Today our guest is Liam Martin. He’s the cofounder of Time Doctor and the conference Running Remote. Hi, Liam. How are you today?

I’m pretty good. How are you, Neil?

Doing excellent. It’s fun to speak with you. You’re someone who knows a lot about remote work. You spend a lot of time in it and you’ve been doing it for a long time. Give us a little bit of background about both Time Doctor and Running Remote. What do we need to know about it?

Time Doctor is a time tracking tool for remote workers. We started that back in 2012. And that has been growing very well since then. About three years ago, we ended up sitting in one of our company team retreats because we have employees in 37 different countries, we fly everyone in every single year to just talk about the future of the company. And we said to ourselves, how do we get from 100 people, which is where we were at that point to like 200 people, or 500 people? And we started searching on the internet to try to find a solution for it. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff about how to hire a virtual assistant and how to do basic stuff connected to remote work. And I know for people that listen to this podcast, they’re thinking themselves, oh, yeah, I definitely understand where you’re coming from. There was nothing that was like next level, there was nothing about building and scaling, remote teams. So we just said to ourselves, it was a ready, fire, aim type of situation. We just said, let’s just buy a venue in Bali. And let’s have a conference about how to build and scale remote teams, which is what I was very passionate about. And I thought to myself, if I lose that hundred grand, but we still have these world experts come, we might be able to increase retention in our company by 10%, which would absolutely make up for the hundred grand that we would have lost. Thankfully, we didn’t lose a hundred grand. We ended up doing quite well. We’ve been running the conference for the past three years, both in Bali, and just recently in Austin, Texas. However, due to COVID, like everyone else, we had to cancel, we lost about a quarter of a million bucks on that one, which we could probably get into in another podcast. And we’re still running online events now, which we find very exciting because for us, just getting this information out to people as quickly as possible is what we think we can do to hopefully move the movement forward.

Yeah. And I think the thing you hit on is perfect, because everyone, to some extent, understands what remote work is like. You can know what happens. And whenever the world shifted to a work from home situation, it wasn’t mind blowing, like, oh, we didn’t think this was possible. But like you said, there’s a difference between just making it possible and making it functional and actually making it work and making it great. So you have a framework that you call the five rules of remote work. Why don’t you walk us through some of those to help us understand, what does it really means to do this well instead of just do it?

