Liam Martin
But the core issue that I've been able to analyze and I looked at dozen plus remote first companies, all billion dollar plus companies that were remote before the pandemic, the one thing that they do, that everyone else does not do is what I am calling asynchronous management, the ability to be able to manage people without actually directly interacting with them.

Jeff Ma
Hello, and welcome to Love as a Business Strategy, podcast that brings humanity back to the workplace. We're here to talk about business, we want to tackle topics that most business leaders might shy away from, we believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. As always, I'm your host, Jeff Ma. And we're here to have conversations and hear stories from real people about real businesses and practices. And today's conversation might be a little different, and I'm pretty psyched about it. My guest is Liam Martin, and he's the co founder and CMO at Time Doctor, and also core co organizer of the running remote conference, the world's largest remote work conference. Welcome to the show. Liam, how's it going?

Liam Martin
Thanks for having me. I'm doing pretty darn well, as we were talking beforehand. I've got a little bit of allergies today. But I'm feeling fantastic. It's spring now in Canada. And for Canadian, this is like the best time it's just the darkness, or in the light is presenting itself for the first time.

Jeff Ma
And how long of a window do you have of that? Wonderful, wonderful,

Liam Martin
we're probably about May to October, we get our first snow, usually on Halloween. That's generally when the first no happens. It doesn't stick around. But you know, you can't just really I've got a beautiful rooftop on my house here. And rooftop season is over once Halloween rolls around.

Jeff Ma
Well, that sounds incredible. Because here in Texas, Houston specifically, we have really cold and then really hot and we have about a couple of weeks between those two seasons. So it's must be nice to have a couple of months to enjoy that.

Liam Martin
I don't know if it's the same thing. But every time I go down for South by Southwest in Austin, I think Man, it's such a fantastic temperature. But then people telling me just wait a couple of weeks, it's gonna be unbearably hot.

Jeff Ma
It's true. They time South by Southwest like that. But yes, Liam. I think one of the interesting things about and I want you to, if you could help illuminate everyone about a little bit about your, your expertise and your passion. Why don't we start there? Actually, why don't you kind of just open up for everybody what is if you want to open running remote, or if you want to talk about Time Doctor, however you choose, but what do you all about?

Liam Martin
So I'm all about our core mission that flows through all of our businesses, which is empowering the world's transition towards remote work. We've been doing that for 12 years, bunch of different products connected to that space. But everything feeds into that core mission and message that we have employees in 43 different countries all over the world. We have never had an office, we never will have an office. And we believe that you can build a business, not just as successfully remote, but actually more successfully, when you do it remotely if you know how to do it properly. So we teach people how to make sure that that happens.

Jeff Ma
That's awesome. Right off the bat. What is the core kind of misunderstanding or assumption that people have when you say working remote and what they understand to be working remote?

Liam Martin
Such a good question. So when I talk to people about how I'm effectively a remote work expert, someone called me a thought leader and I kind of cringe at that. Because I think when you think about a thought leader, then they're not actually doing work. Like they're not executing. They're just kind of talking about executing, or they're giving other people advice. I try to shy away from that as much as possible and continue to do the work and then get informed from that. But people ask me, Should I be using Zoom? Or should I be using Google meet? Or should I be using Slack or Google or Microsoft Teams? And the response that I give them is, sometimes they get really frustrated by it. I tell them if those are the questions that you think that you should be asking me, then you don't actually know the answers that you should be looking for, which is even worse. And the biggest issue that I see inside of remote teams is they don't actually teach anyone how to manage remote teams. So when we switched to remote back in March of 2020, February of 2020 4% of the US workforce was working remotely. By March, it was 45%. That's the biggest transition in work since the industrial revolution. But the Industrial Revolution took about 80 years. And we did that in March. So of course, there's a lot of stuff that's not gonna get communicated effectively. And I remember March, April, May just kind of, I felt like I had, like a life preserver, but everyone was, was sinking right around me in this ocean of what the heck do I do with remote work? And I had the answer. So that's why I actually really worked on this book over the last couple of years, to be able to provide people the methodology of how to manage remote workers, which is very counterintuitive to probably anything that your listeners would would understand in the onpremise. Office environment today. Sure.

Jeff Ma
I know like in the scramble, like you mentioned, during that time, much emphasis was kind of put on recreating the in office experience or replicating that in a virtual way. And I'm assuming that your approach doesn't necessarily do that.

