Welcome back to The Digital Workplace podcast. Today our guest is Liam Martin. He is the Co-founder and CMO at Time Doctor and the co-organizer of Running Remote. Hey Liam, how’s it going?

Pretty good.

Excellent. You are a second time guest on the show. We appreciate you coming back in and sharing some more things and seeing what you’ve learned since then.

Yeah, and I’ve learned a lot, by the way. 

Good. When you first came on, I think it was pre-COVID. So, it was before everything got crazy.

Yeah. I tell a lot of my friends that are in the remote workspace, the way that I identify whether or not someone is legit or not, is whether I knew them in the remote workspace before COVID.

Oh, wow. 

That’s the only bar now that you’ve got to surpass. Because in February of 2020, 4% of the US workforce was working remotely and March of 2020, 45% of the US workforce was working remotely. It was a complete transition of everything that we thought was normal and the work world completely changed. And for this little, tiny kind of cottage industry of remote work advocacy, it just completely exploded. And you’ve probably gotten a ton of these emails as well, I get them too, which is like, ‘Listen, I’m a big shot in the remote workspace. I got to talk to you about this, you know, like, I got to have you on to Running Remote or you gotta have me on Running Remote,’ and all this kind of stuff. And then I look at their Whois data on their web page for their consultancy, and it’s like, they popped up three months ago, right? Definitely there’s a lot of charlatans popping out of the woodwork. So, it’s really important that I think the remote pioneers stick together.

Alright. Well, I’m excited. We will be talking about a lot of things. But just to say it up front, we got Running Remote coming up. When is it? May this year?

May 17th and 18th in Montreal, Canada.

Fantastic. I’m looking forward to it. I will be there and everyone else should come too because it’ll be a blast of a party. But first, just to be sure you are a real human, not just a robot on here promoting your conference Liam, I need to ask you a question. Your captcha question is, what is your favorite ice cream flavor?

So, I was going to say pistachio but I’m now thinking Rocky Road actually. That’s one of the components of being human is, I’m indecisive. 

You changed your mind? 

Yes. 

What makes you change from pistachio to Rocky Road?

So, I generally like nuts in my ice cream. And so, if I’m going to have ice cream, it generally is going to have nuts in it. Like if you had a Venn diagram of ice cream that Liam eats and you know ice creams that contain peanuts, it’s almost a perfect circle. But pistachios have got this weird flavor component to it, and I do also like chocolate. And so, Rocky Road has chocolate in it as well. So, I was thinking I better cover up my bases. That would probably be the thing that I would eat. If I was going to have ice cream every day for the rest of my life, I’d go with Rocky Road. If I could change my flavors, I would probably go with pistachio about 40% of the time.

Why do they not combine pistachio with other ice creams?

That would be awesome. We should think about that. Maybe that’s another business idea.

Launch that at the conference. Cool.

I think you’d get blown away if all of a sudden I had pistachio-Rocky Road ice cream for everyone at the conference. I couldn’t do that.

Cool. Well, there are other things to discuss. Let’s jump into remote work specifically. You’ve been thinking a lot about remote work for a long time. So, now we’re into not just the stuff that everyone knows about but into little bit deeper conversations. Obviously, one of the big terms that you advocate for, and many others do too is, asynchronous work, which we all know just means we’re not working at the same time. So, let’s get into that a little bit more. Asynchronous and remote work pretty much got to go hand in hand. It’s hard to be successful at remote work if you’re not doing it asynchronously. But it is hard for a lot of companies that are in this transition to make that switch. So, tell us about what you’ve found as you’ve seen this in the real world.

So, the first point to unpack there is asynchronous remote work. Yes, we think that they go hand in hand. But the vast majority of people that are currently working remotely, the people that I refer to lovingly as ‘pandemic panickers’ don’t understand this at all. And this is actually one of the biggest things that I think is a disconnect when people understand where remote work is coming from. And for people that are probably listening to this podcast, you’re probably, to a degree at least, able to communicate that message to other people. You have some sort of a voice, and you probably are a little bit deeper in the industry than most regular people. 

