- Pozen encourages you to think like “business of one,” which involves adopting the mindset of an entrepreneur.
- He said this approach promotes work-life balance, productivity, and job satisfaction.
- His prior book, “Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours,” was a bestseller.
Robert Pozen says that being highly productive is a learned skill that most anyone can develop.
Pozen himself happened to learn it at a young age. He grew up in a poor family in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and his father, a traveling salesman, was in and out of work. To help make ends meet, Pozen worked two after-school jobs while also serving as captain of his high school’s tennis team and playing on the basketball team. He later worked part-time jobs to help pay his tuition at Harvard University and Yale Law School. “It was just born of necessity,” he said.
Those early experiences were formative: over the course of his career, Pozen has been productive in a number of arenas. He served as the president of Fidelity Investments and executive chairman of MFS Investments; he taught at Harvard, Georgetown, and currently teaches at MIT Sloan; he worked in government and served on boards; and he’s written several books, including “Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours,” a bestseller.
Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered offices and turned millions of white-collar knowledge workers into remote employees practically overnight, Pozen has trained his attention on worker productivity in the virtual realm. His new book, “REMOTE, INC. How to Thrive at Work . . . Wherever You Are,” written with Alexandra Samuel, a tech and data journalist, aims to help people maximize their success at work and optimize their lives at home.
Pozen recently spoke to Insider about how to be more productive while working remotely.
This interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is it so hard for some of us to feel motivated to start our workdays - and stay focused - when we're working from home?
When you go to the office, everything's structured for you. Your boss is coming around and holding you accountable from 9-5. But as a remote worker, unless you consciously structure your day, you're going to not get much done.
So without being surrounded by colleagues and copy machines, what's the solution?
You need to create a sense of routine. Go to bed at a certain time and wake up at a certain time. Figure out what your rituals look like. Maybe you exercise first or you read the paper and then have breakfast. Choose a structure that works for you. Maybe you start very early and end by 3 o'clock. Or maybe you take a break in the middle of the day and work later. Me, I like to take a nap late in the afternoon. Other people take a walk.
To improve productivity, you encourage people to think of themselves as a "business of one," which involves adopting the mindset, habits, and independence of a small business owner. How does this work in practice?
If you're a one-person business, your boss is essentially your client. And as a client, your boss tells you what your objectives should be. But instead of objectives, which are often too general, you need success metrics. These metrics, negotiated and agreed upon by you and your boss, clarify what success ought to look like at the end of the week or the month. This moves you from a system based on hours worked to one that's results oriented.
What's the upshot?
The benefits are that your boss shouldn't have to micromanage and can spend his or her time in a more useful way. And for you, the employee, this approach promotes work-life balance, productivity, and job satisfaction. It's up to you how and when and where you achieve your metrics. From your boss's point of view, it's almost irrelevant how you work - as long as you get your work done.
Sounds wonderful in theory, but organizations have pesky things like all-hands meetings and mandatory brown bag lunches, which dictate how and when employees work.
If you're a member of the team, you've got to show up for the team. To get the benefits of collaboration, you can't pick your hours and have no time that intersects with others. There are constraints. But I think that 80% of the time you should have freedom, and 20% of time, you've got to meet the organizational requirements.
Juggling work and home life
Do you worry that working from home could intensify our devotion to our jobs because we're always at "the office" and therefore always at work?
There is definitely a possibility that you totally blur the lines between work and home to the detriment of home. But the reality is, the counter pressures of home - including your children and your spouse - are pretty strong. If you're always talking to your boss at 11:00 pm, people in your household are going to complain.
What about people without kids or a partner?
When there are no natural boundaries, you've got to work hard to create them. Another thing that's happened during the pandemic is that young people especially are moving to places where they have easy access to cycling, sports, and various other things. So, I imagine you'll have both kinds of people. Some will use the flexibility to pursue personal activities and others will say, "Well, I don't have to commute. That just gives me another hour and a half a day to work."
The future of remote work
Even as rising vaccination rates signal a return to normal in the near future, both employees and employers indicate that remote work is likely here to stay. Do you think many people will want to WFH forever?
I think most people will work in a hybrid fashion - two, three, or four days a week in the office, and the other days at home. The details will differ from organization to organization and from job to job. Being totally remote will not be very appealing to many people unless they're in a global organization and they want to live in a place like Salt Lake City and ski all the time.
Many companies, including Spotify, Salesforce, and Twitter, have recently said that they will allow employees a choice of whether they work in an office or continue to work remotely. Do you think that's wise?
Employee choice is attractive and it makes it easier to recruit really top people. But there are a few problems with it. One, you can't have total employee choice of hours and schedules because you've got to have some ways that people work together and coordinate. Two, in order to maintain a culture, you've got to have some degree of in-person contact. And three, it's hard to start a client relationship or an employee-boss relationship when you've never met the person face-to-face. I think those organizations will have to rely on things like regional conferences and other ways for people to interact.
It's possible to do well in your job from home, sure, but can you build a big-time career from home?
You could be a tremendous individual contributor, but if you want to really be a senior executive, I don't think you can be four or five days a week remote. You're not having enough interaction to understand the subtle intricacies of your organization. You don't have a chance to develop a close relationship with your boss and you don't have a chance to show your stuff in a way that has a bigger impact.
But having said that, the idea that you could be very successful when only working two days a week in the office is very much in the cards.