Liam Martin
Yeah, I mean, that's the most wrong answer that you could possibly get. Unfortunately, I just I mean, and you hit the nail on the head. So working from home shouldn't turn into living at work. And that's what the vast majority of these people that I'll call pandemic panic errs ended up doing, it was remote at gunpoint, right, no one really had a choice. I remember getting a call from a friend of mine, who runs a company that has about 15,000 employees. And he was freaking out, because the government was mandating shutdowns in this country that he had a couple 1000 People that and it was the entire country was going to be shut down in 48 hours. So he was obering laptops to people, he was literally tossing a laptop into an Uber, or a desktop, and then getting them to drive it to that employees house so that they could get the equipment and, and set up properly. So it was a pretty scary time. But the core issue that I've been able to analyze, and I looked at dozen plus remote first companies, all billion dollar plus companies that were remote before the pandemic, the one thing that they do, that everyone else does not do, is what I am calling asynchronous management, the ability to be able to manage people without actually directly interacting with them. So give you some context, Vaishali, who is someone that ended up connecting us for this podcast, who works in PR, I've worked with her for six years, and we've met in person or video five times during that period. But we work every single day through our project management systems through our instant messaging, through our processes through email. And we work very closely together, we exchange you know, like internet memes every single day, we talk, I know everything about her and her family, she knows everything about me. But we do it in a way that allows for both of us to be able to focus on deep work inside of the organization. And that's the critical underpinning that a lot of these remote first companies got, which a lot of the pandemic Pentacles do not get, which is actually interrupting people throughout their workday is probably the worst thing that you can do towards their overall productivity. And unfortunately, the manager is the nucleus have those interruptions and getting the manager out of the workers way is the best way to be able to have a fast growing organization.

Jeff Ma
Very interesting. What do you say? Or how do you address teams whose at least core current function, or at least their their MO, in essence, is around collaborative brainstorming? Or, you know, you know, creative work that is team based essentially, how does that translate in in your in your kind of perception or system?

Liam Martin
So asynchronous teams and companies don't necessarily, they do meet synchronously? Sure. But it's kind of like an alacarte method versus a buffet style. So when you have an office, everyone pays a sunk cost every single day, right? You pay 90 minutes of your life every single day to go into one particular place. And once you're there, the sunk cost has been paid. So you might as well collaborate as much as humanly possible. Right? remote teams pay that cost every single time they meet synchronously. So that's the big differentiator. So they've recognized well, what's the minimum viable dose that we need on collaboration? So you know, I talk a lot about. And I wish I could actually run a larger study on this. But I only did a small analysis for the book. I believe that for every minute that you stay in a meeting, there's a exponential drop in the output of that meeting. So I don't know if you've been in these meetings before, but like the first 20 minutes is super productive. And then the 90th Minute 100 and 80th minute, man, it gets pretty unproductive. A lot of people kind of get into these, like soliloquies. And maybe only two people are actually having a discussion when there's nine people in the room. And those are the things that asynchronous teams really try to fight against. What information do we need to communicate synchronously, and then everything else, let's manage towards an asynchronous mode of communication. So almost kind of like an async first, mindset, not saying synchronous communication isn't critical. We have team retreats every single year where everyone flies into one particular place. And we have like a, basically a conference about the company once a year. And we also do meet on Zoom, we meet departmentally, we even meet in the metaverse, we bought a whole bunch of Oculus rest for everybody. But fundamentally, for us, we've recognized that the fastest way for us to be able to get work done is to not bother each other.

Jeff Ma
Got it? I mean, it makes a lot of sense. And I think my curiosity and especially in my excitement and inviting you here today to talk is where might the concept of of love at least that we talked about here in terms of, you know, the human element and the, the, you know, the humanity side of things that we try to focus on? Where does that fit in your in your system, or does it?