It’s so important to understand how asynchronous work and asynchronous management is not just a way to be able to run a business when you’re working remotely, but I actually think asynchronous management can apply to an in-office environment and an out-of-office environment equally. I’m seeing a lot of this right now in the hybrid movement that’s currently happening. The majority of the industry is moving to hybrid, and regardless of whether or not that’s a good or a bad idea, I think hybrid is probably the platform that can take advantage of asynchronous management the most, out of remote, on-premises and hybrid work agreements.

Yeah. And you’re saying asynchronous management specifically as opposed to just asynchronous collaboration or other things. What is unique about the management side?

So, I studied this. It was my COVID project. I had a chat, about two years ago, with a book agent and he said, “You should write a book.” And I said, “I don’t know how to write a book.” And he said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got you.” So, two years later, we came up with this book, which is going to be coming out in about six months. And what I ended up doing is I studied all of these remote-first pioneers, mostly billion-dollar plus technology companies, although we do actually have physical brick-and-mortar companies as well that had a lot of their processes operating remotely, a lot of their people operating remotely. 

And the one thing that we found that they all had in common, almost, was asynchronous management. So, the ability to not just execute on asynchronous work, but to have a managerial structure, what we call the ‘asynchronous mindset’, to actually build a business without necessarily speaking to anyone. 

So, we post this in the book, and I know for a lot of your readers or listeners, it’s probably, you know, remote 101. But we basically asked people this question, ‘What if you could never speak to anyone inside of your company? How would you build it?’ And that’s effectively asynchronous management. That’s the process that was born out of the remote pioneers that can apply anywhere, whether you’re in an office or out of one. 

So, as companies struggle to understand this, and as these ‘pandemic panickers’ as you said, like you said, most of them are still working synchronously just with computer screens. They have live calls all day long, they’re in live chats going back and forth. They haven’t really learned how to let go of that. Why do you think that is? Is it just a cultural thing that’s just hard to change? Is async itself just such a different way of working that people struggle to adapt to it? What’s your thought on that?

I think there’s a lot of things to unpack there. So, number one, there’s a lot of ego connected to the way that businesses should be run. I had a conversation with someone a couple of months ago about this particular subject, someone who said, ‘I can’t wait to be able to get all my people to go back to the office.’ And I spoke to him at length for about an hour. And we both came to the conclusion the reason why he wanted to do that was because he had a 10-year office lease on this office that had, you know, a 1000 people in his company, and to a degree, he really wanted to feel like a big shot. He likes being able to be in an environment where there are a whole bunch of people that he gets to tell them what to do. And again, he came to that conclusion on his own without me juxtaposing it for him. But I think that there’s a lot to be said with regards to collaboration and the assumption that more collaboration is always better. 

One of the biggest counterintuitive bombs that I discovered in my research in looking at these remote pioneers was we’ve all come to a conclusion that more collaboration is not always better. And in some cases, actually, collaboration is detrimental towards the success of your organization. And so, this is something that literally if you opened up an MBA textbook, it would be like, ‘Collaboration. You’ve got to collaborate. That is the most important thing that you can do inside of an organization.’ And I wouldn’t disagree with that statement but it’s how that collaboration is delivered, is really important. And the vast majority of that collaboration can be performed asynchronously, which is what, as I said, the vast majority of these remote companies end up doing.

Alright. I think I’m with you but make the case for collaboration being detrimental to getting great work done.

So, we found that there’s an exponential cost benefit analysis that you can deploy as it applies to collaboration. So, if you step inside of an office, or inside of a boardroom, and you’re going to do a meeting with somebody, the first hour of that meeting, or if you were planning on having the meeting be an hour, it would probably be pretty efficient. But then if you plan on that meeting being five hours long, the meeting expands into the space that you have to actually deploy it. So, what we’ve recognized is you can actually get as much done in that first hour than you can in the five-hour meeting. And there are a lot of processes and procedures that asynchronous organizations employ to be able to basically minimize the amount of time that we’re looking at synchronous versus asynchronous communication. 

