Many employers are under the impression that if you give an employee complete control of their time, what they will choose to do with it is, in fact, nothing. Even if they were not slackers before, they will become slackers. The teacher has left the classroom and the students are free to stop doing work and start throwing spitballs instead.

I have been told by some colleagues at other companies that when they heard our organization was becoming a result-only work environment (ROWE), they envisioned our office almost completely empty and pictured that whoever was there was going to be wandering the hall in bunny slippers and pajamas and not getting any work done.

This image of ROWE having the magical effect of turning all employees - even the most productive ones - into slackers is only partially true: working in an environment where there is no separation between work and the rest of your life tends to exaggerate the work habits that you had before you began working in a more flexible way. If you tended to be a slacker, then being given lots of freedom will likely lead to you slacking more. If you tended to be a workaholic, you will likely become even more of a workaholic in a flexible work environment.

For slackers, ROWE is especially dangerous for their longtime employment prospects. ROWE is like a special operation for employers that roots out the slackers, wherever they have been hiding in the company. Maybe they were able, in the past, to at least show up on time, and maybe they knew enough to make sure that they did not leave early, but beyond that, they spent their day busying themselves with very important work, like watching the latest video of a baby panda sneezing on YouTube or making a day-long process of selecting the right stapler out of the office supply cabinet.

Since ROWE is not about whether you can meet a minimum requirement of showing up on time, but is about whether you can deliver results (beyond demonstrating that you did, in fact, choose the perfect stapler), slackers have much fewer places to hide. In the past, our company in particular had a problem with mid-level slackers: the slackers who slacked just enough to hardly get any work done but did not slack enough to actually get fired.

Part of the problem was that we used to have our employees only set two to three goals for the year, and they were not even that difficult to achieve. With that lackluster system of tracking results in place, slackers could easily fly under the radar, appearing to be at least loyal employees (they did show up on time after all).

The radar-evading slackers are the worst types of employees to have because they are taking up the space of an employee who could be more productive, but because you have not set any substantial objective results for them to achieve you do not really have a strong platform to stand on in terms of letting them go.

In a ROWE, everyone has a comprehensive set of results that they must achieve. The slackers no longer have any place to hide, since showing up on time no longer has the affect of giving an employee the starting score of "average." They have to do a lot more actual work before they are seen as a star performer. For managers, this is an amazing shift. Instead of relying on the clock to make their management decisions, they get to make their decisions based on how the employee's work is actually impacting the company.

If you are a slacker, and your company is looking at becoming a results-only work environment, you should lobby hard against it. Having to achieve results and actually support the company's growth through your efforts are ridiculous expectations. Your reign over slackerdom will end. ROWE is no country for slackers.

Jessica H. Lawrence is the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council and a frequent consultant on Results-Only Work Environments. She can be reached via jessicahlawrence@gmail.com.