Like a lot of self-employed people, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson have no leased work space and no standard work hours. The mailing address for their two-person consulting firm, CultureRx, is Thompson’s Twin Cities home. In their case, however, it’s not just a cost-saving convenience. It’s a statement.
CultureRx is on a mission to eradicate the 8-to-5 work day—or any defined work day or workplace—as a basic expectation in the working world.
Ressler and Thompson are the former Best Buy employees turned guerilla management theorists who sparked a cultural revolution at the retailer’s Richfield headquarters. Their model, insinuated into Best Buy on a small scale beginning in 2003 and now a way of life for about 3,000 people—roughly 80 percent of the headquarters staff—is called the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE.
The key idea is that “you get paid for a chunk of work, not a chunk of time,” as Ressler and Thompson put it in their 2008 manifesto Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.
In a ROWE, nobody is expected to be in the office—or anyplace else—on any rigid schedule. No permission is required to keep a dentist’s appointment at 10 a.m., go to a child’s soccer game on a Tuesday afternoon, or even be away for days on a trip out of the country. Attendance at all meetings is optional; people go only if they see a clear reason to be present. Provided an employee’s agreed-upon chunk of work gets done correctly and on time, it’s nobody else’s business whether it got done in the office at 2 p.m. or in a lake cabin 100 miles away at 2 a.m.
The upshot, in other favorite Ressler and Thompson encapsulations of their concept, is that “Everyone is treated as an adult,” “You are the CEO of your own job,” and “Every day feels like Saturday” (in that you decide when to do your chores and when to do some- thing else).
CultureRx was founded in 2005 as a Best Buy subsidiary, headed by HR managers Ressler and Thompson, to spread the ROWE gospel to other companies. In 2007, the partners took ownership of the intellectual property, left Best Buy, and set out on their own, using a line of credit on Thompson’s home to cover start-up costs.
Sales in 2008, their first full year of independent operation, totaled $425,000. By the end of this year, Ressler and Thompson expect revenues to reach about $780,000. The money comes from consulting and speaking engagements, book sales, and a ROWE Launch Kit ($899), sold to employers who want to make a DIY cultural shift at their companies rather than hiring CultureRx.
