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Part I
The Business of One
This is a practical book with guidance on how to solve the kinds of problems you are likely to face when working remotely. But the truth is that you canât really address those problems if you keep working the way you did when you went into the office every day. Thatâs why we need to start by changing that mental model, and introducing you to a new way of thinking that will help you be happier and more productive when youâre working from home.
This model hinges on thinking of yourself as a Business of One, adopting the mental habits and skills of a small business owner. This model allows you to deliver results that wow your boss or clients, while enjoying the flexibility that is the best part of home-based work. The first chapter in this section walks you through what it means to think like a Business of One, and shows you the data that underlies the promise of this new model.
Understanding this model is key to making effective use of the strategies, skills, and tips you find in the rest of the book. But we know that the Business of One model will work differently depending on your role and circumstances, so the next two chapters dig in more deeply and help you think about how to make the model suit your needs.
In chapter 2, âMaking the New Model Work,â we look at how your approach to remote work will be shaped by your employment structure (that is, whether youâre an employee or a freelancer) as well as by your market power (how difficult it is for your clients or employer to replace you). We introduce the idea of punctuated collaboration, which will help you create a little more freedom from your team, and to a few tactics that can help you get a little more freedom from your boss.
In chapter 3, âManaging a Remote Team,â we flip that around, because we know you might be a remote worker and a team leader. If youâre a manager, you need to figure out how to make this model work for your whole team. If youâre not a manager, you may want to be one somedayâand, meanwhile, reading this chapter should give you a better understanding of the challenges faced by your boss.
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Chapter 1
Your Business of One
How do you know if youâre productive?
This question is at the heart of how we think about remote work.
After all, when people talk about âproductivity,â what theyâre usually talking about is how much you get done in a day. If you say youâve had a really productive day, what you mean is that you got more done than you usually do. If people describe you as a productive person, what they mean is that you get more accomplished than most other people in your job or field: youâre productive if you deliver bigger and better results on any given workday.
But what is your workday, exactly? When youâre in the office, itâs an easy question to answer: itâs measured from the time you walk through the door until the time you leave. (Plus whatever additional work you squeeze in before or after hours, if you put in some extra time at home.)
Once you switch to working remotely, however, the idea of a workday gets a lot messier. Is your workday defined by the time you spend sitting at your desk? What about the business call you took while you were doing the dishes? How about the bolt of inspiration that hit you in the shower, and which you then scribbled down the moment you got to your phone? Do they count as part of your productive workday?
In this chapter, weâll help you rethink your notion of productivity so that itâs no longer defined by the dated concept of a workday. Weâll start by looking at where the eight-hour workday came from, and the limitations of that metric in todayâs economy, especially for remote work. Next, weâll show you a different model, which we call thinking like a âBusiness of Oneâ: it helps you achieve more for yourself and your organization by focusing on your accomplishments, rather than the ticking clock. Finally, weâll show you survey data that helps illuminate the productivity gains from providing remote workers with more autonomy, so they can operate like Remote, Inc.
BEYOND THE WORKDAY
Most organizations still define productivity by the eight-hour workday, even as millions of people have transitioned to remote work that makes those eight hours awfully hard to track. Nonetheless, salaried employees are often held accountable for each dayâs work in the form of a timesheet, recording how they spent every hour. If youâre a service professional like a lawyer or accountant, you may even be accountable for each and every billable quarter hour. Even if youâre running your own business, you may find yourself focusing on where your hours go, either because youâre billing on an hourly basis or because the visible hours you spend on video calls are the way you demonstrate effort to your clients or staff.
This obsession with the eight-hour workday is an obsolete leftover from a previous era in which the nine-to-five day was a crucial tool for maximizing productivity, ensuring employee accountability, and measuring output. When the Industrial Revolution brought us factories and assembly lines, factory owners looked at hours worked as the key to maximizing the profits from their investments. Once union organizers won a forty-hour work week, managers focused on getting the greatest possible output from every eight-hour shift.1
As the industrial economy yielded to the digital and information-based economy, however, hours ceased to be a sensible way to measure productivity or hold employees accountable.2 Employees could generate a great result in a few hours, or a poor result in a few days. Indeed, a growing number of studies suggested that piling on additional work hours produces smaller and smaller gains as hours increase.3
You can see the problem with equating hours and productivity in just about any form of knowledge work. If you hire an advertising agency to come up with an ad concept for your new video game, do you feel like the ad is worth more if it took longer to produceâor do you mainly care about whether the ad itself is original and compelling? If you ask your director of sales to find you ten new recurring clients, do you judge those contracts based on how many hours it took to land themâor based on the dollar value of each individual client agreement? If you ask someone on your team to produce the slide deck for your upcoming board presentation, do you want a big deck that represents many hours of workâor do you just want the most effective, well-designed presentation?
