CONCEPT
Results-Only Work Environment
An organizational design pioneered at Best Buy in the mid-2000s in which performance is evaluated solely on outcomes — no hours requirements, no presence expectations, no temporal availability demands.
Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) is the most developed organizational intervention aimed at decoupling compensation from hours. In a ROWE, workers are evaluated on what they accomplish rather than on when or where they accomplish it, with no mandatory schedule, no core hours, and no presence requirements. The approach was developed at Best Buy's corporate headquarters by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in 2003 and subsequently implemented in various forms across multiple organizations. Its relevance to Schor's framework is that it represents one institutional mechanism for redirecting productivity gains from hours to time: if a worker can produce the same result in fewer hours, the ROWE design allows her to capture the gain as time rather than requiring her to fill the saved hours with additional work.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The ROWE implementation at Best Buy produced documented improvements in productivity, engagement, and retention, and the approach spread to multiple other organizations. However, its scaling has been limited. Best Buy