ROWE Program at Best Buy - Essay Example

Plachy & Plachy (1998) also confirms that ROWE assists managers to design feasible ways of improving their output. Best Buy, for instance, is an international company that applies the ROWE program. This paper, in effect, explores ROWE program at Best Bay using various subheadings. Culture of Best Buy Best Buy Co., Inc. is an international electronic retailer that majorly sells in the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Turkey, China, and Canada. As an important aspect of the culture in Best Buy, the organization holds close social media as a form of empowering its employees.

In other words, the company reaps massive productive gain through proper application of social media. Gibson & Billings (2003) points out three important social media tools applied in Best Buy. The Loop Marketplace, as one tool, involves replacing traditional suggestion box, where employees submit and share ideas, with specific market meeting points. Instead of collecting opinions of customers using suggestion boxes, the company identifies specific marketplaces where customers could converge and air out their views.

As a second tool, Best Buy applies the Prediction Market tool to predict future market behaviors. Through prediction strategy, the organization designs suitable ways of controlling both supply and price of its products. The third social media tool the company has productively implemented is the Blue Shirt Nation. The latter tool involves diverting focus from improvement of pension schemes to modification of IT systems. Application of modern technological advancements has created a work environment where both employees and employers could freely interact.

Approach to Organizational Change that ROWE Program Illustrates Gibson & Billings (2003) asserts that Best Buy has transformed its workplace by demolishing old systems where physical presence of a worker is equated to productivity of the worker. That is, from the name of the program, “results-only work environment,” Best Buy has focused on productivity of an employee, as an organizational change. Delmont (2005) also supports that the program in Best Buy objects at judging performance of a workforce on its output instead of duration spent in a meeting or in an office.

Practically, ROWE program allows employees in the company to enter and exit their workplaces at any time of the day. There is no penalty or fine to an employee arriving after the official opening hours or leaving before the official business hours. Delmont (2005) summarizes that the program perceives work as something to do but not somewhere to go. The company is, therefore, interested in knowing whether work is satisfactorily completed. Through ROWE program, two major positive outcomes have been felt in the company.

Overall employee satisfactory has shoot up following improvement in every department. Also report by Gallup, an organization that audits corporate cultures, indicates that the company’s productivity has climbed up by 35% (Delmont, 2005). Resistance ROWE program at Best Buy Faces Even though ROWE program has significant effects in improvement of overall productivity of an organization and employees satisfaction, it, however, faces certain challenges. Resistance often comes from staffs members who appear to be