Successful Remote Work Through Asynchronous Management

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1:02Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Liam Martin. He is a co-founder of Time Doctor and has been working remotely for over 20 years and has worked with thousands of companies looking to adopt a remote working model. Liam is incredibly passionate about understanding how organizations can unlock remote work to help achieve more autonomy for business owners and employees. Today, we're going to talk about his newest book, Running Remote, Master the Lessons from the World's Most Successful Remote Work Pioneers. So Liam, welcome to the show.

1:40Thanks for having me, John. So I'll be the first to admit, when I saw the title of the book, I was like, oh, yeah, a lot of companies are having to do distributed workforces and run remote today. Pretty clearly, when we get into it, you're not necessarily saying that's how to go. You introduced the term asynchronous management as a mindset. So with that setup, I'll let you explain what you mean by that. Sure. So when we went remote, just to kind of give you context, February of 2020, 4 % of the U.S. workforce was working remotely. By March of 2020, that was 45 % of the U.S. workforce. That is the biggest shift in work since the Industrial Revolution.

2:23But the Industrial Revolution took 80 years, and we did that in March. So it was what I like to call emergency remote work, right? Everyone just said, well, let's start working from home immediately. And within days, and for someone who's been doing this for 20 years, it was incredibly exciting to see the entire world shift over to my mindset. The thing that was problematic inside of that was that no one actually understood how to manage remote workers. And so now we're seeing this pushback to the office because they don't really fundamentally understand how to manage people effectively when they work remotely.

2:59And what I've been doing with Time Doctor and then also running remote, which is the largest conference on remote work that's been running for the past six years, is I studied what successful remote companies do. And the one thing that they have in common more than anything else is something that I like to call asynchronous management, which is essentially, and it's a very alien concept to a lot of people. Think about if you had to build a business, but you couldn't talk to anybody inside of that business. That's essentially asynchronous management. And the book teaches you exactly how to do it.

3:35You know, it's funny, in a lot of ways, I think that people that get this, whether they even go into offices, get this mindset, it's probably a better way to manage than most sort of top down hierarchical, you know, organizations have always, you know, since the dawn of time, managed. And I think a lot of people learn this, as you mentioned, out of necessity, and probably will never go back, even if they start going back to the office. Would you say that's a fair statement? Yeah, the data is quite interesting. So we just actually had Brian Elliott from Future Forum, that is the largest longitudinal data set on remote work.

4:13And one of the things that he's seen recently is remote work hit and dependent upon the study that you look at, it can differ. About 26 % of the US workforce is currently working remotely. But that number is going back up. It's not going down again. So we've actually gone past that COVID bump and we're now going back up in terms of remote work. Also, 68 % of new companies formed today are actually stating that they want to be able to work remotely from the get-go. So I actually think that these new generation of companies are going to be a lot more efficient. There's a friend of mine who is the head of remote for a company called GitLab.

4:51And he had this great mindset connected to this, which was essentially asynchronous management is like the first Model T rolling off the production line. And the old 20th century model are horses. You want to be the Model T. You don't want to be the horse. Right, right, right. You know, it's funny. It's a lot of industries like restaurants. You know, they were forced into doing things differently during COVID and they'll never go back, you know, now that they've learned that. And I think that is probably aren't we still in a bit of a window where actually remote workers have to learn how to work remote as well as remote managers or leadership?

5:26I mean, I think there's a learning curve all around, isn't there? Absolutely. So leadership, executives, directors and above, they actually have adopted to remote work quite well. They actually are not going back to the office anywhere near as much as middle managers. Middle managers are the real bulk of the problem in terms of adoption of remote work. 76 % of employees want more remote work. 67 % of managers, middle tier managers, want less. So there's a direct conflict between those two groups. And it's fundamentally that they just don't understand how to manage those people the right way. And again, asynchronous management, it's a little bit of an alien concept to be able to get your head around.

6:10But once you actually crystallize it, it becomes much easier to be able to manage people and scale. The other thing that I found really interesting when studying this book and studying a whole bunch of asynchronous organizations is that they, on average, had a managerial layer about 50 % as much as on-premise in-office counterparts. So, therefore, you can manage a lot more people with less managers. Sure. You, I mean, essentially Time Doctor is a tool, but you go to great lengths to suggest that this mindset is not about the tools, or at least first and foremost. Yeah, so I mean, Time Doctor for us is really an asynchronous time management tool, which is the biggest thing that people are concerned about with regards to remote work is, I don't know what they're doing.

