[00:00:00] Stephen: Hello Wow @ Work listeners. Unfortunately, sometimes technology lets us down and unfortunately today is the day where it let us down for our podcast specifically with my audio. We have the wonderful Liam Martin talking about remote work and about his book Running Remote, and, uh, rather than lose the moment where we asked these wonderful questions and got some really insightful insights from Liam, we've gone ahead with releasing this podcast. I just ask you to just bear with the fact that the questions that I ask sound a little bit distance, and the audio is a little bit off, but still we get to the nub of the brilliant concepts and ideas around remote work that Liam is sharing with us. So I want you to be able to gain the insights from this. So once again, apologies for the audio and thanks so much guys for listening. [00:00:54] Welcome to the Wow at work Podcast. I'm Stephen Dargan, and this is an Liliana, Liliana Ashton. And today our guest is the wonderful Liam Martin co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor, which is a time tracking and their productivity platform. Also the co-organizer of debt Running Remote conference, and he's the author of the new book. And that's just give me a call running remote cares about me. It was so low. [00:01:19] Liam: Thanks for having me. I'm wowed that I'm here because I've actually been in Lisbon the last couple of days. And it's been really nice to disconnect cause we just finished the conference about two weeks ago, approximately. So I'm just coming off that. [00:01:34] Stephen: Brilliant. And this is a real good example of how remote working works. So you are not from Portugal. You are not from, they spend, but you're never working remotely for a while, while I'm doing other stuff as well in this one, which is incredible. [00:01:45] Liam: And maybe this is. This is an oversimplification simplification of it. But to me, people should be able to work wherever they want whenever they want, as long as they actually get their work done and I'm getting my work done. So I'm just doing it from Lisbon. It's very sunny outside. [00:01:58] Stephen: Fantastic. See the whole idea of remote working was that anatomy attend to it, many people going through the like two and a bit years ago as well. And I always imagined this scenario where if somebody in January 20, 20 bucks at a Boston, they say again, listen, I'm thinking of the same, it's ideal that I'm working from home working remotely, and the boss may have said in that situation, but how do you think that's going to work? I made 100. All my work would be done from home. You can communicate, via the internet. I'd be as do all my work as normal and send it to them, but he can communicate online and by the feeding that many bosses across the world, but it said that won't be happening here. And then within the space of two and a half months. So he, everybody realized this will be happening here. You entered the world of remote working before this even happened. [00:02:44] Liam: Yeah. Yeah. So I've been doing it for almost 20 years and I remember February of 20, 24 ish percent of the U S workforce was working remotely. And my March 45% of the U S workforce was working remotely. That's the biggest transition in work since the industrial revolution, but the industrial revolution took 20 years. We did that in March. So an obsolete and complete shift of everything that work is basically happened in less than 30 days. And you're to your point, it's very frustrating that it had to take a pandemic for a lot of employers to be able to allow for people to say, yeah, I'm willing to go and work from Lisbon. I'm going to be just as productive. If not more productive. And I'm going to deliver my work on time. I'm going to be reliable in that context. And if I'm not, then you can fire me or you can have a chat with me uh, to be able to have me to go back to the office, right? That was such a difficult ask pre pandemic, but then the pandemic produced this fantastic silver lining, which is now we're going on. Planet earth has the option to work remotely. [00:03:50] Liliana: most of them, I suppose. yes. I mean, Hopefully everyone. [00:03:55] Liam: You're right. Most of them do. So Elan isn't in that group with us, unfortunately. I don't know when this is going live, but what a week and a half ago, he basically said everyone's to be back in the office, you're going to get be fired. And I totally understand actually Yuan's perspective on this. He's working with a 20th century management philosophy. In the 21st century. So he just needs to readjust the way that he's thinking about work and where it happens and how it happens. And if he can do that, I think he'll actually be way more productive at Tesla. But then also when you think about just the culture of Tesla, it's a 14 hour, 16 hour. So when you burn people out to that degree uh, you can produce extraordinary results, but it just results in probably 10% of your team, burning out every quarter. But you have to replace, I don't know what the retention numbers of Tesla would necessarily be, but I do know amazon has actually one of the most difficult retention issues in all of tech, because they have that same philosophy that 14 to 16 hour work day, which will catch up to you eventually. And you can only do that for a year or two before it basically burns you out and you've got to move on to something else. [00:05:06] Stephen: Yeah, I see an apple, arguably the most, I know last name, who was the CEO of the Australian company. And they got into a bit of a spot because I last seen happy working remote here. I think it was around the bags and it was the summer of 2020. They said nobody's worked on about. Um, They're quite as proactive companies and I'm happy doing this for years, they would have done