If you’re looking for a role model when forming your corporate culture check out Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy.

While Anderson’s external focus is customer experience, for a sample just walk into any store, internally he’s enabled a culture that allows ideas to move from the bottom up, as opposed to top down. And not just little ideas, but giant ones, such as eliminating required work hours for the entire company—can’t get much bigger than that!

The program is called ROWE (results-only work environment) and was conceived of, and developed by, HR mangers Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler, who recognized that the main thing that “presence” and “productivity” have in common is that they both start with a “p.”

Since the idea of telecommuting surfaced, nearly 25 years ago, there has always been tremendous resistance by managers, based in fear, to the idea that people can be productive outside of the boss’ sight. This is well summed up by the attitude of the general manager of BestBuy.com, senior vice-president J. T. Thompson, “who was privately terrified about the loss of control” when he first heard about ROWE. The difference is that Thompson dealt with his fear, took the risk, and is reaping the reward.

How big a reward?

“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.”

In fact, ROWE is a subculture, possible only because of the overall culture fostered by Anderson, who encourages “bottom-up, stealth innovation.” He and his team believes in ROWE so much that “they have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx, to help other companies go clockless.”

In a response to the question, “Where do you find new business ideas?” Anderson shows just how well listening to workers can pay off.

I believe that some of our best ideas have come from the people who are furthest removed from the CEO’s office – those line-level employees who interact with our customers each and every day. We’ve got a wonderful team of eccentric people working in our Manhattan store on 44th Street and Fifth Avenue. Now, there’s a large Brazilian community near the store, and the manager said, “Hey, we don’t do anything to cater to them.” So he hired folks who spoke the language in the store. They wound up discovering that there are cruise ships of Brazilians that come to New York City, so they contacted the travel company and found that the store was a desirable stop for them. So all of a sudden we have buses of tour groups pulling up on Sundays. If we waited for someone in Minnesota to come up with that idea, we’d still be waiting.

But it goes much further than that. While other companies talk about their multicultural hiring, Best Buy turns theirs into a competitive advantage. Few people think of retail sales jobs as career moves, but they can be.

When a delegation from China recently toured Vancouver-area Future Shop stores, Kevin Layden [chief operating officer of Best Buy International] was the only one in the group who needed an interpreter.

In every store they entered, Chinese partners of the retail chain met Future Shop employees who not only talked the same technical language – they were all in the electronics retailing field – but spoke Mandarin as well.

Among the Canadian hosts to the Chinese delegation was Yingming Gao, manager of a Future Shop store in Surrey, B.C., and a 12-year veteran of the company.

Mr. Layden says the key to managing diversity, and to understanding different cultures, is to listen, learn and adopt the best ideas from a variety of sources, rather than imposing one corporate viewpoint.

Mr. Gao, who is expected to take on a management role in the Nanjing store, understands the differences in business philosophy, as well as the cultural differences. He aims to help Best Buy and Five Star bridge differences without disrupting Five Star’s relationship with customers.

The greatest cultures aren’t pronouncements, they are enablers that incite creative thinking at all levels, listen to the results, act on them and give credit where it’s due.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under About Leadership, Culture, What Leaders DO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: rowe
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.