How did a For­tune 100 com­pany increase pro­ductiv­ity at headquar­ters by a third while decreas­ing vol­un­tary turnover (cor­por­ate euphem­ism for quit­ting) as much as 90%?

Best Buy Co, Inc., the lead­ing elec­tron­ics retailer in the US, used to be known for its killer hours, herd-riding bosses, and high turnover. Now it is home to a work­place revolu­tion called ROWE, for “results-only work envir­on­ment,” that seeks to demol­ish decades-old busi­ness dogma that equates phys­ical pres­ence with productivity.

In a ROWE, people do whatever they want whenever they want as long as the work gets done. In the park or in a cof­fee shop, At mid­night or 3 a.m. or on Sunday. There are no sched­ules. No man­dat­ory meet­ings. In short, work is no longer a place where you go, but some­thing you do.

There isn’t any cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion without employee satisfaction

It seems to be work­ing. Since the program’s imple­ment­a­tion, aver­age vol­un­tary turnover has fallen drastic­ally. Mean­while, 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.

The crazy thing is that ROWE wasn’t author­ized by the CEO, Brad Ander­son, but began as a “guer­illa” ini­ti­at­ive nur­tured by innov­at­ive employ­ees that even­tu­ally trans­formed the com­pany (to be sure, Ander­son encour­ages such bottom-up, stealth innovation).

Ulti­mately, for Best Buy, the new approach to work is about stay­ing com­pet­it­ive, not just help­ing its employ­ees. Like many other com­pan­ies facing global com­pet­i­tion, Best Buy expects more train­ing, more ini­ti­at­ive, more cre­ativ­ity from all its employees.

A big part of ROWE involves innov­at­ive use of tech­no­logy and tech com­pan­ies have been going bedouin for sev­eral years. At IBM, 40% of the work­force has no offi­cial office; at AT&T, a third of man­agers are untethered. Sun Microsys­tems Inc. cal­cu­lates that it’s saved $400 mil­lion over six years in real estate costs by allow­ing nearly half of all employ­ees to work any­where they want.

Once people start to chal­lenge the absurdit­ies of the work­place, they start to real­ize that there is no reason why they can’t deliver res­ults on their own terms. The ripple effect a ROWE cre­ates in a team, depart­ment or organ­iz­a­tion is huge, but the core idea is very simple: praise the out­comes, not the behavior.

For more inform­a­tion there is a TIME art­icle on ROWE and Best Buy