the 20% time that Google took on board before that even was a thing. And I don't think that Elan was very happy with the watch as Scott Farquhar, our phone company. That's it. So does he yell at, says, I need to actually put something to the website, if anybody from Tesla wants to come and work for us or taking on remote workers. And I think that's the biggest you in this world now, isn't it? The fact that people have options. And those companies that likes, we can talk about the Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan's, that aren't really proactively into the whole remote idea, the ones that fighting and pushing against this cause Scott Pharpar would have talks and a better whole, Elon Musk thing as pretty much like going back to the 1950s, like you're right. It's a 20th century concept of work in a 21st century where you almost most, you're trying to do 22nd century things. It's the designs and the principles that don't space it all the time. And it just doesn't make sense because anybody works with Tesla, the things that 14 hour days, as you talked about, it's going to something that's going to give it to be doing for 10 years. I've it is at a high to nothing. So company people want to work for companies that are going to allow them bills like just flexible hours revoke hours are I'm Sure. [00:06:37] Liam: Yeah. What I really think about with regards to work is it should be proof of work first, not necessarily the packaging. So male, female gay, straight. Different racial backgrounds, none of these things really matter at the end of the day political views. It's do you get your work done and do you get it done reliably? And remote work offers the best vehicle in order to be able to deliver that type of. Work because all of these biases are effectively removed. We have a short that we ran at the Running Remote conference, which was about this this man named for him who ended up becoming one of the best graphics designers on Upwork and Fiverr. But he lived in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Number one, but then number two, he became a top 10 designer on these platforms, but no one knew that he had muscular dystrophy, that he could only just move his hand and that's it. So none of that was advertised. But he was an extraordinarily good designer, and I don't care how much you believe in equity and diversity, if he walked into Tesla, if he walked into Google, if he walked into Facebook, walked in, rolled in because he has muscular dystrophy and said, Hey, I want a job. As a graphic designer, they wouldn't have hired him, but they do hire him. On these platforms because that bias is removed. And I think that's what we should really be fundamentally getting back to. It's just let's look at what actually gets done. Not necessarily whether you're in the office for 16 hours a day, because the, just because you're in the office 16 hours a day, doesn't actually mean that you get any work done. [00:08:19] Stephen: Actually Jason freed, I know you've probably read the book stays and free from base camp would have had the book Rework and also the book, it doesn't have to be crazy to work here. And he said, and studying the workspace, there's that there's not a lot of work and don't work anymore. This would have been about five years ago when he wrote that book on Basecamp, they're very good at promoting the whole idea of remote work before we even entered into the world, that brings the moments and they create the right technology and the right atmosphere for that to be able to happen. And his concept is not just that, that we should all be able to work remote people. We should just do eight hours and we'd go home should be no reason to be there beyond that point. So I like people who champion that end up being champion that from before hunt. [00:08:57] One of the questions I have for you is what are the benefits that you see now that we're talking about this remote working space, what are the benefits that you offer or that you see from working remotely for people? [00:09:07] Liam: Oh the first thing is that work is no longer a place. You can take with you and because you can do that you can do things like become location. Like we currently are. I can just go through all of the advantages that we advertise internally. So you can be location independent as long as you want within the requirements of the legal obligations that our corporations have in order to be able to make sure that we are not breaking any laws in another country as an example. So the employer of record industry is a big one that if you're thinking about location, independence, Connect with some of those companies beforehand, but we can travel the world. We can do whatever we want. You can have more time with your family more time with your children. My wife right now is out with my daughter and they're exploring. Portugal. And I have about three more podcasts that I'm going to be doing this afternoon, but then when we come back, we'll all be able to connect and we're going to go out to dinner together. That's the beauty of remote work, fundamentally for me as a big benefit. But then the other part of this, which I think is not spoken about that often is the advantage of proof of work removing biases from a lot of. The, a lot of corporate America and like the fortune 500 and generally in the world that you see where everyone talks about equity and diversity, but I don't think they actually speak that, that language truly when it comes down to brass tacks case in point, my friend, Faheem, he never would have gotten the job no matter how. Egalitarian, those companies want to be able to put themselves forward. It's just not happening. But the beauty of remote work is that it just allows everyone and anyone to be able to get access, to work opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise had. [00:10:56] Stephen: First example of that I would have seen was in about 2013. I walked across Spain. I did from the Western. And I'm doing that. I met two Mexican computer programmers and I had small little laptops in Dubai, and they were also walking from severely severe. They're down to San Spain, all the way up to the north of Spain and to do that, they would code for three hours in the morning and they would walk through the rest of the day. And that's how they made their way over there to the north of Spain. I was homeless a credible. [00:11:21] Liam: The other thing that I think is hilarious going back to Ilan I've been just peeled with, to be honest with you about how we used to, I think right now we're the PR war is happening live like in the next couple months, we're actually going to define. Is remote work. Cool. Is it not cool ham? What percentage of the population is going to be working remotely? Right now? It's about 30% of the us workforce is currently working remotely down from 45% and we're about zero. So there is a component of the population that's actually increasing their remote work, which is people that make more than a hundred thousand dollars. So they went from 30 to about 30.7%. There's a really great dataset from Slack that can give you great insights on this type of data. But the thing that frustrates me about Ilan is he has one of the biggest tools to enable roadwork, which is the satellite system that he's launched a, that gives anyone on planet earth access to high speed internet, wherever they are on planet earth. And he should be a proponent of remote work because I actually think there's going to be tens of millions of people within the next few years, that will be using his satellite system to get access, to work opportunities that they would've otherwise never had. [00:12:36] Stephen: Is this an old school sort of a thought pattern? Like the likes of Aidan's habits, maybe a Jamie Dean on from jP Morgan's and Goldman Sachs and David Solomon and all that kind of stuff have a fear that they can't control people if they can't see them and they don't know how to do this. And there's probably a worry that lots of middle managers in organizations are really struggling with the idea of having to manage remote people it's harder work. [00:12:58] Liam: And I think that's actually, that's the core premise of my book, which focuses on this concept, which I'm calling asynchronous management, which is what all of the remote teams pre pandemic implemented to be able to overcome this overt monitoring that you're seeing in an office and focus more on a different philosophy towards management. And inside of that philosophy towards management, I studied over a dozen asynchronous organizations in preparing to write this book. And one of the most interesting factoids that I pulled out of it was. In asynchronous organizations, the managerial layer is 50% thinner than in their on-premise counterparts. So there are 50% less managers in asynchronous organizations than there are on premise synchronous organizations. And this makes a lot of sense because the platform actually becomes the manager, not necessarily the individual. The primary job of a manager is to simply communicate what their direct reports are doing to the next level of. So it's this interesting game of telephone that everyone plays, but he synchronous organizations don't do that. All of their metrics are digitized. The platform becomes the manager. So all of your metrics are on a platform that everyone else can get access to dependent upon how open you are as an organization. And that's it. [00:14:18] So the beauty of it is in these asynchronous organizations, there are more people working on big problems than there are people managing people doing. And to me, this is an inevitability where this is a model T versus a horse type of moment where you're actually seeing an exponential increase in the amount of work invested. And more importantly, the results of that work is measurable in a way. That is more precise than any qualitative system that you've had previously. So you've got a really good system and I'm thinking about pragmatics here. It's listen, whether you like remote work or don't like remote work, forget about that. Let's actually talk about the methodology that was built out over remote work, which is asynchronous management and implement that as a philosophy. And by the way, you also automatically work remotely the very next day, once you deploy this type of system inside of your organization. [00:15:12] So this is the big piece that I think everyone is missing is Elon doesn't understand any synchronous management. He doesn't understand the actual methodologies that all of these guys figured out, basically a decade and a half before COVID. And if you simply implement that philosophy and that management system, you're actually going to have a much easier time at working remotely. [00:15:32] Stephen: Things under so much tools that are out there to be able to help with. that. I'm just wondering also too, as well. When we talk about working remotely, what are the pitfalls that you might see people coming up against? Yeah, especially, companies have just decided that maybe remote working is something that they want to delve into, but what are the things they need to look out for? [00:15:51] Liam: Sure. So social isolation is probably the biggest one that I think on an individualistic level is the one that everyone needs to be able to measure against. The biggest psychometric green flag inside of a remote organization is introversion. So introverted people work much better in remote first environments and extroverted people. There are ways to be able to allow extroverted people to work successfully inside of remote