Inside of brick-and-mortar companies, and I think I’ve also recognized, again some of these thoughts are kind of like a little bit unbaked, but everyone drives into one location every single day, in an on-premises organization, right? You each pay 90 minutes of your time to come to one single place. Then at that one single place, it’s a collaboration buffet because there’s a sunk cost. Everyone paid that 90 minute to get into that single place. So, why not collaborate as much as humanly possible. Asynchronous organizations have recognized, well, we’re not paying that 90-minute sunk cost every single day. So, we don’t actually have to collaborate as much as humanly possible. We can have taken a la carte method. We can say, well, maybe we want to collaborate here, maybe we don’t want to collaborate there. So, if there’s no gun at your head saying, ‘Hey, we have to actually go into a physical meeting space to be able to meet about absolutely everything’, then you actually discover that you don’t actually need to meet about the vast majority of things. You can actually communicate that information in much more efficient ways which focuses everyone on deep work and individual autonomy as opposed to everyone getting in a room and working out whether or not we should have blue markers or red markers on the whiteboard. I have been in a meeting like that, by the way.

This idea of sunk costs is really intriguing. I’ve never thought about it in that way, in the sense of like, hey, we’re already here. Therefore, we’re going to use the most expensive kind of collaboration, which is everyone together in any meeting, at the same time, like ease of everything. Because we can, it’s right here. We don’t have to worry about it. Whereas if I’m sitting at home or sitting somewhere else and trying to get work done, that’s a big ask to say, ‘Hey, can you come to this hour-long meeting?’ It’s like, ‘I don’t know, man. I got other stuff to do.’ But if I’m already there at the office, it’s like, ‘Well, what else am I going to do? We’re all here anyway. Let’s get this out of the way and move on.’

How many people do you pull out of deep work in that meeting? And so, someone was just about to actually have a huge breakthrough personally and achieve a huge return for the company, but you actually grabbed them five minutes before they could achieve that great breakthrough for the company and now, they’re sitting in a three-minute marker meeting, at a three-hour marker meeting. I mean, it’s horrible. And this happens all the time. And those disruptions towards your productivity, yes, they seem like you’re moving faster in the short-term, but actually long-term organizationally, you’re moving way, way slower. 

I think about this when the Romans, who were responsible for a lot of great things and bad things, but one of the best things that they were responsible for was the rise of the military. Yeah, the ancient Romans. They were the first standing army in the world. Before that point, basically, you just had a whole bunch of people get together, and you said, ‘Hey, okay, everyone, get your pikes and get your swords and we’re going to go out and we’re going to try to kill the enemy.’ And then they went back to whatever the hell they were doing after the fact. But the Romans actually had permanent armed forces that were operating on a constant basis. And yes, that was incredibly expensive to be able to have that type of asset sitting there. But long-term what it provided was, if it’s your job to be a soldier, you’re way better than some guy that just got pulled off the, you know, the farm fields and was given a pike and said, ‘Hey, go stab that guy.’ 

This is what I’m saying when we’re talking about the short-term versus long-term advantages. If you actually operate your business with an asynchronous philosophy, you’re going to be much more effective long-term because everyone is going to be able to optimize towards autonomy and deep work.

Yeah. I think of it too about what you said before, in terms of the ego factor. Because I think a lot of collaboration is just this, “It feels good.” Like it feels good when you get out of those day long meetings and you go like, ‘Phew man! We did it. We nailed it. It was great.’ When you look at that Slack channel and it’s just popping, everything’s going in, that feels like work. And it feels like work even from an ego sense to say, ‘I got all these people in this office that will do whatever I say right now. I can yell at them from across the room and make it happen.’ So, the question when we first started to move to remote work in the pandemic was like, ‘Hey, how do I know my people are still going to be productive?’ And I think the question underneath that was, how am I still going to feel I’m in control and controlling all that and have those other signals?

