The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Operational decision · 2003–2013
Best Buy's ROWE pays for results, not hours — 41% productivity, 90% less turnover
Two Best Buy employees replace face time with a results-only culture: no fixed schedules or mandatory meetings, just output — productivity climbs 41%.
Best Buy
What it had to solve
At Best Buy's corporate headquarters in the early 2000s, the culture rewarded presence: staff felt judged by the hours they sat at their desks, and schedules, meetings and clock-watching ate the day. Two employees, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, argued that what mattered was the work that got done, not where or when it happened.
How it works
Best Buy's Results-Only Work Environment began as an argument between two employees and their company's habits. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, who worked at the retailer's headquarters, noticed that the office measured attendance rather than achievement: people were praised for being at their desks and punished, implicitly, for leaving early, even when the work was done. Their proposal was blunt — stop counting hours and start counting results.
Under ROWE, employees had no fixed schedules and no mandatory meetings. They could work from wherever they chose, at whatever times they chose, as long as the outcomes they had agreed with their teams were delivered. Managers stopped policing presence and started managing output, and teams themselves decided what done looked like. The idea spread from volunteer pilot teams across Best Buy's corporate workforce.
The numbers made the case. From 2005 to 2007, productivity in ROWE departments rose 41% while voluntary turnover fell nearly 90%, which Best Buy estimated was worth about $16 million a year. The program became one of the most-discussed workplace experiments of the decade, and its creators took the model to other companies as consultants.
The experiment had a clear endpoint: in March 2013, CEO Hubert Joly eliminated ROWE during Best Buy's turnaround, saying the program was fundamentally flawed from a leadership standpoint. Ressler and Thompson publicly defended the model they had built, arguing the company was retreating from accountability toward old-fashioned management.
Why it lands
- It inverted the core employment contract: pay for delivered results instead of purchased time.
- Removing schedules and mandatory meetings forced teams to agree explicitly on what done means.
- Managers shifted from watching clocks and bodies to coaching outcomes, which changed their jobs too.
- Voluntary turnover fell roughly 90%, showing the policy also worked as retention and culture.
- It demonstrated that output-based freedom could scale inside a big corporate headquarters, not just startups.
What it did
Between 2005 and 2007, productivity in ROWE departments rose 41% while voluntary turnover fell nearly 90%, saving Best Buy an estimated $16 million a year; the experiment became a national story about measuring output instead of hours.
What you can take
Give autonomy and define what done means, and people manage themselves; but a culture change rests on leadership continuity — a new boss can reverse measured success in a day.
Since then
ROWE ran at Best Buy for roughly a decade before the 2013 reversal, and its life cycle became part of its lesson: Ressler and Thompson spun the method into a consulting practice and defended it publicly when Joly ended it as part of a broader turnaround. The acronym survived as shorthand for results-based management, and the measured gains — 41% productivity, roughly 90% lower voluntary turnover — remain the standard citations whenever companies debate whether to manage presence or output.
Sources
- Can ROWE Improve Your Workplace Productivity?
- Finding Freedom at Work
- The End of Working From Home: Best Buy Kills Flexible Work Program
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