organizations, which is generally giving them access to a coworking space, giving them, telling them they can work from a coffee shop if they want to even allowing some type of satellite office system, so you can go in one or two days a week and you can get that type of energy from people. So that's the biggest thing is introversion, and paying attention to people and making sure that they don't become lonely inside of their work. [00:16:43] The other part of it is miscommunication. We have a rule which is always assume positive intent. Because we communicate asynchronously, meaning we don't communicate live on a zoom call. The vast majority of the time we communicate through project management systems through email, through instant messages through videos, sometimes that information can be miscommunicated in a negative way. Like, someone who writes a one-line email and says, please fix uh, who, which is actually a story that I got from WordPress uh, which was, these people writing these one line emails and everyone thought that they hated them, when in reality, these people were just not very good at socializing and they just recognized that they just needed to write these one light, they, they needed to. Communicate more effectively to be able to show, Hey, I'm not angry at you. I just need you to be able to fix this particular problem inside of the organization, or I need you to fix this line of code. And so that's the big thing. Assume positive intent. If you believe that someone doesn't like you, that's when I do suggest that you go synchronous and you just jump on a Zoom call and say, Hey, I've seen these emails coming in. I don't know where your head is at. But they seemed a little negative to me. This is just my interpretation of it. What can I do to help? Or am I completely wrong? And working out those issues as quickly as humanly possible. [00:18:08] And then I would probably say the third biggest problem is lack of documentation. So that's the, one of the biggest pitfalls inside of remote first organizations. Asynchronous companies document everything because they are asynchronous. So it's a forcing function for them when you don't have a meeting like this, where, we're recording this call, but we're not dictating it. And we're not putting it into our project management system, but. Collect all that information and you make it indexable by anyone, you digitize it and you make it indexable. Then people can actually get access to it whenever they want. And they can get answers to pretty much any problem that might pop up for them. And the vast majority of companies don't do that, they just use, synchronous communication as the major tool to be able to proliferate information. And that burns out the manager and really makes the employee super stressed out because you get lots of random messages saying, Hey, can I talk to you for five minutes? Don't ever do that by the way. That's one of the worst things you can possibly do to an employee, is the manager sending a random slack message saying, can we talk for five minutes? They think they're getting fired every single time, even though they're not. [00:19:17] Liliana: Yes. And on the subject of stress, Liam, I just, I've got this question from your research and everything that you've done so far, amazingly for remote working. Do you know of any good case studies of companies that have made breathwork available to workers? [00:19:34] Liam: I can't think of specifically breathwork examples, but I can tell you that there are a lot of companies that employ online like psychology teams. The best one in the market right now that we use is a company called Better Help. Not necessarily, they didn't pay me to say that, but it's a team of online professionals and it's basically, you can just query them whenever you want. So if I'm having a mental health issue, We provide a certain amount of money for every employee, if they want to have access to these types of professionals and really break down any issues that they might have. So that's the biggest thing that, that we personally do. There is another company called Juno, which is really good, which provides the provides a certain amount of money to every single employee. And this is like a service, but then it allows the individual employee to choose their perks. So do you want a gym membership? Do you want to be able to have free lunches? Do you want to be able to get access to better help? You can optimize your personal budget, the way that you want to as the individual employee. And in that case, probably they would have those types of programs. [00:20:43] Liliana: Fantastic. And would you say that to any uh, synchronous events, just to connect people that are working in the same organization, but are that have a theme to do with the type of services that these two companies, Better Health and Juno are offering, would you think that would be a good idea to help? [00:21:02] Liam: Oh, absolutely. So at the core of every HR problem, I think there's forced versus voluntary action. So, I've seen a lot of this during the pandemic where it's forced culture, it's culture at gunpoint. So at Friday at 5:00 PM, everyone needs to report to a zoom call where we're all going to play Cards Against Humanity, but the, but the HR approved version, not the actual fun version. And your beer will be FedEx to you, in the next 15 minutes. If you pull people anonymously, and you say, would you like more or less of that? 95% of people say less. And the reason why I know is because I've challenged people and I've said, let's run it on in this poll and find out. They do not like it. Why? Because it's forced. So meet those people where they are right. Are they really passionate about what they're doing in the organization? So that's the first big assumption that I'm hopeful