For me, fundamentally, it’s as you would notice, or as you stated before, it’s not just about going remote, it’s actually about going remote successfully. You were chatting beforehand, you were talking about asynchronous versus synchronous communication. Literally that was our biggest poll, at the last physical version of Running Remote, where we had a debate between two companies that have multi hundred person teams, one believes in async, the other beliefs in synchronous communication as a general standardized management philosophy, and people loved that. They found that super interesting. But to people that are just getting into remote work, they’d probably be like, this is super boring, and I don’t want to be here. If any of those words excited you, you should probably check out Running Remote, but let me just get into the rules here. So fundamentally, for me, it really boils down to rule number one is hire people that want to actually work remotely. And you’d be surprised at how many people even though we’re in the COVID remote work boom right now, generalised stats were 5.5% of the US workforce was working remotely in 2018. And by our best estimates, and this was a number that was pulled last month, it was 58% working remotely in the United States just about a month ago. So we’ve seen a huge jump in terms of remote work, but there are still a lot of people that are seeing a backlash towards remote work. Work from home is the terminology that they’re currently using, which I love because it’s very much dividing from remote work. Work from home is I have to work from home. My kids are screaming in the background, my dog’s crying, well, my kids are crying and my dog’s, whatever. You’ve got this scary virus that’s outside that’s really possibly going to kill you at any one point. You can’t go to coworking spaces, you can’t go to coffee shops. This is a big problem. Remote work is very different from that. And I think for people that are listening that are currently in that headspace, listen, it’s going to get way better once we actually get a vaccine and you’re never going to want to go back inside of the office but there are a lot of people that don’t. So, go to the job posting boards that actually are designed for remote work. We like RemoteOK, We Work Remotely, FlexJobs. If you even want to go a little bit more upmarket top towel, maybe even dribble 99 designs. Those are platforms that are specifically built for remote work. The second rule, which is really interesting, because of our discussion with regards to Kissflow is build process. So for me, process documentation is absolutely the most important thing that you can do before you actually can scale your remote team. So you can go remote and probably be relatively functional for a couple months, but you will not be able to scale that organization, or have that organization contain cohesion over an extended amount of time without process documentation. So you could use tools like Kissflow, you could use Google Docs, if you just want to get started really quickly. A really great resource that you can check out is about.gitlab.com/handbook. It is the single largest remote work process document on the planet. It’s 3200 pages. It’s all of what GitLab does inside of the organization. So if you want to know what their company values are, it’s in there. If you want to know how many stock options you get as an employee, it’s in there. If you want to know how they do their product demo, it’s all in there. And Dimitri, who’s one of the cofounders that also spoke at Running Remote, encourages people to steal all that content. So literally grab it, pull it into your own system, and then you have your own process doc up and running. Rule number three is get the right tools in place. So the beauty that I see in a lot of people, especially when I talk about this next rule, they always then say, okay, well, now I’m going to pay attention to all these tools that you’re putting out, Liam. And rule one and two is about people and process. So it’s people, process, and tools in that particular order. If you have really bad people implementing really crappy process, and you have excellent tools, it will actually burn your business down faster than if you had just forgotten about the tools part in the first place.

Liam, let me jump in here and ask a couple questions as we go through. You talk about get the right people in. What’s a sign that maybe this person either has no experience or maybe won’t succeed in a remote environment? How can someone who’s doing that hiring really notice ahead of time that this might be a problem?

So one of the biggest psychometric factors that we’ve been able to collect is introversion, ironically, so more introverted people actually end up having a much higher retention rate inside of remote-first organizations than people that are necessarily extroverted. So you have to be able to look at, we do a lot of site testing just before we actually hire someone on throughout the hiring process to be able to make sure that they are the right type of people. But the other part of this, which is really important, is I have a thesis statement for people that work with me, which is I want you to tell me what you did, not ask me what to do. And this is so important inside of remote-first organizations because everyone’s disconnected. Communication has to happen on purpose inside of remote-first organization. There’s no like, hey, Neil, how’s so and so doing? Do you want to talk to Betty about this project that we’re going to work on Friday? And that would just happen in the copy room or something like that. That doesn’t happen inside of remote teams. It has to happen on purpose. You have to set these meetings, you have to set a cadence to that type of communication. So that’s another really big one as well is making sure that everyone has made their independent decisions. And then when they come to collaborate, they can really get that information and make sure that everything is working out properly.

Good. So to the extent when you talked about introversion, extroversion, if you know somebody is definitely extroverted, are there any warning signs? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take them on, but what are some other things you need to test for or to figure out or make accommodations for I guess?

So for me, I am slightly on the extroverted scale of the spectrum. And one of the best ways for me is to just feel included inside of the team is I have, well, before COVID, I had my own coworking space that I could go to where I could get that type of outlet and communicate with other people. I also spend time at coffee shops. I will usually interact with people through video a lot more often than I would through a Slack message as an example or through an email. So higher nonverbal communication fidelity interactions are really going to help more extroverted people to get that energy out of their body, and hopefully communicate a lot more effectively.

Great. Follow up on your second point, process documentation. When it comes to actually making these processes, how reliant would you suggest people should be on really just automating them, getting a workflow set up, and how much is just, hey, here’s the document to follow, if you find one to be better in different situations?

