Creating a Productive Remote-Working Culture

We are in a new era of leadership. How we did what we did is constantly being challenged by new demands and new work conditions. And that's what my guest and I will be talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode! I am so glad that you're here with us. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them work on their business, not just in their business. My name is Marc Haine. I am your host and Service Expert, Master of Experiences. And I'm so glad that you are here today. I have to tell you, sometimes we have hiccups and today is no different. So, we're a tad bit on the late side but that's a-okay. You know, my guest for this episode is co-founder of Time Doctor and co-organizer of Running Remote, Liam Martin. We will be discussing how we as leaders need to support remote workforces in this new era. And it really is a new era since the whole COVID thing has hit. And we'll talk about how to avoid common and I dare say costly mistakes. You know, having remote workers myself, I can tell you that I have yet to figure out how to be as effective as I possibly can be. I'm constantly questioning things like, am I delegating effectively? Is my team challenged enough? Are they challenged too much? This brings me to our Question of the Day. So, our Question of the Day is really as a remote— the fact that we've done this remote thing, how have you been with your staff, with your employees? Are you one of the people who are saying, please come back into the workforce? Are you insisting that people be on-premise to do their work? Or have you created a brand new environment where people can thrive by working from home? There's all sorts of benefits and challenges with the whole remote idea. Why don't you go ahead and share this episode on your social media platform, on your favorite social media platform, and really put in there #ExperienceLeadership. And let's make you part of the conversation. Let's talk a little bit about what it is that you're doing that's a little bit different now than before COVID hit. What are you doing now that is taking you further afar that you are now able to say, you know what? I have in-house people. I have remote people. We can do this together. It's a challenge. And so, Just looking at my notes here. I'm terribly sorry. I forgot where I was. Isn't this the brilliance of live broadcasting? I think is when you lose it out. And luckily, through the magic of editing, maybe we'll cut it out. Or maybe this is just really authentic and this is just going to stay the way it is. So join me. We're human beings and things happen for a reason. As I mentioned, my guest today is the co-author of Running Remote and co-organizer of the Running Remote Conference happening in my hometown on May 17th and 18th. I can't believe you're going to be in Montreal. This is going to be great. Whenever possible, Liam encourages others to work remotely and actively promotes remote work. His products and his services defined by the concept of giving workers the flexibility to work wherever they want and whenever they want, which is a huge paradigm shift over the carrot and sticking Leadership Style. Liam and his co-founder Rob Rawson have unearthed the secrets and lessons discovered by remote work pioneers and founders who have harnessed the async mindset to operate their businesses remotely in this most seamless, hassle-free, and cost-effective manner possible. Liam, welcome to the show! I'm so glad that you're here.

Yeah, I'm so glad that I'm here too. And Marc, I didn't know that you were in Montreal. This is fantastic!

I'm not in Montreal. I grew up in Montreal. I grew up in Montreal.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. And so, it's definitely where my heart is. You're more than happy to come back for the conference whenever you'd like.

Yeah. I mean, I think that regardless of where you are, the beauty of the future of work is that you can work wherever you want, right? So, whether you're in Montreal or Toronto or New York or San Francisco or Barcelona or Mumbai or Bali, I mean, we can work effectively wherever. I generally I always tell people, work wherever you want, whenever you want when you join the company or when you join any other kind of hardcore remote-first company. And I think this is a huge tidal wave that's really kind of overtaken the last couple years due to COVID obviously. That's completely changed the way that work exists.

Yes, yeah, it's amazing. Before we get really into our topic today, could you dig a little bit deeper into what you do for your clients?

Sure. So I run a couple different companies, or I've co-founded a couple different companies, Time Doctor and Staff.com, which are both time tracking tools for remote teams. Running Remote, which is the conference on building and scaling remote teams. And then also just recently, I took the last year and a half off, which we can probably get into, to write a book about the real difference And the difference in terms of managerial philosophy between remote teams and on-premise teams and how you generally have to treat them very differently from people that work inside of an office. But inside of that, our mission, our vision is really empowering the world's transition towards remote work. And that's what touches all of the different things that I do.

That's amazing. So, we're talking today about remote working. Why In your opinion, is this topic so important today?

