The way that ROWE plays out at Centresource is that each employee has a certain metric that he or she is required to meet, such as a certain number of billable hours tracked each week, and as long as that goal is met, when or where it is done doesn’t matter. In order to ensure that employees could still do their job, team members must be reachable on weekdays between 8am and 6pm, either by phone or instant message.

So, now, after a year of ROWE, we thought it appropriate to stop and take stock of what the staff and leadership of Centresource think, with a year of ROWE experience behind them. We asked the team to share some of their initial fears, what unexpected benefits were realized, and in general, their thoughts on one year of ROWE. Here’s what the team had to say:

Centresource President and Founder, Nicholas Holland, commented that on “…the first day of ROWE, the office was a ghost town. Actually, it was a ghost town the whole week.” It stressed him out. “Everyone kept encouraging me to sweat through it and deal with it, and sure enough: the metrics were being met.”

CEO Evan Owens — “I was nervous about the morale / unity of the team. With team members in various locations I feared that we might lose some camaraderie. However, it’s improved as we now have very clear expectations of ‘what matters’ for each other rather than potentially getting frustrated by the smallest things.”

COO Chris Wage — “The flexibility it gives is amazing. Getting sick is no longer an existential dilemma of whether or not I want to sacrifice a half-vacation day to sleep in. I merely sleep in, medicate myself, and then work late. The separation between your home and work life can get even foggier, so you have to be diligent in keeping it separated. We were concerned that our ability to stay on top of metrics and performance might be difficult, but so far so good.”

CIO Chip Hayner — “ROWE has removed all traces of guilt that used to exist around the office: guilt that traffic (or one too many times hitting the sleep button) caused you to be 5 minutes late, guilt that you had to run an afternoon errand (so you worked through lunch), guilt that your lunch break took 10 minutes longer than expected… Instead, these feelings have been replaced with an expectation that a) you’re reachable if needed, and b) your work will get done — something that everyone has easily stepped up to reach.”

Manager of strategic consulting Will Acuff — “ROWE has been phenomenal. I love the flexibility it has allowed me and my family. I’ve noticed a few communication gaps but nothing that has been anywhere close to my worst case scenarios. All in all I think it has been a great success for CS.”

Strategic consultant Patrick Quicci — “ROWE was one of the deciding factors for me in taking a job with CentreSource. I love having the ability to work remotely and on my own time depending on what my schedule entails.”

Strategic consultant Matt Phillips — “I have loved working under ROWE. The biggest shift in my normal 8-5 mode has been avoiding peak traffic times. I live 40 minutes away on a good day, but its taken up to 90 minutes to drive home on certain days. With ROWE, I can anticipate the weather issues and come in late or leave early. That’s time I get back in my life which was always lost. Its been huge.”

Manager of interactive consulting Katy Ludington — “ROWE has been amazing. It has meant less stress and more productivity which has been the key to my success. If I’m up late working, I don’t feel like I have to rush in the office as soon as I get up in the morning. I honestly think I work more since ROWE was introduced because I feel like the metrics we have to hit are more closely monitored and I want to keep the system going.”

Strategic consultant Jon Arnold — “Having come from the corporate world, ROWE is like a breath of fresh air. I’m used to being nagged for not showing up on time. I’ve enjoyed this team’s approach to working together: there is no condescension for not being in the office, and working remotely is actually encouraged. I have found working from home or remote to be so inspiring and productive (although our office and team is pretty awesome).”

Developer David Calhoun — “ROWE is great. It negates a lot of stress about work. I love the ability to just take a break in the middle of the day, if things just aren’t rolling or I can’t focus. I can always just pick work back up later in evening.”

And for more inspiration on ROWE, here’s what inspired Nick Holland to make the change in the first place. First, Nick found this thoughtful blog post on dealing with late employees. The post impacted him, but what really changed his mind was the comments. They took the blog post to task and really suggested a new way of dealing with employees and their time.

And if you have time, dig into this amazing presentation on Netflix’s corporate culture. Nick found it incredibly inspirational for our ROWE implementation. It’s massive, complex, and full of amazing thoughts on how a corporation should treat it’s employees.

Just recently, Foursquare rolled out a new tool for businesses to take greater control over their venue and/or brand on its location-based social network.

