COVID-19 vs. Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)

Last week, our government declared a state of emergency. Today, a national quarantine was imposed. More and more countries are going to do the same to handle the COVID-19 crisis. I don’t want to talk about COVID-19 and its impact on the global economy; I’m no expert there. I’ll take it from a company perspective — how this situation affects team leaders and team members. I strongly believe that having ROWE in place (or at least leaning towards it) is now more important than ever as many people will be required to work from home.

Are we ready for ROWE?

We are a software company. Between 2004–2015, we managed to develop a mature product and experienced rapid growth. With having thousands of customers and hundreds of employees all around the world came challenges. Moreover, we saw the market shifting towards Software-as-a-Service. Recognizing a window of opportunity there, we started working on a new product, with a new business model. We felt the need to change our way of working, and the mindset of our people. We wanted to start fresh, and ROWE was something to strive for.

As I began to lead the Customer Success department, I read a book called Why managing sucks and how to fix it by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Before I read it, I thought I knew everything.

• Accomplishing agile transformation? Check.
• Establishing distributed teams (even though having meetings from Europe with the US and Australia was a weekly challenge)? Check.
• People working from home all the time? Check.
• Setting up well-described roles and responsibilities? Check.

I read the book just out of curiosity so that I could recommend it to others for their personal development. I felt so confident. Oh boy, how wrong was I! There were countless eye-opening moments while reading the book, and lessons learned during the implementation. Let me share those with you.

1. Drop the assumptions

The change is hard, especially when it contradicts your beliefs. I remember the time when we were punching the clock, and I was proud to work over 200 hours a month. For several months in a row. I was the first one in the office and the last one to leave. It felt like the only way to give it 100%. I believed one needed to be in the office to have efficient communication with others, to be effective, to make a difference. I presumed people present in the office were the ones working, while whoever worked remotely was, in fact, slacking off. Now I see how crazy I was! The book made me realize that:

“Work is something we do, not a place we go to.”

So I started giving my colleagues more freedom and decided to fight all the presumptions in my head. Now it’s up to them if they want to work from home, a co-working space, a teahouse, or whatever else does it for them. Whatever is best for their respective team.

2. Team, team, team

Yes, the team. We needed to add the team aspect as well. For us, ROWE is:

“Work whenever you want, wherever you want, as long as the work gets done.”

While everyone understands we win and lose as a team! When people work together and help each other, not only do they achieve better team results, but they also feel better because they contribute to something bigger than themselves. That is rewarding. Moreover, being a part of the winning team feels great. Even though we appreciate individual contributions, we celebrate as a team! And when things go south, we don’t finger-point, but we learn, again, as a team.

3. ROWE and Agile can be a match

It’s been ten years since we set off an agile transformation in our product development team. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, however, I bet everyone is now glad we have moved on from the waterfall era definitively. It was a bumpy ride with highs and lows on the way. Having said that, we found our way to Scrum eventually and people got used to it. We see the benefits and it works. I hope, in five years, the memories of the pre-ROWE age will feel as cringe-worthy as when we think about waterfall today. Both ROWE and Agile encourage a person to be:

1. proactive — you need to take the initiative and ownership of your work.

2. mature — it gives you responsibility and holds you accountable.

3. communicative — it requires you to talk to your teammates.

It took some time and effort to find a way to do team retrospectives, groomings, daily standups, and other ceremonies remotely. Needless to say, it was not something to write home about at the beginning, but it proved to be worth stepping out of our comfort zone in the end. If you work with people who are communicative, proactive, responsible and accountable, nothing will stop you!

4. Communication is key

I remember myself saying: “Let’s wait till you get to the office, and we’ll discuss that in person.” Not anymore. Everybody has a stable Internet connection with a decent webcam, people don’t need to wait. You don’t need to be in the same room to have a conversation. There were so many people who came into our office asking if Martin was in or when he was going to be. My answer for these situations? “Just text him…” I saw people using it as an excuse that they were not able to talk to others in person. But it’s pointless. There are many tools for improving collaboration, from communication to project management to content publishing. You can do it. Real-time. There is one more thing to add though.

5. You get what you measure — 4DX, OKRs

Here’s a little confession: we love frameworks. Or at least I do. The Advantage, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, Objectives and Key Results, Blue Ocean, 7 Strata, The Hedgehog concept, Lean Canvas, CORE, Scrum, Kanban, you name it. We’ve tried it all. We’ve failed a lot. We’ve learned a lot. One thing remains, for sure: you get what you measure. I do not want that to be the time people spend in the office. It wouldn’t help our customers, nor would it help our colleagues; it simply wouldn’t help at all. No matter what framework we used, we always pushed hard to make sure everybody knew what we were aiming for as a company, as a team, and as individuals. We’ve been using OKRs for around two years now, and for me, it’s definitely something to recommend, hands down. You can read our lessons learned (aka 7 deadly sins of OKRs) written by Rocky, who is leading Developer Relations here at Kentico and using OKRs daily.

Where to start?

If you are a leader yourself and have the power to influence the way your team or even your company as a whole work, you may want to read more about ROWE and/or reach out to CultureRx at http://gorowe.com for ROWE implementation support. Set measurable goals, and help your people grow. In the book, there are 50 things to try or avoid. I encouraged my people to pick just three, practice, and once they master something, pick another one. Personally, these were my first things on the list:

1. Review and remove all ambiguous language from our goals and replace it with concrete, measurable goal statements (Key Results).

2. Pick a couple of face-to-face meetings on my calendar, and choose to communicate in a different way to get to the same result.

3. Stop recognizing people for how much time they worked, how late they worked, or how early they came into the office.

If you are a team member who wants to be treated differently, be a self-starter, take ownership, and take more responsibility. Ask the big questions like “Why are we doing it? How will we measure success?” Talk more about the work, not the way it’s done. Show others that you can bring results, no matter where and when you work. Lead by example, people will notice. Your leader certainly will.

Good luck.