Marcus Walters

Speaking of family-friendly workplace policies (as we were last week), I have written an essay for the Magazine this weekend about women in the recession, and one of the things I explore is how such policies are being cut and eliminated just when many workers need them most. The American Society of Human Resource Managers found that while the number of companies offering things like flextime, part-time and telecommuting schedules had been increasing steadily leading up to the down-turn, the latest measure showed a drop of five percent.

But there are some exceptions to that trend — places where the commitment to flexibility is actually increasing. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson are among those leading the push-back. The duo first made a name for themselves building what they call a Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, at Best Buy’s headquarters in Minneapolis. The way ROWE works is simple, yet it goes many steps beyond the more common flexibility options, which may tweak the workplace, but don’t overhaul it. ROWE, its creators say, allows all employees to “work wherever they want whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.”

So at Best Buy, 80 percent of the corporate staff gets to come and go as they please. One runs meetings by teleconference from his cabin near a lake; another does much of his work electronically while following his favorite rock band around the country. Workers arrive “late” and leave “early,” with no judgment or need to explain, because there is no “late” or “early” under ROWE, and productivity isn’t judged by how many hours someone puts in the chair but rather the quality and quantity of their work.

Ressler and Thompson left Best Buy just before the recession began, to write a book entitled “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It,” and to create their own company, Culture Rx, which aims to bring ROWE to workplaces everywhere. Their services are not cheap, however, and because one of their two key selling points is that turnover rates drop as employees are given more control over their work schedules, it seemed it might be a tough sell when corporate budgets were tightening. (In fact, I spent months following the team during the spring and summer of 2008, expecting I would write a magazine article about their work, but the piece was dropped by the fall of that year, because talk of employee retention seemed like a relic of the old economy.)

Their other key point, however, is that employee-driven work is good for productivity; people do more and better work when they are given the latitude to decide how and when to do it. And in an era when staffs are being trimmed, and those who remain are being asked to do more with less, that argument is having traction. Flexibility is also something that employers can give to their workers at a time when more traditional rewards — like a raise — are problematic.

Perhaps because of these reasons, business at CultureRx is picking up. The Gap Outlet, a division of Gap, Inc. announced last month that the 137 employees at corporate headquarters in San Francisco have “migrated” to ROWE. And the City of Minneapolis has begun a pilot program to bring the philosophy to companies along the overcrowded 35W corridor, with the goal of reducing commuter traffic congestion (if you can work wherever you want, whenever you want, you are not necessarily going to be clocking in at the office from 9:00 to 5:00.)

These are glimmers, yes, but they are welcome ones — signs that the recession has not destroyed a decade of progress.

You can read my entire essay here, then come back and join the conversation about whether flexible work is a contradiction in a down economy (and also about the larger subject of the essay, which is why the downturn has been somehow “good” for women at the expense of men).