that everyone has inside of the organizations, which is, do you have a vision for what you want to do with your company? Ours is we want to be able to help the world's transition towards remote work. That's what we do as if that's our mission as an organization. If you're not excited about that, then don't work at this company, and I'll try to find you another job for more money as quickly as humanly possible. And I'll keep you employed until we can do that. Create an environment in which someone can say, I've lost my passion for remote work. Great. Let's get you out of the company as quickly as possible so that we can actually get someone in that is excited, have cult-like commitment towards that mission and that focus. And then outside of that let people do whatever the hell they want to do. So is it breath work? Is it yoga? Is it, I want to go to the gym and get as jacked as humanly possible? I got one guy that works in the company. That's he's he looks like he's ridiculous. I was like 300 pounds of pure muscle. That's what he really wants to do. He probably doesn't want to do breath work. But we're just meeting people where they are and we're, we want to be able to provide the environment in which they're really excited about working in the company and anything that's forced generally doesn't work. [00:23:11] Stephen: I like that idea. Cause I know there was a big sort of revolt in Basecamp and Jason Fried, CEO of the company, who would offer a free gym membership, um so they took that back and said this, and we can't, we can't make you think, oh, we don't want you to put your, that face will be, think that's, this is what you definitely need to be doing with the money they're giving you. So they, they changed the options within your organization. I think that's important too, as well. Forceful never works. And that's certainly where we go from and we do a sort of happy for organisations. [00:23:39] Liam: and the Basecamp example, I mean, and I feel for those guys, cause I think they lost about a third of their org chart. And I actually think without commenting too much on, on Basecamp and I have an utmost respect for them as an organization, they lost touch of their culture. So when a third of your company quits, either the founders weren't aligned to the culture that was being developed, that changed, or those course corrections were not made quick enough. And really the founders of the company are the ones that set the culture and the set the mission for the company. If you start to see that moving, you need to snap it back into place as quickly as humanly possible. And if you're not doing that, then you're going to unfortunately turn your company into an environment that you don't even want to exist in. And I think really those guys were between a rock and a hard place, where they said, wow, I don't think we really like the culture that we've built here and we're going to make a change. And so they made a change and I absolutely respect their change. But then also those employees ended up leaving from that change and that's just a very public, unfortunately, very public bloody version of that type of thing that's occurring. [00:24:53] If I made a decision like tomorrow Hey we are not about remote work anymore, we don't want to talk about remote work anymore. As a company, probably half the company would leave. I would hope they would actually, because that's the core fundamental mission of everything that we're doing as an organisation. [00:25:10] Stephen: If there was three options given to, to to a team or to an organization, and the three options were back in the work place full-time, hybrid work, whatever three and three, two, and three, whatever they want to work at automobiles. What do you see the as the best option and what's second place? [00:25:26] Liam: Let me tell you the breakdown first it's about 60% hybrid right now. It's about 20% completely remote and 20% back to the. As it stands now the hybrid definition is quite variable, right? Cause hybrid could be, oh, will you take one day off a month to work from home as an example, or it could be, I work four days from home or what the real plan right now, which is still technically hybrid is because of the EOR situation, employer of record situation, which we currently have at least in the United States and actually throughout Europe as well, you have to be able to prove your tax status in a particular country. So whenever you see one of these companies that say you're remote, you must report to work one day a month, it's for legal obligations. That's why it's there, right? It's not because they want to keep that extra day a month and keep people in the office. It's because they know that they need to prove that to the internal revenue service in the United States, as an example, that is a tax resident of California, that type of thing, but that's still technically considered hybrid. [00:26:35] In terms of my interpretation, I would probably say. The best situation is remote. The second best situation is back to the office, and the third and worst situation is hybrid. Based off of where I see it right now, I think that hybrid gives you none of the advantages of remote work, but yet you're coupled with all of the problems of the. As well, and there's a big kind of phenomenon inside of hybrid work, which is called distance bias, which is the closer that you are to a decision maker. Unfortunately, the more your decisions are brought forward. And if you're a remote worker, you don't have as much face-to-face time with your manager, particularly if you're asynchronous and these other employees are synchronous. And so it creates an environment where a lot of those remote workers feel disenfranchised because their ideas are not getting moved forward anywhere near as much as their