I’m going to steal Napoleon’s quote on this, which is order shouldn’t be easy to understand, they should be impossible to misunderstand. And that’s my entire philosophy for process documentation. Once you make that flip, so I’ll give you an example is very, very early on in my remote work career, I had a process document setup for my customer support reps for another business that I was running. And there were two buttons to refund a customer, there was a dollar amount that you could input and then click refund. And then there was a refund button. And I wanted this person to refund $3,000 to a client, and they had paid us $9,000 for the entire year that they had been working with us. Well, that person clicked the refund button, instead of putting in the $3,000 and clicking refund and they refunded them $9,000 as opposed to $3,000, which for a very small business like mine, was a disaster. That’s what I mean when orders shouldn’t be easy to understand, they should be impossible to misunderstand. So I get as detailed as humanly possible. And I assume that everyone that I’m communicating process to is a five-year-old, which sometimes the processes are quite long, but there’s no misunderstanding, and I actually sometimes write three different versions. So what I’ll do is I’ll write a very clear process, for let’s say, flows and documentation connected to those flows in different directions that you can have, then I would write a version that’s a lot simpler, like let’s say, a half paragraph version that is maybe just like the cheat notes for that process. And then the third one is I actually put up a video showing everything that I’m doing all the way through that process. So you can jump in at any three points of understanding, and then go through that process however you’d like because people shouldn’t just be using processes once. That’s another really important point to be able to put inside of your organization is process documentation is one of those things that people say, okay, well, we did it, and it’s up and then no one uses it. Because we just say, okay, well, it exists and no one really goes back to it. For us, because we use Time Doctor as an example, we can actually measure how much time you’re spending working on process documentation, or at least interacting with it. And for us, we want to be able to make sure that people, even people that have been working in the company for years like me, 5% of their time should still be spent in process documentation, understanding how all these processes work.

Great. So we’ve done number one, get the right people in place. Number two, process documentation. Three, get the tools in place. Let’s go on to four.

Rule number four is communication. Process documentation is how you build the foundation. Communication is how you build the company, fundamentally. I have what I like to call my hierarchy of communication, which is in person beats video, video beats audio, audio beats instant messaging, and instant messaging beats email. As you move up the chain, you become more synchronous. As you move down the chain, you become more asynchronous. Generally, you want to be able to figure out a mix that’s really good for you. So as an example, if I sent 10 Slack messages back and forth with a coworker, and we’re not really understanding what’s going on, I immediately try to jump to a Zoom call as quickly as possible, I try to jump to a Zoom call and not an audio call, because I can see all the nonverbal cues that that person is communicating inside of what they’re doing. So if they don’t understand what’s going on, you might see that non verbally, whereas on an audio call, you may not really understand that. The other part that’s connected to this is rule number five, which is communicate who you are, as well. And I have this document which is blueprint to Liam and his weird little quirks. And what I did is I had three of my closest friends write down what they would say to someone that is going to be managed by me. So literally like an operating system or a blueprint to who I am as a person and a lot of the stuff in there is not really something that I would necessarily like to admit. But it is the right information for that worker to be able to interact with me. And I encourage everyone that I’m working with as well to send me back their version of a blueprint, because that just cuts through all of the niceties that you would have theoretically picked up over probably weeks and months working in person. Because that feedback loop isn’t as intimate in a remote setting versus an on premise setting, we just cut through all that and we just say, Hey, this is who I am. These are the types of things that I like. I like speed over precision, as an example. If you are coming to me and you haven’t done those things quickly, I’d rather have you do things quickly and fail, than do them perfectly and succeed all the time because, at least inside of a tech startup, the more shot that we have on goal, the more successes we can theoretically have. So those types of things a lot of people disagree with, but it’s just the way that I like to work.

Yeah, I like giving that ahead of time. And like you said, you can pick things up when you’re right next to someone else working side by side. It doesn’t take too long to figure out those things. But in a remote environment, you maybe only have one touch point a day or less in some cases. So being able to figure out those things. I had an experience with someone where we were in, even the hiring process. One of the questions was, how do you like to be appreciated? Do you want this? Do you want me to tell the whole team like publicly or would you rather have a private note sent to you? Because that’s something we need to know. We need to know about how it’s going to be going so that right from day one, you know what’s going to speak to that person.