7:00I know when they're in the office, they're at least there and they're doing something. Well, the reality is that they're playing Candy Crush on their phones just under their desk just as much as they are when they work from home. It's just that they get an extra hour and a half of sleep when they work from home. So they're on average more productive. There's about 27 studies right now in the last year and a half that have come out about remote work productivity. 26 of them have stated that there's an increase in productivity with regards to remote work. But yet we still see a massive pushback to the office.

7:30And again, when I push managers and really ask them the true reasons, it is we need to be able to make sure that those workers are accountable. We need to be able to measure their output. And there are ways of doing that. Time doctor is not the only way of doing it. There's a lot of other tools, particularly inside of asynchronous management, to be able to make that happen. It's interesting. I read a study that said, you know, when people went remote, there was a huge spike in like tracking software and things. So, so it's like, they're not in the office. I can't see them. So I assume that they are not working at all unless I can like monitor them and watch them.

8:05Right. And I think that, as you said, what really proved out was people were actually far more productive, probably, probably a percentage of them far happier in, you know, because, Hey, I got a five minute break. I'll go throw the laundry and, you know, I'm getting something done, but, you know, I'm going to take a break at work, but now, you know, now I'm actually going to do something for myself, you know, during that time. So I'm sure that we will see tons and tons of studies about mental health and happiness and whatnot related to work. But is it true that there's also a con to that, you know, not being in the office?

8:40There are people that miss. I hear it all the time. You know, I miss the interaction. I miss being with people. I miss having team moments. So how do you keep some of that alive? So there are ways of doing it, and we outline it in the book. But there's companies like Duist, as an example. they have a huge chat version of Dungeons and Dragons, where all of a sudden you'll get a push notification saying you've got to go and heal your wizard. Otherwise, the dragon is going to break down into the castle. You've got people that do off sites. So we do company retreats every single year. But the biggest thing that you have to think about is when you think about your social circle, it's fundamentally around your work, particularly during your working years.

9:25And one of the things that I find super confusing is we don't have arranged marriages in North America, but we seem to have arranged friendships. It's just these people that we happen to work with that are around us become our social group. Well, for me, I actually have a lot of neighbors that I talk to every single day. We have lunch three or four times a week just with the local people that I work with. I have a co-working space that I go down the street, and those are really my work social network. And for me, that gives me much more happiness than if I'm necessarily interacting with direct coworkers.

10:01Let's talk about communication rituals. I think that's one of the ways that people have struggled the most with remote. I mean, they had the daily stand-up in the office, and they had the weekly meeting, and they had the 360 meeting. Is there a way that you have found a framework for how to communicate, how not to communicate? I mean, the last thing we want is a whole bunch of more emails because we're not in the office anymore, you know, from coworkers. So is there a framework for, you know, effective internal, particularly internal communication that you've found really benefits from remote?

10:36Yeah, well, that's a core piece of asynchronous management, which is fundamentally the platform is the manager, not necessarily the individual. So every single employee has a quantifiable and longitudinal number that they're answerable towards. And ideally, that number is actually provided by the platform, the project management system, the data points that you're pulling in. It just is automatically presented. So the manager doesn't necessarily have to sit down and say, hey, John, why aren't you hitting your numbers? It's very clear that you're not hitting your numbers. You don't have to actually identify that.

11:10Then we can focus more on how to fix it as opposed to how to identify it. And now let's hear a word from our sponsor, Marketing Made Simple. It's a podcast hosted by Dr. J.J. Peterson and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and, more importantly, make it work. In a recent episode, J.J. and April chat with StoryBrand certified guides and agency owners about how to use ChatGPT for marketing purposes. We all know how important that is today. Hey, listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

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12:29Check it out at dtm.world slash certification. That's dtm.world slash certification. So one of the things that asynchronous management probably begs people to do is make decisions on their own because I, you know, I'm not going to like go, hey, boss, you got a second. So I'm making decisions on my own. How do you equip people to make better decisions on their own? So we have a company value, which is self-guided missile, which specifically works all of this stuff out. And fundamentally, it is, don't ask me what to do. Tell me what you did. And if you have that type of mindset, you're actually going to work very well inside of remote companies.