on premise employees. So they either quit the company or they move into the office against their will. [00:27:35] Stephen: It must be harder to manage, share people too, in the hybrid module as well, trying to get timing's right between people that don't have an office. And like I did a call the other day. I've actually yesterday. It was into yesterday, the day before in the Brighton, in the UK. I'm based here in Ireland, in the Brighton, in the UK where they have me on a laptop and then the people present. And you can see a, sort of a difference or a disconnect for the person that's on the computer, whereas everyone else is in the room and even, things pastries and having coffee and then getting food to different out. Then it's a lot of hard work to try and include a model like that. If you try to get the whole team together, but somewhere in the office, so many are outside of the office too, as well. And as you talk about the politics that are involved in that too, you're out there are you. Are you less likely to be promoted? Is there going to be more chat after the conversation has ended on youth culture? You're not talking about our day, talking in the room is, are so saying that maybe Steve's point wants to give, to advancing this conversation, stuff like that. [00:28:30] Liam: we call that undocumented conversations in asynchronous organizations. So nowhere in an asynchronous organization should a conversation, not be documented. All conversations should be documented unless, and again, HR issues are something that I put in another box. But generally, if, if I say, Hey, Steven, listen. Liliana's great. But if you don't want to do what Liliana wants to do, we want to do this other thing, right? If you have that type of conversation in an undocumented way, number one, Liana is completely disenfranchised from this conversation. She's not able to actually respond to it. And more importantly, I don't have the balls to go directly to Liliana and say, I think you're an idiot, and here's why. Right? Those are the types of conversations to be radically candid in front of other people, in a respectful manner in order to be able to move the organization forward. And I think that those are the issues that we're going to continue to see in hybrid, and it's only going to get worse as we fully integrate into a kind of post COVID endemic COVID world, where we're going to see the biggest choice be hybrid right now. And it is difficult. [00:29:44] I just actually got off of a call with a friend of mine from a very large company, 500,000 employees. And he's saying, I'm going with hybrid and they're going with hybrid as an organization, and he's very much thinking about. 'cause he just can't deal with it anymore. He can't deal with his stuff, not getting moved forward because he's just not respected as much as the employees that are in the office. [00:30:08] Liliana: Absolutely not dimension there, that the loss of energy and resources and redoing things and people going really in different directions because they are not previewed to those undocumented conversations that you're just mentioning. So in that case, that you've just put forward very well is I would have gone away and spend time and energy and budget to do whatever we agreed on during that call where in fact, maybe something else was decided afterwards. So he's the waste of time or resources as well. [00:30:41] Liam: It's a complete waste of time and resources. And it's really unfortunate because I think that the vast majority of the, those problems could be solved with a little bit of radical candor, just speaking to everyone and saying, I believe the secret to life is being comfortable, having uncomfortable conversations, and the more of those that you can have in your personal life and your work life, like I'm not happy in this relationship any longer in here's why, or I don't think that you're capable of completing this particular position inside of the company. And here's why. And also getting that information back to yourself. Such a game changer, if you can accept that type of critical feedback, but the vast majority of people, unfortunately can't, and that's another thing that I think we really need to teach in our transition to, like, I wouldn't even call it remote work. I'm going to call it more asynchronous work. Cause I think that the real key is going to be this methodology that everyone understood before the pandemic in the remote work world. And then the entire world went remote and no one actually paid attention to all this work had been done over the last decade and a half. So that's why I'm writing this book to be able to get that out there to a lot more people. [00:31:53] Liliana: Not to mention the introverts of course, because introverts are going to be the ones that will struggle the most to be able to express those feelings and thoughts. So yes, I suppose that's something as a challenge that we need [00:32:10] Liam: that is the magic part of this too, by the way, which is introverts are very comfortable debating things, asynchronously, as opposed to synchronously. So if you go into a board room, and these boardrooms that are in glass boxes, you can generally figure out whose idea is going to get adopted without even listening to them. It's the six foot five white guy that looks like Captain America. That's generally the guy who, if I were to put my money down on whose idea is going to get adopted most often, it's that guy. Cause there's a lot of bias inside of. Somebody who's tall, good looking, you know, big guy. That's the guy that's usually going to have his ideas adopted the most. But does he have the best idea? No, he doesn't generally he's usually actually sometimes got the worst ideas in the room, but his ideas are the ones that get adopted most often. And it's because