Yeah, that’s the type of stuff that I love. I’ve sent this document to quite a few people and I actually had one person going through the entire hiring process from 500 candidates down to two candidates. And one of those two candidates ended up saying I don’t fit inside of who you want to be, how I want to interact with you at all. And they decided to walk away from the position. But that was exactly what the document is designed to do is to be able to say, let’s be as fast as humanly possible about this. Here’s who I am in black and white. Come check it out. If you don’t agree with that, then we shouldn’t be working together.

Back to the communication points. There’s one element we’d like to talk about on the show, which we’ll call the durability of communication in the sense of there’s some communication that you’re using Slack messages, you’re just doing instant messaging, if theoretically, at the end of the day, all that stuff could be purged out and your business should be able to go on fine. As opposed to your durable communication, which like the process documentation you’re talking about or these blueprints that you really need access to. You need to be able to find there later on, too. So what’s your thinking in terms of communication? How do you divide those two? How do you make sure that people know, hey, we’re having this Slack conversation. We just made a decision, we should really document this decision instead of just keeping it here or I have a file that’s kept in email. I can’t keep it there. I got to keep it somewhere else.

The way that we break down communication is any piece of information that we need to keep for an extended amount of time should go into a project management system. So we use Asana for a lot of our task execution, JIRA, as well, on the development side. We use a lot of Basecamp for the debating of a particular issue. So something that we just need to be able to see all those different messages and we want to be able to go back and take a look at them for an extended amount of time. And on Slack, we have smaller conversations connected to that. But fundamentally, Slack is actually a really bad spot to be able to get that documentation and roll back and really see like, well, how did we come to that particular conclusion? Project management systems are generally a lot better at that, at least in my opinion, than doing it on an instant messaging platform.

Let me push back on something. You have a product called Time Doctor. You’re trying to track time that’s there. As we look to the future, one thing we want to be able to do is, on a lot of remote work, you want to free people from that tight connection between you’re working for a certain number of hours, hours equals pay, hours equals your ability to live in different ways. What are the ways that you have morphed over the years, and especially as a product, that we use time more as a tool like yours, more as a feedback loop of looking at what happened rather than a precursor to this is how you make your living.

So on our side with regards to Time Doctor, one of the biggest suggestions that we bring back to clients once they’ve deployed is not necessarily working for 40 hours, or even working in 9 to 5. If anything, by using our tool and we’ve seen this analysis ourselves, there is zero correlation between a 9 to 5 and success. If anything, actually, workdays connect to a job category. So we can see a developer, as an example, works very, very differently from a customer support agent or from someone who does customer success or sales or marketing or anything like that. So, internally, we really push for a 26-hour work week. So inside of our company, as an example, we say you owe us 26 hours a week, do it however you want to do it, the only thing that you have to show up for are meetings. So that’s the only time that you actually have to show up and meet with your team members to be able to collaborate and move forward. And a lot of the times, we end up discovering really interesting insights inside of the data that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to figure out. I’ll give you a perfect example is when I started using Time Doctor for the very first time, after a couple months, I started seeing a really big drop in my productivity on Tuesday evenings and afternoons. And I didn’t really understand that I was like half as productive, which basically for us, is there’s a lot of different variables to connect to that. We use a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence inside of Time Doctor to be able to predict outcome variables. But one of the things that Time Doctor was constantly telling me was, I’m not doing well on Tuesday afternoons. And then I discovered the variable which was, I don’t know if you have this where you’re from, but we would have cheap movie nights on Tuesdays. So it was half price on Tuesdays. And the messages would start at around 1pm where someone would call me saying, hey, do you want to see Batman or Superman? And then my girlfriend would call me saying, hey, Suzanne wants to see Batman too. Can you ask Suzanne’s husband if he’s interested in going as well? And it was this really weird system that was just completely destroying my flow state. So for me, being disconnected, let’s say I’m writing a blog post, as an example, and then someone messages me, it’s not just the two or three minutes of that phone call, on average, it takes about 14 minutes to be able to get yourself back into flow state. You’ve got to read the previous paragraph. You got to figure out the context, maybe get distracted by something else. So I realized that by taking Tuesday afternoons off, which is counterintuitive, I actually was more productive. I was getting more work done by working less, because I was able to build those types of insights. So I would agree with you. For us, that’s the way that we use the tool. And there’s always people that are probably going to not use the tool in that intended way. But for us, we’re very much focused on productivity, not necessarily on how long you worked, because we know that, and again, we have the largest second by second work database on the planet. There’s no correlation between how long you worked and how productive you are.

