Radical Retention Strategies

The single most impressive corporate campus I've ever visited is that of Best Buy, the retailing giant based outside of Minneapolis. When BusinessWeek describes the place as "ultramodern," it's not saying half of it. There are coffee shops, multimedia presentations playing in the walls, dry cleaning services, child care on sight, and an energy like you feel in top-end shopping centers.

Now Best Buy is in the midst of experimenting with a "results-only work environment," or ROWE. As BusinessWeek describes it:

Hence workers pulling into the company's amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren't considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It's O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid.

and

... arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. "This is like TiVo for your work," says the program's co-founder, Jody Thompson. By the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Starting in February, the new work environment will become an official part of Best Buy's recruiting pitch as well as its orientation for new hires. And 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.

The article goes onto to discuss how other companies have approached Best Buy to learn more about the strategy, with an eye toward adopting it themselves. For good reason:

Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE. Employee engagement, which measures employee satisfaction and is often a barometer for retention, is way up too, according to the Gallup Organization, which audits corporate cultures.

I bring all this up because not only does Best Buy employ accountants, auditors and tax professionals (though there's no word on whether those departments are involved in ROWE just yet), but because the challenges the program addresses are the same as those faced by any number of accounting and auditing firms struggling to hang on to their people: Long hours, high stress, no life.

Best Buy smashes the clock [BusinessWeek via MSNBC]