Despite the obvious flaws of using hours to measure productivity, some employers have tried to find new ways of counting the hours put in by remote employees: tracking mouse movements and keyboard strokes, taking video snapshots of employees at their desks, or just keeping people so tied up with phone and video calls that they donât have any free time to waste.4 But that kind of scrutiny is more likely to lead to employee burnout than increased productivity: just one month into the remote work shift triggered by the Covid pandemic, one survey found that 45 percent of employees were already feeling burned out.5
If the eight-hour workday is so ill-suited to measuring the productivity of knowledge-based workers, why do so many employers obsess over counting hours? Blame history: Two hundred years of bean counting wonât evaporate overnight. Hours offer an easy way to measure and bill your services. And for managers, hours provide a plausible if crude way to track what the team is doing: if youâre spending eight hours on back-to-back video calls, at least your boss knows youâre not going to the beach!
As outdated as the hour-tracking system may be, itâs not going anywhere until organizations find another way to ensure the accountability of their employeesâespecially those who are working remotely. The right approach to accountability also needs to be better for employees: enabling them to work productively, deliver stronger results, and achieve more control over how they spend their time. Thatâs exactly what will happen if remote workers think like a Business of One.
THINKING LIKE A BUSINESS OF ONE
Thinking like a Business of One means thinking of yourself as if you are your own small business, even if youâre actually an employee working for a larger organization. Your âproductsâ are made up of the work you are delivering for your clientsâand if youâre an employee, your number one client is your boss. You are the CEO, the chief marketing officer, the director of HR and the entire workforce of this business: itâs your job not only to get the work done, but also to think strategically, manage your âbrand,â and keep your workforceâthatâs you!âhappy and productive.
Thinking as a Business of One lets you focus on outcomes instead of hours worked, and outcomes are what should matter to both you and your employer. By helping you rethink and reorganize the way you work remotely, this model solves the problems of accountability, productivity, and output measurementâbut in a totally different way from the outdated obsession with the eight-hour day.
- ACCOUNTABILITY . . . FOR OBJECTIVES. As the CEO of your Business of One, you are accountable for achieving or supporting the objectives your clients have set out. If you are an employee, that means that you are accountable for the objectives that have been set by your boss or employer: thatâs your client. (If you are a freelancer or business owner, your customers are your clients.) You and your boss/client will negotiate agreements that ensure these objectives are crystal clear, so that you actually can be accountable for delivering on them.
- PRODUCTIVITY . . . FOR YOU. As the head of HR for your Business of One, it is your job to fully understand what maximizes the productivity of your workforce. You should organize your time and space to bring out your best, even if what is best for you might be a little different from how youâve worked in the past, or how youâve related to the rest of your team. If youâre an employee, you and your boss will need to agree on a mode of working that lets you deliver the best results in a way thatâs in everybodyâs interests.
- MEASUREMENT . . . OF OUTCOMES. As the chief marketing officer, you need to protect and further the reputation of your business by delivering measurable results. When youâre clarifying the objectives of your boss or client, you will also discuss how to measure your progress toward these objectives. To create a true meeting of the minds, the remote worker and the boss should agree on what we call success metrics: a written list of deliverables with time targets. Then you will organize your work in a way that yields those measurable results, and regularly communicate with your boss to share your progress.
Managing Accountability, Productivity, and Measurement
Letâs look at how thinking like a Business of One might change the day-to-day work of a customer account manager at a medical supply company. In the old model, the head of the department ensures accountability by witnessing the account manager hard at work all day at the office, either in meetings or on calls at her desk. The boss manages productivity by walking around the floor just often enough to discourage chitchat and personal calls, so that everybody stays focused on customer-centered work. And the boss may simply reach a subjective judgment about whether certain employees seem productiveâperhaps based on how much time they spend in the break room.
When that customer account manager shifts to remote work, however, those accountability mechanisms and subjective judgments fall apart, because sheâs no longer under the bossâs nose. Instead itâs up to the account manager to think like a Business of Oneâfiguring out the best way to organize her work at home to deliver measurable results for the company.
Her clientâthat is, her bossâsets the objectives f...