Yeah, I think that’s the thing that organizations need to do as they move through these levels of digital workplaces. That initial gut reaction is, okay, everyone’s at home, I got to make sure that they’re working. So let me use a tool like this to just basically do surveillance and make sure that they’re logging in the hours. And there has to be that wake up moment that says, wait a second, we’re not tracking the same thing here. Productivity is different than just time.

The other thing, too, is when you look at the work from home model, and this is where I’ve looked at the data, and I didn’t want to believe this, but it’s absolutely true from the research that I’ve done. Working from home is not as productive as working in an office. There is very, very clear, every single large study that’s being done says there are way more distractions at home than there are at the office. There’s your kids, there’s your husband or your wife, there’s your roommates, whatever it might be. There’s the PlayStation. There’s CNN doing COVID coverage, which I’ve been watching constantly the last couple of months. All of these things pull your focus away. The advantage however if on average, your commute’s about two hours a day. So if you literally just slept for those extra two hours, you’re going to have a much more productive employee than if you had told that employee to drive into work, as an example. So there’s a lot of those things that we have to take into consideration. And at least on our end, for us, Time Doctor is more a productivity tool to be able to keep you on the straight and narrow meaning I need to accomplish this particular task. And there’s an entire industry, multi trillion dollar industry, I like to call it the distraction economy, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, CNN. And their goal is to distract you from your goal, which is writing that blog post. So we’re a counterpoint to that saying, hey, if I’m on Facebook, and I’m supposed to be working, we put a pop up saying, hey, do you really want to leave productivity town because right now you are currently getting distracted. And if you want to keep going and stay distracted, go for it. But it’s something that, for us, at least for me, it was absolutely one of the biggest triggers towards my personal success.

Now I love using a tool like Time Doctor to really learn about yourself, learn about your own flows, your own energy as you go through the day, and really maximize that, not as a way to necessarily, hey, I put in my 40 hours this week, or my 60 hours, but to say, I put in that but I bet if I realign these times and really highlight my most productive times and really cut out these distractions, I can actually probably only work, like you said, 26 hours or so and really get the same effort.

We have a piece that’s coming out pretty soon. So we have a beta feature, which gives you just basically predictions on how you should be more productive with your time. So we’ve done a deep analysis of salespeople. So basically, we have thousands and thousands of salespeople in our system. And we know which ones are successful salespeople because they make more money through HubSpot or through Salesforce, and who are not as successful. And then we studied and we analyzed all that data through artificial intelligence. And we’re able to now come to some very interesting conclusions with regards to what makes someone successful and what doesn’t. I’ll tell you one of the ones that blew my mind is, people that work below between 20 and 40 hours as a salesperson are the most successful quartile of salespeople. So if you work under 20 hours per week, you’re not the most successful quartile. But if you work above 40 hours per week, you are just as unsuccessful as the people that work between 20 and 40 hours. That’s a very interesting insight, which is, the more you work, the worse you’re getting at your job. And that’s the type of stuff that I’m trying to study in a deeper way. And once people can be armed with that, particularly employers, they can start to see, oh, okay, well, yeah, I really shouldn’t have them in for the 9 to 5, maybe I should have them in for the work whenever the hell you want, just get the job done. And here’s a tool that can give you the insights to be more successful in your position.