Yeah. So, I think you broke down busy versus productive. Being busy is not being productive. Putting in your 12 hours a day is not being productive. We actually have a lot of data that supports that a 12-hour workday is incredibly detrimental towards your overall output and will actually end up pulling down your output in comparison to someone who’s working eight hours a day. But when you look at the fundamentals of what we’re talking about here, it’s about really saying, we need to be able to have detailed metrics. So, we need to be able to measure as much as humanly possible so that everyone can optimize their own personal productivity, really focusing everyone on Deep Work, which is a fantastic book by Cal Newport. It’s one of the most referenced books that I came across in studying all of these remote-first entrepreneurs that are incredibly successful. 

The goal of your organization should be to be able to optimize everyone towards a state in which they can accomplish really difficult ideas, and they have everything available to them in order to actually accomplish it. And generally, that means not actually interacting with synchronous forms of management. So, what I mean by that is, inside of our organization, the actual platform is the manager, the vast majority of the time. So, we have a massive wiki where we have all of our process documents, we have project management systems where you can get access to when decisions were made, we have information available to every single employee that effectively makes them as informationally aware as they could be. They have an information advantage almost to the same degree as the CEO of the company. And because of that, they can actually make decisions that the CEO would have made without the actual CEO sitting down and making those particular decisions. So, you’re really breaking down all of those barriers. 

And this is a very difficult chasm for a lot of business owners to cross. But I honestly think this is a ‘horse and buggy’ versus ‘Model T’ moment that we’re currently experiencing right now. And I think that probably within the next five years, you’re going to see the vast majority of these companies operating remotely, that are in like the S&P 500 as an example. And I think the majority of those are probably going to be working on an asynchronous work model.

And a lot of the writing and talks that we do will try to give a little bit of a percentage to just let people understand what’s going on and what’s a good goal too. So, based on your research, I’d like to get your feedback. I’ve been advocating for, ‘Hey, you should lean towards the synchronous parts of your day, which means meetings and live chats, you should try to get that down to about 20% or less’ is what I put out as a goal to put out there. What’s your thought on that? 

I would generally agree with that. So, I would love to actually do some studies so that we can actually pull this directly back to output. But what I would do is batch your distractions into one single part of your day. So, instead of saying 20%, or 30%, whatever the percentage is, I spend about three hours a day communicating synchronously with my direct reports. That’s an example. So, that’s the time that I spend communicating synchronously with people. And also, inside of that, we do things like company addresses, as an example. But we record those asynchronously. So, we actually record those videos, we edit them, and then we put them out for everybody. And then people can listen to them on Zoom, or they can listen to them as a recording after the fact. But I would say batch it. 

So, I usually have Monday afternoons as my time to be able to communicate synchronously with the vast majority of our team members. And if there’s any big problems that pop up during that time, then obviously, we try to redirect it towards Mondays. There are situations that are obviously out of our control. This week, and I don’t know when this is going to go live, but Ukraine was invaded by Russia, and I ended up having to do a lot of very quick work to be able to try to make sure that all of our Ukrainian team members are safe and are where they need to be. Obviously, those are instances in which synchronous work is inefficient, but the fastest way to actually get things done. 

But yeah, I would probably say 20% is a good one. And then more importantly, if you can batch it, then you can really sit down and say, ‘I’m going to work on a very difficult problem for six hours.’ As often as you can do that, and as often as you can empower every single team member inside of your organization to be able to do that, that’s the secret towards growing a business.

