One of last year’s winners in the Optimas Awards, which Workforce Management gives for excellence in workforce management practices, was Best Buy and CultureRx, a subsidiary company that Best Buy launched. The radical notion put forth by Best Buy and the founders of CultureRx, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, was that the only thing that should matter about work is that it gets done. When and where it gets done and how many hours someone puts into it are not relevant. Results are the only thing that matter. They call this approach the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE for short. The program was also profiled in a Workforce Management feature story in 2006.

Now Ressler and Thompson have laid out the argument in support of the result-only workplace in Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke—the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific. According to the authors, virtually all of Best Buy’s 3,000 corporate headquarters employees are now working in a results-only environment. No one keeps track of when they start working or when they stop. No one expects to see them at a desk at a certain time. Every meeting is optional.

According to the book, ROWE has real cost impacts. For instance, lower turnover among three work teams at Best Buy—just 377 employees—has saved the company nearly $7 million in voluntary turnover costs. Productivity is up, the authors say.

The book is peppered with first-person accounts of Best Buy employees talking about how ROWE has improved their working lives—and their personal lives too. One employee, an e-learning specialist whose work is fairly self-contained, talks about how ROWE enabled him to spend 19 days in Europe following the Dave Matthews Band on tour.

“I basically do what I want, when I want, all the time. I do my work, for the most part, when it is convenient for me. Since I always get my work done, I can enjoy life to the fullest while working for a great company.”

That sounds pretty much like paradise—and to some people, paradise can only be achieved after death. Ressler and Thompson argue on virtually every page of the book that we don’t have to wait that long.

To a certain degree, I think Ressler and Thompson are right. Some work can be done differently than the way it is now. Technology, in the form of cell phones, the Internet and wireless connections, lets some people do work wherever and whenever they want. That’s very often how we do work at Workforce Management. Our reporters and editors mostly work in offices, but sometimes we work at home because that beats the time (and cost) of commuting, or because we have dentist appointments, kids’ school events, yoga class. You know—life.

Ressler and Thompson know that there are plenty of naysayers out there in workland, so the book has lots of sidebars headlined “Yeah, But …”. These anticipate common objections to ROWE. And the authors’ answers are good ones, as far as they go. Any HR reader, however, is bound to start asking, “But what about hourly employees? What about vacation time and PTO? What about staffing the shop floor?”

Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It does point out that there are hourly workers at Best Buy’s headquarters who work in a results-only fashion but must track their time because of federal wage and hour laws. “We think this is stupid and outdated,” the authors write. “Having to track your time even when you’re delivering results makes people feel like second-class citizens. … We believe that eventually the Department of Labor is going to have to change its laws to catch up with the new realities of the global economy.” They also question, rather blithely, whether FMLA would be necessary if companies would just adopt ROWE.

Maybe they’re right, and ROWE is the answer to all our workplace woes. But given the glacial pace of change at the Labor Department and battleground that is wage and hour law and employee leave law, I don’t think we should hold our breath. In fact, I think the authors might be a little naive about how fiercely some constituencies will fight to retain such things as nonexempt job status and disability leaves. “As ROWE spreads, these are issues that we’ll have to work together to resolve.” Work together? I don’t think they’ve met Andy Stern and the Service Employees International Union.

At the risk of sounding like a “Yeah, but …” type myself, ROWE really is designed for knowledge workers, and there are certainly plenty of those trapped in old-fashioned work environments. There are also thousands of companies and millions of workers for whom the full-on ROWE concept is not possible, including schools and their teachers, hospitals and their nurses, stores and their clerks, manufacturing facilities and their line workers. Even Best Buy hasn’t converted its stores to ROWE, although Ressler and Thompson have said that’s being contemplated.

I’m sure there is some kind of modified ROWE that would work in some organizations. Hospitals, for example, are increasingly using software that lets nurses and other medical professionals pick their own schedules. Manufacturing probably could come up with its own version of voluntary scheduling. But I think it will be a very long time before Taco Bell or J.C. Penney let their employees do their work when it’s convenient for them.

I will say this for Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: It made me think about my relationship to time and my notions of when I’m “on the clock” or not. It made me pay attention to the damage I could be doing to co-workers if I imply, even with a joke, that their working at home, or their time of arrival or departure, is in any way related to how well they’re doing their work. The authors call that kind of time-slave backbiting “sludge,” and say that it poisons the workplace. I think they’re right. If the only thing that Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It accomplishes is getting managers to stop watching clocks and start measuring results, they’ll have done all of us a favor.