introverted individuals can't necessarily, they don't have the skillset to be able to debate out an issue synchronously with captain America, because they're very intimidated by captain America, but they're more than happy to be able to go on a base camp thread and very clearly lay out their arguments as to why we should do B instead of a, and this works. If you're introverted, if you're a woman, if you're a minority, you know, it's like all of these biases that we do have in synchronous communication really get suppressed. And effectively to me are moot once you actually moved to an asynchronous platform. [00:33:41] Stephen: We use would use liberating structures would be a format you'd ever used that with teams, to be able to allow those introverts, to be able to have a thought on their own thought process on their own about the ID we've given them. And then we moved into group to two then into groups of four. So we generate the idea through true group of people. So being to all those introverts, because I always think about it when it specifically comes to introverts, there's so many fantastic introverts that have not had a chance to share their ideas and their, the apple certainly wouldn't have been an extroverted human being whenever you, what ideas look quite incredible. When you think about ones you deliver to the rest of. Yeah, I liked the idea of that. [00:34:15] The other question I have to you as well as it is the idea of company culture. If companies have really poor culture, are people wanting to leave those copies and move to an online sphere where companies allowed them to be an artist, the company cultures report. Is it an escape to go off at remotely? So you escape the toxic experience that might be hiding. [00:34:36] Liam: I hope so. Money's good too, right? There's a lot of people that stay in bad jobs. It's a reliable check, but at the end of the day, that's probably not going to make them happier. I have an interesting perspective with regards to culture as well, which is, I think it's less about the people and more about the work and that's specific to. Asynchronous remote organizations, meaning it's not about whether we get pizza on Thursdays or you get a cake on your birthday. It's more about what's the mission and vision of this company. Why am I really excited to be inside of it? Would I do this job for free? If if all of a sudden they got a hundred million dollars, would I stay in my job? If the answer is yes to all of those things, then you're incredibly excited to be able to stay in the company. And you're also really excited to be able to overcome people that are in the organization that maybe you don't necessarily agree with that much. Or maybe you, you know, you have a little bit of tension with, because you're so excited about trying to dent the universe in a positive way. And this is what most asynchronous organizations really focused on. So every single meeting that is either asynchronous or synchronous that I've seen, people reinforce the mission and vision of the company and what they stand for. It's at the very top of every meeting document that I see in these asynchronous organizations. And like employees are quizzed about the company culture and the vision and the mission of the company. And if they don't succeed at actually understanding those and fundamentally living those then you get them out of the company as quickly as possible. [00:36:06] I actually think there's a e-commerce company called Shopify and they are completely remote. They have almost 10,000 employees and they do a vision and culture fit before they even look at your resume. So you can be the best qualified person on planet earth. You could be the best engineer on the. They don't look at your qualifications at all. They look at, does this person connect with our culture? And is this person excited about our mission as a company? And if the answers are no, then they don't work with them. Then they don't look at the resume and they move on. And I think that's a very ballsy way to be able to operate as a company, but it's worked out pretty well for Shopify. [00:36:49] Stephen: I like companies that do that. I know there's a company in Brighton there called propeller niche and they do this really, really well in their organization. They've got 15 core values in the organization and before the onboarding process happened, so they decided that the person, it seems like a right fit for the organization. They showed them the 15 values. So they know this is what we're going to live by once you enter into the organization. And if you feel comfortable with them or think that they don't fit your values, you can make a decision now to stay enough. And I liked that idea. It also, everybody's aligned with what's going on. [00:37:20] Just before we get towards the end of what we're talking about today. I like I mentioned earlier as well, that some companies, the big companies, the likes of the Goldman Sachs they're beginning to come on board now and they have a good, but JP Morgan, I don't know if the companies and the loans and that kind of stuff, but fighting against the whole idea of working remotely. That might be down to things like maybe they've got high costs in before a lot of buildings they got by rental contracts that they have in place as well. What do you think also might be playing into that? [00:37:48] Liam: Oh boy. I can tell you the ones that I really think it's ego a lot of the time it's um, well I go into an office and there were a thousand people in here and I get to tell them all what to do. And when I walk into a room, everyone pauses and looks at me. And I like that. And that's a massive ego boost for me. And I would like to continue to have that in my life. I have, I've gone through a very long Socratic method of just asking