Nice. Alright, let’s transition to what I have found to be the best, not necessary argument against remote work, but the most pressing challenge in looking towards the future. So, I was at a talk, and somebody said, ‘Look, remote is a privilege that you earn when you’re in the middle of your career. You know what to do, and if somebody leaves you alone for six hours, you know what to do with that time. You’re going to be great at it and you have that focus’ as opposed to somebody who’s coming up, they’re new in their career, they’re fresh. I see a lot of people who are concerned about people at that stage of their career, working remotely from their parents’ house or wherever and not getting the time that other people had to sit next to somebody, to see how that was worked, to learn all the things that don’t show up in manuals, but the osmosis learning that happens. What have you found other companies have done to try to navigate this?

Well, I think there’s a big assumption there that management needs to be done synchronously. Like inside of that entire statement, you’re assuming management must at all times be synchronous. And I’ll give you an example of me researching GitLab and doing a lot of interviews with GitLab. Okay. I probably did about four or five hours of interviews with the GitLab people. And they actually got a little frustrated with me because I would ask them a question on Zoom and they would respond with a URL, which was like, ‘Oh, well, here’s how we do it.’ ‘Okay, but how do you do it?’ ‘Well, it’s in the URL.’ ‘Okay, can we talk about it for two minutes?’ ‘No, we can’t. It’s in the URL. Let’s talk about something else that’s more valuable during our time here. Let’s talk about something that isn’t already documented so that we can actually make this time as efficient as humanly possible.’

So, I actually think, in the future, 10 years from now, we’re really going to get away from the concept that we currently have right now of management. And instead, it’s going to look a lot more like leadership. So, when I speak to my direct reports, I don’t talk to them about where they’re getting their numbers from because all of their numbers are already documented. And we’ve clearly identified what the goals are for those individual team members and what they need to achieve, and whether or not they’re on target or off target, it’s all documented asynchronously. And I’ve consumed that information before I actually sit down with them for the meeting. What I instead really focus on is, one of my team members, her dog died, and her kids are having a real difficult time with it, and they’re really going through some difficult issues, and this is impacting her work. That’s what I talked about this week for about 45 minutes.

Those are the things that you need to be able to talk to, that’s what you can provide as a way to be able to boost an individual worker’s productivity, as opposed to show and tell, how are your numbers, where did you get those numbers from, are those numbers good. And then more importantly, at the end of that meeting, now, I’m going to go tell my boss those numbers, and then my boss is going to go tell his boss or her boss those numbers, and this stupid game of telephone that just doesn’t make any sense. Everyone in our organization, I can look at what their core quantifiable metrics are within about two minutes. So, there’s no discussion, right? I can say, ‘Well, why are Vaishali’s numbers not where they need to be, Lauren? It looks like she’s going through some real trouble. What can we do to be able to help her long-term, get back to where she was before?’ Those are the types of conversations that we have. We don’t have these synchronous games of telephone, which are really detrimental towards overall productivity.

But how do you translate that into a skill development, a learning development? Let’s say if somebody is a designer. The difference between somebody sitting at home, once or twice a week they check-in with a senior designer to get their work looked at versus sitting next to that designer five days a week, seeing what they do, getting instant feedback. Obviously, a more inefficient way to run a company.

So, it’s not a more inefficient way for the company. It’s like when you have that person sitting next to that designer, it’s more efficient for those two designers, it’s not more efficient for the company. That’s what I really wanted to reinforce, is when you look at the way that these interactions really occur, it’s building rapport. It’s having people that are part of your tribe, that are part of your culture, and I am a huge proponent of that. And actually, this afternoon, I’m going to put on my Oculus Rift. We have Oculus Rift Friday afternoons where we all meet in the metaverse, and we play ‘Shoot ’em Up’ games together. And it has nothing to do with work. But it’s just something that we voluntarily do. And the investment that we made was getting everyone the headsets, and then we basically said, “Well, you guys do whatever the hell you want to do with it.” And we’re measuring the output of that, which is the dividend, which is how often do they actually meet with other team members from the company, and not necessarily talk about work, but kill zombies, as an example. 