Or even maybe you have to leave at this time, like we got to kick you out, because if you’re working too much…

Absolutely. So one of the variables that we’ve changed now, and it’s back and forth on this debate, which is basically what we’re measuring is profitability per hour for salespeople. So how many dollars do you generate per hour of work? And we found some salespeople were working 260 hours a month, and they were the top salesperson but they may have only made $5,000 more than the next most successful one who was working 130 hours. So the 130-hour one actually wins by our correlation because we changed the way that we’re defining success.

Man, I love what you’re doing. I love the looking into the future, standing on the edge helping us get there. Leave us with one thing that you feel like in terms of the big picture of remote work, not necessarily where we’re going, but where do you think we should go? What’s the best case scenario that we can take remote work to the next level?

So I think that remote work, at least in the last six months, we’ve seen the biggest shift in labor since the Industrial Revolution. No one has moved work as fast as COVID and remote work has in the last six months. I think the future of remote work is really going to be, to be honest with you, and I look at this pragmatically, actually, I’d like to maybe not necessarily give you the sunshine and rainbows version, but the reality is, we’ve seen Shopify, Google, Facebook, all of these massive tech companies are going in part were completely remote. Twitter just shut down all their offices, and they’re saying they’re going to be remote forever. You’re currently seeing the largest exodus in the history of San Francisco from San Francisco and it is the most expensive of workers that are leaving San Francisco. It is going to be that is the end of the Golden Age of tech, of the tech startup epoch because San Francisco was such an amazing place where all talent would be centralized. 53% of people that work inside of a major tech company in San Francisco are immigrants. They’re not Americans, they were brought to that particular area. So within the next 12 to 18 months, you’re going to see a mass exodus of San Francisco. You’re going to see those people return to either their home countries or back to, let’s say, the Midwest where you can get a six-bedroom house for the cost of a one-bedroom in San Francisco. And then after that, you’re actually going to see the expansion of, and I don’t like the terminology outsourcing because at its core, it’s quite racist to be completely honest with you. If you are working in Mumbai at home on your computer, you’re outsourced, but if you’re working at home, in Manhattan on a MacBook Pro, you’re remote. So to me, it’s going to be this next wave of, you’re going to be able to take advantage, these tech companies are going to be able to take advantage of talent. And a $30,000 developer in Kiev will turn to a $100,000 developer, but the age of the $400,000 developer in San Francisco, I believe is over. And it is not going to be coming back because the genie is out of the bottle. We’re going to have a lot more equality throughout the planet in terms of labor. Fundamentally, for me, remote work is all about giving employers and employees the opportunity to find the best of each other. So I think that’s just going to explode and it’s probably going to come at the expense of the United States. But I think globally, we’re going to be a lot happier.

Liam, this has been really fun to talk about. You’re obviously living in the space, thinking about it a lot, talking about it a lot. So thanks for sharing with us. Tell us more about how to get in touch, Time Doctor, Running Remote, where do we need to go to learn more about it?

Sure, timedoctor.com, 14-day trial, check it out. If you scream my name at any point to any customer support agent, I simply appear magically. Running Remote, we run free online events every couple months, the next one’s coming up on August the 12th. And if you don’t have time to be able to do that, just go to the YouTube channel, youtube.com/runningremote. All of our talks are up there for free. So if you can’t afford to be able to go to a physical event, all the information is up there for free because we believe at least more so than any time in history now, we need to be able to get this education into people’s hands.

Awesome. Well, Liam, thanks for being on the show. We look forward to connecting with you more and sharing more of your stuff.

Thanks for having me on, Neil.