ROWE ROWE ROWE the pun(t)

Reading Sylwia's interesting post on the results only work ethics model (ROWE for short) has inspired me to reveal something of my past experiences as a grad student. As Sylwia says, you can learn more about what ROWE involves on Lyndsay Blakely's post. In basic terms it is a work model where employees chose how much they work and are judged purely on results.

I would say that ROWE comes as standard for scientists in universities, here's why

• The work a group does and the money coming in is judged on perceived merit
• Must compete with Japanese and Americans who take goal orientation to the n'th degree
  
• The passion required and low salary mean that it is a vocation more often than not
  
• Supervisors would be hypocritical if they denied access to the social opportunities they themselves enjoyed as grad students, they may chose instead to dangle carrots like conference tickets for achieving milestones.

According to the post meantioned before "Perhaps the most significant one is the fact that for a ROWE to be effective, it requires a mature, goal-oriented manager." The crushing irony of the subtext of this sentence is, that the manager in question probably can't learn this maturity in a ROWE workplace. My conclusion is therefore:

Academics need to have done other jobs to to get good at their job!

They could also do with setting their job as supervisors in the context of corporations trying out ROWE. As a grad student, I was always told things like "it's different in academia" maybe it's not so different after all.

Guess I've learnt some things about management from my academic roller-coaster ride anyway. I will have to upload the journal article I contributed to one of these days, see how good my science communication and marketing is as I keep on banging on about it.