Liam Martin
So the funny thing that we have, and I'll give you a small story that might allude to this, we have something called Silent meetings inside of our organization. So if you're going to meet with eight other people, we set up an Asana group for it, usually, it's a recurring meeting, and then we'll put down the issues that we need to talk about during that meeting. And we discussed them asynchronously. So we literally write comments. And if we've come to a conclusion, on that particular issue, we take the conclusion we put at the top of the ticket, and then we clear the ticket. And if there's less than three issues, for a meeting, we don't have the meeting, because it's actually not worth our time, to be able to get everyone in the same place at the same time, boot everything up and basically interrupt 90 minutes of your workday, which is not just 90 minutes, by the way, it's like the 30 minutes on the front end and the 15 minutes on the back end. And what we've discovered, or at least what I've discovered inside of those meetings, is the issues that don't disappear, have nothing to do with the bureaucracy of the business, they have nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of the business, actually entirely are connected to human issues to EQ issues. So you know, Jeff's got an issue with Liam, and here's why we've got to jump on this call and figure it out. Or, you know, Jeff has had a loss in his family as an example. And we need to be able to address that, and he's falling behind. And we need to be able to delegate some of his responsibilities to be able to make that work. Those are all examples of what doesn't get resolved synchronously. So when I think about my synchronous meetings, they actually almost have nothing to do with work they have to do with how are you? How are you feeling? What can I do to be able to improve the overall output in the organization and the vast majority of the time, that means unblocking issues that have nothing to do with classical work, or at least what most classical managers think, are the blockages towards work.

Jeff Ma
So in essence, you're saying there is still an element of relationship building that may exist or layer or at least addressing interpersonal, you know, issues synchronously, or is that still also asynchronous?

Liam Martin
So you can address them to a degree asynchronously, but I think when we're talking about emotion, it's something that you should almost always address synchronously. I have one. So the one thing that I've asked every single asynchronous organization that's been successful and has been doing it for more than a decade, you know, what do you do synchronously? And the one thing that they all talk about is an onboarding process and an onboarding process. So when you're going to hire someone in fire someone that's entirely synchronous. That's the one thing that almost everyone currently does synchronously, because obviously it's a very emotional time. But I can give you an example a couple of weeks ago, one of my direct reports, her dog died, and her kids were having a real difficult time of it. So she was distracted by that and was not actually able to do the work that she needed to do inside of the organization, she didn't necessarily lay that out for me. I mean, you have to be a little intuitive to be able to kind of recognize that. But what was the solution? Well, I ended up asking her if she wanted a therapist to be able to sit down with her kids to be able to see if they could work through it. And someone actually just last week, in my one on one, and he ended up having a very serious back injury. And we got him a booking at a physiotherapy clinic to be able to help them out. And then I also I do have a lot of back pain myself. So I sent him my back happiness repair kit that I've that I assemble on Amazon from time to time and send to friends of mine. Those are the things that number one, people actually, the people that report to you recognize that they're actually you're paying attention to them on an emotional issue, and you're making sure that they're heard inside of that process. But more importantly, I actually think this is way better than giving someone a raise or giving someone more responsibility. It's like, listen, I actually do care about you, I'm listening. And here are the exact here's my proposed exact solution to this problem. And getting into those deep emotional issues, a lot of people shy away from those, but I think those are the ones that actually enable your organization to move a lot faster. Because this is all I mean, companies are based on trust, fundamentally. And if you don't necessarily, if you don't have that trust both ways, I don't think you're going to succeed long term.

Jeff Ma
I 100% agree. And I think, part of the disconnect for me, when I first kind of heard your kind of approach at a very high level, right? What you're saying now makes a lot of sense. Because what I'm hearing is that, you know, asynchronous, like, you know, you reference how you work with someone for years, but really, I've only met synchronously with them only a handful of times, and it's still very impactful and successful. What I'm hearing is also that you do have a personal relationship with that person, that you do actually still have, you know, you know, like, like, I won't say emotional connection, but you know, an emotional relationship in the sense that, you know, friendship or closeness does still exist and can be built in an asynchronous manner.

Liam Martin
Yeah, I mean, so, another example that I can share with you is, we have a couple team members that are in Ukraine right now. And we begged everyone that we could to leave, actually, remember about a week before the invasion. We told everyone, I jumped on a synchronous call with everyone. Guess what, you hit the jackpot, you have a all expenses paid trip anywhere on planet Earth, you want to go, plus, you've got a month of an Airbnb, wherever you want to go on planet Earth, you know, you ever wanted to go to on an African Safari, let's do it, now's the time to be able to make that happen to try to convince them to leave. And a lot of them didn't end up doing that. And a good hour of my day now is spent checking in on them asynchronously and synchronously. Just seeing how they're doing. And that's something that I think is number one, the right thing to do as a human being. People are under enormous amounts of stress. And they're not productive. But obviously they can't be there in a war. But more importantly, I think that this is something that has long term dividends that kind of go past just the min, I guess Liam was willing to book me a flight anywhere. It's like, no, Liam actually really cares about and the company cares about where you're going and what's happening to you, and making sure that you're as safe as humanly possible. And that doesn't just work with those people that also reflects the culture of the organization and make sure that everyone else in the organization knows if we actually get in serious trouble. The company is going to make sure that we're taken care of

Jeff Ma
awesome. I I know you've already alluded to a number of these things, but can you just break down kind of plainly, what is kind of the number the top few things or things that remote teams and managers are getting wrong right now? What is like the summary of that of the assure.