questions. Okay, so why are you keeping the office? Oh they're more productive when they're in the office, but you said they were more productive when they weren't in the office. We don't know about that. Is it true? Like where did you get your information from in the first place? What do you know what they were, how productive did you think they were before they were in the office? Why were you measuring it? I go through this process and at the end of the day, ego's pretty awesome. Like, you know, You want your ego stroke. That feels great. And so a lot of people I think, are really looking at that as the core reason as to why they're still sticking to the office. And some of them have billions of dollars worth of real estate holdings that they have to, but they have to do something with right? A whole bunch of people had billions of dollars worth of Luna that cryptocurrency that went to absolute zero about three months ago. Just because you're holding something that's worthless, it doesn't necessarily mean that you should continue to hold it. So I think that's an important point to be able to reinforce is recognizing that you have to look inside yourself, say, why do I really want to be able to go back to the office? Is there a real, legitimate reason or is it something that has more to do with myself than necessarily the productivity of the organisation? [00:39:31] Stephen: Can you give us three tips that you would give any supervisor leader or a manager that is leading a remote team? Like three things that they definitely need to be doing to ensure that team works effectively and stuff like that they're there and the care for us there. [00:39:46] Liam: Top three things from the running remote book delivered over communication, democratize workflow and detailed metrics. You need to be able to communicate in a very premeditated way. You need to be able to record those conversations, make sure that two years from now, you can go back and figure out why a decision was made. You can have an archeologist go back and actually figure out issues inside of the organization. [00:40:11] The second one is democratized work. So build process documentation inside of your organization, make sure it's built from the bottom up. Your entire organization is opted into this process. What I suggest that people do is spend an afternoon to day writing everyone in the company, how I do my job, it's about a five page document. We've got some at the running remote website that you can just download and get access to, and very easy to be able to get you on that road towards documentation. [00:40:41] And then the third one is detailed metrics. You don't need managers to record metrics any longer. And unfortunately that's the vast majority of their job. They need to actually focus more on EPQ side, on leadership side activities. How are you, how can I make your work better? Not what are your metrics, are your numbers good this week? Because all that information should be digitized and documented and indexed and available to everyone inside of the organisation. [00:41:07] Stephen: We have soda, just basically coaching people in those situations broader than managing people. [00:41:12] Liam: Lead people don't manage them. The fundamental piece for me is don't manage people, lead them because asynchronous organizations remove all the boring parts of management and you can only focus on the really exciting parts. [00:41:24] Stephen: Liam thank you so much for sharing with us which I think is going to be the future of work. Certainly a remote working is here to stay, even though you've been 20 years and talking about this and we've all just been forced into it in the last two and a half years. This is something that I suppose that if companies think that remote working is going to go away, they're wrong, it's going to be part of life. And what's going to happen is the Gen Zers, and those people that are entering the workforce now have seen from transparent means the flexibility that some organizations certified to work in, they're going to go work for them. So the best talent they're going to follow, the remote work and the 40 weeks is another conversation that we're going to have soon. [00:41:59] I think it's a beautiful avenue to go down. It's something that if I didn't know that, but I just want younger, I certainly would have grasped at. I do it now, because I'm here talking to you in Portugal. And I do when I talk to teams in UK and talk to teams in America and I don't need to get on a plane and I don't need to drive to the airport and doing all of those things in Mercedes environments are healthy things. There's Nestle CO2 and all those different types of things. If people want to contact you in the future or find out more about what you do and your a hundred book. You let us know what they are. [00:42:27] Liam: Sure. If you just type in running remote into Google, you'll be able to find our conference running remote.com/book is where I have all of those processes. That you can just get access to. And if you don't want to go to the conference or you can't afford the book, go to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/runningremote. That is where we put all of our talks up for free. So if you want to get all the information about remote work, it's a it's available to you right there. [00:42:54] Liliana: this was amazing. I've learned personally I've learned an awful lot, even though I have been doing remote working for a long time, but yes, this has been enlightening. So thank you, Liam, for my part as well. [00:43:05] Liam: Thanks for having me guys. I really appreciate it. [00:43:07] Stephen: So name all the way from Canada. Liliana is really from Argentina and based in the UK and I here in Ireland. This is a great mix. Fantastic week. Liam, thank you so much.