Jim Kavanaugh, the billionaire founder and chief executive of World Wide Technology, has reversed his thinking on how closely employees need to be watched to get good work out of them. A former professional soccer player, Kavanaugh founded the Missouri based IT solutions firm in 1990. It now generates about $20 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 12,000 people. His net worth is estimated at $7.7 billion.
Kavanaugh has described how he used to check the company parking lot after 6 p.m. on Fridays, treating who stayed late as a signal of who was putting in the most effort. The pandemic forced him to reconsider whether physical presence in the office actually reflected how hard someone was working.
World Wide Technology has since adopted what it calls a dynamic persona approach, allowing flexible work arrangements that vary by role rather than applying one blanket policy to the entire company. Kavanaugh has summed up the shift simply, saying the company needs to trust its employees.
That puts him at odds with some of his peers. Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan and Andy Jassy at Amazon have both held firm on five day a week office mandates. Kavanaugh's approach instead favors judging employees by the quality of their output rather than the number of hours they spend at a desk.
Management researchers have taken note of the shift. Kevin Rockmann, a management professor at George Mason University, and Natalia Emanuel, an economist at the New York Federal Reserve, have both pointed to evidence that trust based workplace cultures can outperform approaches built around close monitoring and surveillance of employees.