13:17We have team members in 33 different countries all over the world. And it's very difficult for us to be able to communicate synchronously. I don't know if you know this, John, but what do you think the average amount of video communication is in the average remote company that started in 2021? Because it's very different from 2020. me. Video communication, you mean like one-to-one Loom video kind of thing? Yeah. So we're talking Zoom, Google Meet. We're talking about all those types of video formats. It's probably five or six hours at this point a day. It's about 56 % of an employee's work week is spent on video communication.

13:55Asynchronous organizations at max 20%. So it's a huge advantage where you're kind of meeting to prepare yourself for work, but you're not actually doing any work, right? We're discussing work, but we're not actually getting work done. And the more that you can have autonomous individuals that can actually execute on what they need to execute on, the faster your organization will grow. Along with the platform being the manager, one of the other pieces, which is a little bit more difficult for particularly founders to follow is we try to give everyone the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company.

14:35And this is a very hard pill to swallow. And it challenges us constantly. But if you give every single team member the same information as the CEO of the company, then magical things happen. They actually become way smarter overnight because they just have the same information that you had in terms of being the founder of the CEO of the company, and they can make much better informed decisions about how to operate inside of the business. All right. The CEO knows the financials. The CEO knows what everybody's paid. I mean, are we talking about that level of... So the only thing that we hold back is how much employees are paid.

15:12So we give our employees P &Ls. They know who our customers are. They know what they're making. We know everything and anything that goes on inside of the organization. And because we're asynchronous and we document everything and everything is basically written in the human, basically written down, the ability for us to actually jump in to all of those different virtual meetings that are asynchronous is very easy. So anyone can basically access anything anywhere. There's been some discussion, I don't know if it's valid or not, but I've heard especially in larger organizations, that this remote work actually puts junior employees at a disadvantage?

15:54You know, they're not interfacing with the SVPs anymore or they don't, you know, they can't necessarily connect with a mentor at work that's going to help them kind of guide through the politics. Do you think there's any credence to that idea? I think it's pretty early to be able to say. So the first generation of remote work, we were able to take the creme de la creme of planet Earth and bring them into our companies. So we were really hiring the best people on planet Earth that wanted to be able to work remotely. This next generation, I agree, the data shows that it hasn't really figured itself out yet.

16:30But I would say that there are ways of doing it. I mean, the mindset that we have is don't focus so much on identifying where people are going. Let the platform actually execute on the results. And then you deal with a lot of the EQ side of the business. How are you doing, John? What barriers are you currently having? How can I help you achieve those particular goals? That's what you should be spending your management time on as opposed to whether or not you fill out your TI-83 report. So you have more than once talked about this asynchronous platform. So give me a, like, sketch that out for me.

17:06What does that look like? I get the concept and the mindset. What does it look like from a tangible aspect? Sure. So every week I have something which is our top executive meeting. All of our executives meet. We have it inside of a sauna. We call it a silent meeting. So we have all of our metrics. We have our rocks that we need to achieve for that particular quarter. We have tasks that we need to achieve within the next week or two. And all of that is updated inside of Asana. And then we have issues. And we write down all of our issues and we start to debate it. And sometimes these debates can go 5, 10, 20, 30 comments deep in terms of the discussion.

17:48But when we come to a conclusion, we take that conclusion, we add it to the top of the ticket, and then we clear the ticket. And if we don't have anything to say for that meeting, we don't go to the meeting because we just saved everyone 90 minutes of their lives. And we can see that the vast majority of technical issues don't actually need to be addressed. The only ones that stay up on the agenda are the ones that really deal with people. It's John doesn't like Liam for some particular reason. And Liam is quite angry with John and we need to be able to settle in. That's really the core issue that we, and the most synchronous forms of meetings are ironically HR and people meetings.

18:30Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of that one, again, there's certainly people out there that are saying that remote work is really kind of devaluing culture inside of organizations. Obviously it's a different culture. How do you keep, let's say you have a very rich culture. People loved working at this organization. Now we've all gone remote. How do you keep aspects of maybe an old but cherished culture alive when a lot of the ways that people did that go away? So I think that people really need to understand what is culture to them. And the way that I see culture at its nucleus is a mission. So our mission as a company is we're trying to empower the world's transition towards remote work.

19:17We've been doing that for almost 15 years and we want to continue doing it. And if anyone doesn't align to that culture, we move them out of the organization as quickly as possible. So it's not so much who you work with. So a lot of people confuse who you work with your culture. It's not about whether you get a birthday cake on your birthday or whether there's pizza Thursdays or there's nap rooms in your office. This doesn't matter. It is, do you care about what you're doing as a company? Are you excited about actually accomplishing that mission? If you're not, don't work there. And if your company doesn't have an exciting mission, don't even start.