That’s how you can actually build that type of mentorship and that can lead to another conversation that might lead to something else. But having that designer sit down with that other designer is such a pull on their overall productivity when the vast majority of that conversation is probably redundant. And they probably only need two to three hours per week, as opposed to the 20-30 hours that I think we see in the corporate world right now. 

There’s also this belief that just because someone doesn’t have that much experience doesn’t mean that they cannot find answers to their own problems. And I think that this also comes out of, I’ll call it like ‘90s manager’. So, generally I see this with people that like, when they really became a manager, they became a manager during the 90s, and they completely missed, basically the Wikipedia generation, right? The generation, which is just like, ‘Okay, well, how do I create this video edit?’ ‘Google it, dude.’ ‘Like, what? Why are you coming to me and talking?’ Like, yes, I know the answer to that question. But did you spend two minutes looking for the answer? Let’s actually spend our time working on deeper issues that are really going to be problematic, like, how do I actually convince Neil that my idea is the best idea? That’s what we should be spending our time on, not ‘how do you do a video edit’, as an example?

Yeah. And even those skills, like how to have those negotiations in those live meetings and how to be convincing, I think there’s a long way to go to help people understand those things. And I think, like you said, right now, there is an internet full of information out there, and YouTube is very huge, and what it can train people to do. 

Yeah, I think in the next 10 years, we’re going to see what I like to call the rise of the ‘introvert leader’. Because synchronous meetings are really advantageous towards charismatic individuals. So, you have a group of eight people, you’ve got a six-foot-one-Captain-America-looking type guy that’s incredibly good looking, and he has a horrible idea. But because he’s so charismatic and he’s really good at delivering that messaging, everyone goes with that idea. Inside of an asynchronous meeting, it’s all through text. You’ve got to get much better at communicating in textual formats. And more importantly, a lot of the introverted people that may actually have much better ideas are able to sit down and really think about what they want to talk about, really write it out, and provide really good arguments to why they think their idea is the best. I think you’re going to have a lot more of those ideas taking root inside of an organization as opposed to the synchronous, charismatic leader, which we’ve had. 

We had a quick section in the book which was ‘The guy that started WeWork.’ And I don’t know, I can’t remember his name right now, it escapes me, but we used him as a perfect example of the ‘charismatic synchronous leader’. WeWork raised over half a billion dollars. It was probably one of the largest companies in 2019. They were going to IPO at, I think it was 75 billion. Then they dropped their IPO down to 40 billion, and then their IPO completely collapsed. And it was because, honestly, and I hope that WeWork is not one of your sponsors, WeWork was, you know, vaporware. It was entirely based off the charisma of this incredibly charismatic individual, Adam Neumann, that ended up building such a massive, massive company. Well, charisma only gets you so far. What you really need to do is focus on the fundamentals, and that’s what the vast majority of asynchronous leaders are currently doing.

Well, I’ve enjoyed this a lot, Liam. It’s been fun to dive deep into these discussions. And I think if anyone else out there is feeling like, yeah, this is getting them excited, then we got to meet synchronously once a year at least, right? Do we do some kind of conferencing to get together? So, where should people go if they want to learn more about the conference?

Go to runningremote.com. The conference is May 17th and 18th, and it’s really designed for the business leaders, founders, and operators of remote first organizations or organizations that want to transition towards remote and hybrid work policies because those are the people that I think are really going to be the tip of the spear over the next couple of years in understanding where this entire movement goes.

Excellent. And be on the lookout for your book coming out later this year, right?

August 16th. Hopefully, we get it out. I mean, we’re going to get it out, but it’s been a challenge. I’m never writing a book ever again. It was the worst experience of my professional career to be completely honest with you. I don’t know if you’ve ever been up since two or like three o’clock in the morning trying to work on a paragraph. It was hard work, but I hope that everyone enjoys it. Anyone that comes to the Running Remote conference will be able to get access to a free copy of the book or a couple actually.

Excellent. Well, cool. Liam, it’s been great to have you on again. We look forward to the next time.

Thanks for having me.