Liam Martin
So I think there's three major tenants, at least for me, which is deliberate communication, democratized processes and detailed metrics. So deliberate communication does not mean undocumented conversations. So you've probably been in a boardroom before where you have the official conversation and then you have the conversation that's in the in next to the bathroom or at the watercooler and that's where a lot of these decisions truly get made. But I think this is actually really detrimental to run about organizations. And more importantly, actually, they're absolutely disruptive inside of hybrid organizations. Because the remote team member that's popping on a zoom call in front of the five people that are in the boardroom, you pop off zoom. And then the conversation continues. And it's an undocumented conversation that really disenfranchises that remote worker. And it creates a phenomenon that I call distance bias, which is, the further you are away from the decision maker, the less of your ideas that get adopted, not because you necessarily have good or bad ideas, but just because you're able to other people are able to convince the decision maker of other options, because they're just closer to them. So that's the first big one that you need to take into consideration is asynchronous communication provides a A equal playing field for everyone to be able to communicate. And I really think this also empowers what I like to call introverted leaders. So the people that are not the super charismatic, six foot two Captain America guy that's really good at inspiring people in an executive meeting. But someone who's like the wallflower, like me, that's introverted, and I can't really communicate in that way. Because I just don't have that type of skill set. My ideas may actually be better than Captain America's. But unfortunately, they don't get adopted because I just don't have this tool set to be able to do it. A synchronous provides a level playing field for everyone to be able to get access to that information. Very interesting. Next one is democratized processes. So everything inside of the organization is documented. And for us, we actually go a little bit step for step further, I call it the ability for everyone in the organization to be as open as humanly possible. It's radical transparency. So within the first month of joining the company, you get access to the P&L you get access to our customers are how much they're making, all of our processes, everything and anything inside of the organization you get access to and it effectively gives you the goal anyway, is to give you the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company. So if you then and this is only possible, by the way through a synchronous organizations, you can't do this synchronously, because it's impossible to be able to document all of those things and those processes. But when you have all of those things digitized, because you have to because everyone's working remote, you can just open that up to everyone. So there are no closed doors inside of the organization. So when difficult decisions need to be made. A lot of people in our companies and other asynchronous remote companies say wow, okay, you know what, you made the right move. We definitely needed to cut back sales by 20%. Because otherwise, we would have lost a couple million dollars next year. Third one is detailed metrics. So the ability for everyone to be able to document everything that they're doing. I kind of talked about I steal, Jocko Willink's next quote here, which is discipline equals freedom. So counterintuitively, the more bureaucracy and the more documentation that you have of your metrics and what you're doing and where you're going, the more successful the organization will be. So if I'm on Asana as an example, I write down all the tasks that I'm doing, it's available to everyone. And someone might come to me and say, Man, Liam's got to do his speaker prep calls. And he's got to be done this task by Friday, and it's Thursday, and it's only 50% done, I better not bother this guy right now, because I know that he's completely overloaded.

Jeff Ma
Awesome, I love how you lay that out. The question that comes to mind is, a lot of this sounds like it comes much like in synchronous organizations and other any organization, it comes down to the leadership or the management as well. A lot of the things you're saying, to me require a great deal of either the right mindset, discipline, accountability, empowerment, any combination of those things, which I usually look to how leaders lead in order to accomplish. What do you have, I guess, for leaders, what do you what do you say to leaders to kind of help them through this