19:53It's just fundamentally something that people really miss. And for us, I mean, we have a 98 % retention rate inside of our organization because we have a very clear mission and values that connect to that core piece, which is people are really excited about helping people work remotely. And whatever that is for you, you need to be able to reinforce that and reinforce it much more when you are working remotely. So you probably went a little bit down answering this question. When people, particularly people that haven't done it before and they're like, yeah, we're going to go to this, where do they generally get it wrong?

20:35So there was a chapter that was removed from the book, which is very frustrating on my part. I actually wanted to publish it, but the publisher said we shouldn't. I ran 20 case studies, so I worked with 20 companies to try to make them asynchronous. And three of them became asynchronous by my definition, which was less than 20 % of their work week spent on synchronous activities. Seven reduced the amount of synchronous time that they had, but ten increased the amount of synchronous time that they spent inside of their organizations. and it really boiled down to three key factors. Number one, you need full buy-in, not just from the founders of the CEO of the company, you need the entire executive team and more importantly, the directors and managers below that particular team.

21:25If there's a chink in that particular armor, it's going to fall apart. Second is you need to be able to build out process documentation and we basically connected to platform as the manager is when someone has a question, Like, what are the HR policies inside of the organization? Well, we redirect them towards the document that actually explains that instead of me sitting down and talking to you for 30 minutes. And then the third thing is all of this documentation exists, but very few people can actually query it in a meaningful way. So we identified that over 95 % of these process documents, once they actually got them written in the people that failed, they never looked at them ever again.

22:11So they actually needed to use them. They had built this huge infrastructure and they never started to actually use it. So there's a huge, there's a huge software opportunity there actually for someone to be, I'm sure there's going to be a chat GPT add on where you can just magically get that information and put it in front of you. But those are the three key issues that have a problem. Yeah. And of course, what that, that application will do is it will also tell you in real time, here's the things people are having the most problems with, you know, finding And it's like, we need to redo this or we need to make this better or more prominent.

22:45So for sure. So I want to end just on the thought about unmanagement, a whole new leadership style. Is this something that is going to need to be taught and built into leadership training? Or is this just really going to be something where it becomes an organizational mission and everybody buys in or they don't? I think what's happening right now is, as I said before, at the top of our call, 68 % of new companies that are in tech, at least, are starting remote. And they're adopting an asynchronous management model as their core operating system. And so I do see a lot of resistance inside of corporate America to be able to adjust to this particular model.

23:28I would say in the next five to 10 years, when those companies, those little companies become big companies, they're going to recognize we've been caught with our tail between our legs because we're dealing with an organization that can scale at a speed that is at this point incalculable to the average corporate America company. And so I think that's essentially going to figure itself out. And then it's probably going to work into the MBA programs, you know, 10, 15 years down the line. Be seen as a case study for, you know, competitive reasons, if nothing else. There's actually a lot of HBR articles specifically on asynchronous management and how successful it is.

24:10And yet no one actually wants to implement it at scale. And most of the adoption is happening in the tech startup space. But I think that would change very soon. Yeah. And I think it's probably just sort of counterintuitive as part of the problem. You know, it's like your silent meeting. I mean, that would freak a lot of people out because it just seems, you know, so counter to what, you know, everybody's been raised to believe is especially an executive over 50. I mean, I can say that because I'm in that category. But the other part that's really interesting is charisma bias disappears. So the vast majority of people that have existed in the 20th century management model, they're incredibly charismatic people.

24:55You wouldn't be running this podcast if you weren't an incredibly charismatic individual. So you're the person that controls the conversation. The ability for you to communicate synchronously allows for your ideas to be adopted much more often than others. But are your ideas better or are you just better at delivering them? And asynchronous management allows for everyone to have equal access, including the wallflowers that don't necessarily want to be able to compete with the charismatic people, but they now can have a shot with asynchronous management. Actually, a leadership skill that I've had to learn is keep my mouth shut.

25:30So you're dead on that one. Well, Liam, thanks so much for stopping by to take a few minutes to share some ideas with our listeners. You want to tell people where they can connect with you and possibly pick up a copy of Running Remote? So at Liam Remote on most social media. And if you want to go pick up a copy, best place is Amazon. And next best place is runningremote.com, which is also where we have our conference. If you want to have access to all of our previous videos and talks from the last six years. Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the podcast. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.