:06 am
It could work at the level of stockist, but I am guessing “No”, generally. Best Buy, with 80,000 employees and 400 locations can’t really afford to be anything other than a well-oiled-machine when it comes to customer presentation and interaction. Loss of on-shelf time is directly correlated to loss of revenue. As someone who is an owner of a retail store, I see it everyday. http://bestbuysux.org/comments.html shows how the company is not all that great at treating employees in some cases. I like Best Buy, but since we don’t have one in my town, I can’t really speak to how they run their business in the end.
Serene
December 8th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
I still think Best Buy is from the fru-its of the devil (think So I Married an Axe Murderer).
I used to work for Intel and to see a sea of blue shirts cheering at 6am sales meeting is both disturbing and hilarious.