Liam Martin
outside of buying the book, which is going to solve all of their problems? Sure. The next thing that I would tell them is, you're absolutely right. This is a top down issue. Unfortunately, if you're a middle manager, or if you're a frontline employee, and you're saying, I'm going to implement asynchronous management inside of my organization, you'll probably fail. What you need to do is actually convince your, your decision makers of that fact. And the biggest thing that I would tell them is Your job as a manager, or as a leader, is to remove blockages or distractions from your workforce. So the philosophical underpinnings of asynchronous management is another book by Cal Newport called Deep Work, which I would highly suggest that people pick up. And effectively deep work shows you how to have everything at your disposal to be able to solve difficult problems that so that means not actually asking someone else, hey, what's the answer to this problem, or I have this blockage here, it's having everything at your disposal through an automated way through the platform, not necessarily individuals to solve those issues. And the big problem that a lot of managers and leaders have is, when you're trying to free up all of those blockages, you unfortunately, are the source of the majority of those blockages. So you are the person that saying, well, we've got to jump on a zoom call right now, because this is an emergency. There are no emergencies inside of asynchronous organizations. There's no requirement for immediacy. And if you really do look at all of the problems that you have an accompany, you may be accelerating yourself as a leader. So getting that immediate response may accelerate yourself, but you're actually decelerating the organization, because you're disrupting other people's flow, and focus. And if it comes from the top down, we'll usually see a lot of success in people switching over to asynchronous, but if you require the, hey, I need to jump on to a zoom call, or I need to call this person right now. It generally will fail. One kind of interesting point is, I know that you've got board games behind you, we have, we have a chat group called Red Alert, because we're nerds, and we really like Star Trek. So when everyone, when anyone posts in the red alert, chat on Slack, the shields go up. And like it is something that actually rings all of our phones at the same time for anyone that's in the Red Alert chat. It gets used once a year, on average. And it's literally like, Russia is trying to hack us. Red alert, right? Like that's those are the only instances that are really requiring immediacy, then when you analyze an audit all of your interactions, you'll discover that the vast majority of those things don't need to be responded right now. They can be responded, they can be responded to when your direct reports have their most optimal time to be able to respond to those things in which they're less stressed. There's lower forms of anxiety, you know, that immediacy just isn't there anymore.

Jeff Ma
I love it. I love it. I want to save some time for you to talk a little bit more about your upcoming book. But this is all extremely, extremely enlightening. And I think heartening as well. Because, you know, when when I tie it back to Love as a Business Strategy, I wasn't sure what to expect in the conversation, to be honest. But what I'm hearing is that it it's it still holds a lot of the elements that we espouse in terms of, you know, being human and working with each other just because we're not co located or even synchronously communicating, we're still putting ourselves into that asynchronous space and kind of just consuming it differently. On the other end as well.

Liam Martin
Yeah, I almost kind of think about this as we're gonna go back to another nerd analogy, but like subreddits, some of those communities are incredibly tight knit, right. And they are by design, asynchronous, right? Someone puts on a comment, someone else puts in a comment, they go back and forth, they communicate. And that's really, if you were a fly on the wall inside of our organization, you would find that EQ component communicated asynchronously. And we have an NPS of. And again, it's not the perfect measure. But we have an NPS of 73. In the organization, which is much better than the I think the early 30s is the average. And when we ask people, well, why do you like working in this organization? It's that we have the autonomy. And we have the transparency that that I love working in. Those are the two major components that they really love working in the companies that that we've built, because we just open everything else up to everyone. And we allow people to get out of their own ways to accomplish their best work.

Jeff Ma
Very cool. Very interesting. With the time we have left you can you tell us what is the what is the book coming out and how can we get it?

Liam Martin
So August 16th is when it comes out. But you can actually go to runningremote.com to be able to check out the book right now. And we have a lot of really cool bonuses if you're interested in pre ordering. And then outside of that, if you're interested in just learning more, and you're not able to buy the book, or go to our conference, one of the best spots is youtube.com/runningremote, which is our YouTube channel where we put up all of our talks for free from the running world conference. So if you really want to go deep into learning this stuff, that's by far the best resource that I can point you to outside of the book, obviously.

Jeff Ma
Awesome for those who can't wait as well. So absolutely awesome conversation them. Thank you so much for the time today. I really appreciate all the insights you've shared.

Liam Martin
Thank you.

Jeff Ma
So to our listeners, I hope you enjoyed that. We thank you very much for tuning in. And be sure to also check out our book Love as a Business Strategy still there, still great. But with the podcast, subscribe and rate if you haven't tell a friend and we will be posting new episodes every week. So with that, we will see you next week. Thanks again. Everybody. Have a good day.