For those unfamiliar with Foursquare, it allows people with GPS-enabled phones to “check-in” at various locations from a mobile website, or an installed app.  Users select their exact location from a list of venues that the app locates nearby. Each venue check-in earns the user points and sometimes “badges”.  The user who checks in the most within a certain time period is awarded the title of “mayor” for that location.

Until now, small business owners had very little that they could do to take advantage of their presence on Foursquare.  That has all changed with this recent roll-out of Foursquare for Business.  Now, a business owner can claim their venue on Foursquare, and add specials for users that check-in at their location.  Specials could include things like giving a user 10% off their purchase on every fifth check-in, a free dessert for a user on their first check-in, or a free drink for the reigning venue mayor.

In addition to quickly and easily being able to create specials for a venue, Foursquare for Business also provides a business owner with access to a stats dashboard showing data about check-ins at your location — things like most recent visitors, most frequent visitors, a gender breakdown of your customers, the time of day that people check-in, and how many check-ins are also broadcast to users’ Twitter and Facebook accounts.

If you own or manage a small business or retail establishment where people regularly “meet, socialize and linger” (as Foursquare puts it) then don’t miss out on this opportunity to increase interaction with your customers and gain valuable insights.  Go stake your claim at www.foursquare.com/business/

It has been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while that old media still can’t seem to get with the program when it comes to navigating the online space. I can never understand why these corporate behemoths can’t seem to deliver an online experience that comes close to matching what they have mastered in the old media space.

Case in point — Rodale publishing. I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters, some because I am interested in the content, some because I like the design and/or benefits (here’s looking at you, Borders Rewards), and some, I’m not quite sure why I subscribed. In an effort to better organize the newsletters I get, I am trying to change many of them to a new gmail account. One of these newsletters is from Men’s Health, published by Rodale. I received the Men’s Health newsletter, and looked over it to try to find a method to change the email address to this new gmail one. As is typical, to manage my email options, I looked to the footer of the email. The footer contained three links — Your Privacy Rights, Contact Us, and Unsubscribe.

Hmmm… I try Contact Us, and I get a page that says “We couldn’t find what you were looking for” page error.  Not good.  So, I go back to the email and try the Unsubscribe link, thinking it may present an option to change my subscribed email address.  The unsubscribe link takes me to a page that says “We are sorry. Not all required pieces of information have been provided on the URL.”  Strike two.   I go back to the email and try the Your Privacy Rights link just to see if anything worked correctly, and it indeed took me to a monstrous Privacy Rights statement, but of course, it didn’t help me with changing my email address.

So, I go back to the email one last time, and I notice, buried at the very bottom, in much finer print, a link to Customer Service. Aha!! Upon clicking it, I’m presented with a page telling me that customer service is important, and I should select the publication I want help with. I choose Men’s Health. This takes me to menshealth.com. The homepage, not anything customer service related, just the Men’s Health homepage.  So I scrolled to the footer, where I see a few Help options, including Manage Email Preferences. Finally!  I entered the email address where I currently receive the newsletter. Then, I was presented with a list of their email newsletters, with a check next to the one that I receive.  My only options here were to select other check boxes to receive other newsletters, or uncheck the box for the one I do receive.  So I did.  I unsubscribed.

Now, if I cared enough to really want to continue to receive this newsletter, I could sign up a new account with my new gmail address, and opt in to the newsletters I’d like to receive, but I realized after all the difficulties in trying to simply change the subscribed email address that I don’t really care that much about the newsletter anyway.  So in the end, while I had set out to better organize my subscribed email newsletters and streamline them all into one account, it had the unexpected benefit of helping me to also whittle down the number of newsletters that I receive by at least one.

Ozburn-Hessey Logistics (OHL) specializes in third party logistics (3PL) services, meaning that they partner with other businesses to meet their supply chain demands on a rapidly scalable platform. Our goal for the site was to communicate nearly 60 years of experience in a way that appeals to logistics decision makers. One of the ways that we achieved this is by producing a video that you can view right on their home page. The video features two people representing very different businesses, but one shared need — a partner for their global distribution network.

The OHL Excellence and Media Center sites were created to cater to the specific needs of different segments of visitors to the site. Excellence highlights OHL’s mission and values, corporate culture and awards with which they have been honored for being a global leader in their marketplace. The Media Center serves as a central location to find out about news and events for the company.

Visit the site at http://www.ohl.com.