So, February of 2020, 4% of the U.S. workforce was working remotely. By March, that was 45%. That's the biggest transition in work since the Industrial Revolution. And the Industrial Revolution took 80 years. We did that in March. So, a lot of stuff happened very, very quickly. And I actually think a lot of those people were just kind of— we haven't even recognized the impact of remote work and how massive That is. And I think we're only going to realize that probably once COVID is completely over, once we move completely to an endemic stage. Right now, we're sitting at about 30% to 33% of the US workforce working remotely. And 5% of that workforce is doing it due to COVID. So, 95% of the people that are currently working remotely right now, 33% of the US workforce, is doing it voluntarily. So, this is a complete change from the 4% that we had back in 2020. And it's only going to grow, I believe, in the next couple years.

It's amazing. I've talked to some people. I have a friend who works for the Bank of America and she's a little choked that her employer is insisting they come back in-house. They've been able to establish a process and a routine now and a workflow that works very well for them as a remote worker. But the employers themselves are insisting that they come back to the office. What do you say to employers who say that this is a necessity for them?

You're in trouble. You're sticking your head in the sand and you're not recognizing that the genie is out of the bottle. So, you may have— and to your point, your friend that works for— what was the name of the bank again?

Bank of America.

Bank of America. Free ad for Bank of America.

Yeah.

So, for Bank of America, and I'll just pick on them directly, they probably have to be PCI compliant, which is bank-level encryption for everything that you do as a remote-first company. And there are technologies in place to be able to make that happen. I know the first 3 months of the pandemic, my private banker had to actually go into the office for me to be able to make trades and to be able to move money around inside of my accounts because she couldn't do it from her home computer. But all of those problems have been solved by this forcing function of remote work. So I'm sure that your friend is probably what I would call an A-player. So the 20% of workers that do 80% of the work inside of any organization. And those people are the people that, number one, see remote work as table stakes. And number two, actually have the options to leave. They have 3 to 4 other job opportunities in front of them. And they can say, hey, you know what? I'm not going to work in that job anymore. I'm going to go work for a company that allows me to work remotely. Or at the least, can at least provide me the flexibility to be able to leave the choice as to whether or not I come into the office or not up to me.

Yeah, it's interesting because I was actually watching very closely the switch when COVID hit to this remote workforces. And I realized that part of the challenge that we had prior to it, and this is a question I've been asking for decades, is When somebody comes into the office, they sit down at the computer. They unpack their laptop they just brought from home. They turn on the computer and they start doing work. At the end of the day, they fold up their laptop and they leave. And I thought, why is it that employers insist that this is the case? And it happened specifically to me when I was working for municipality where I walked in at like quarter to 9 and somebody looked at their watch and said, oh well, that's nice. And I said, well, what? She goes, well, our workday starts at 8:30. And it's like, well, I've been up and meeting with clients since 7. So, maybe I should go back to bed. But this idea that you're only working when you're on-premise was a ridiculous concept back then. And as COVID hit, I started seeing all this influx of control software, which I thought was really interesting. It's kind of like when surveillance cameras in stores became a thing and the bosses thought, thought, I'll put cameras everywhere and I'll sit at home and I can watch what everybody's doing. It's like, how much time will you spend actually monitoring this stuff? But now, people are like, I think that people have a belief system around remote work. So, when it comes to businesses, are there any myths around remote work that you think need to be conquered?

Yes. So, 75% of employees believe they're more productive when they work from home. 67% of managers believe the employees are less productive when they work from home.

Interesting!

There's a major communication problem that's currently occurring. And I think actually, the core piece is it really boils down to when I analyzed all of these remote-first companies that were remote before the pandemic. I found one single thing in common that they did differently from everyone else, which is what I call asynchronous management, which is the ability to be able to manage people without directly interacting with them face-to-face. So, Vaishali, as an example, was the person that connected us for this session. I've worked with her day in, day out, every single day for 6 years. And we have met in person or on video 5 times during that period because she has all the processes, systems, project management operations, task management systems in place in order for her to be able to do her job and be autonomous. And then, I have all of the information available to me in order to actually do these podcasts and these live sessions and all that kind of stuff. So, it's a really beautiful marriage of everyone knowing exactly what they need to do inside of the organization. And the manager ceasing to be the critical part of this managerial process and the platform becoming the manager.

But this is not just something you can just simply twinkle your nose and make it happen. You need processes in place. How does one even analyze whether or not they have the capacity to be able to do remote work or having a remote workforce?

So, I think first of all, that decision is actually going to be made for you. It's not one that you can just say, oh well, I've decided that all of my people are going to work in an office today. If you don't want A-players, sure, run your on-premise company. I'm gonna— all of your competitors are going to completely blow you out of the water because remote work is where those high-end workers are going. Another interesting statistic is people that make over $100,000. What percentage of the workforce that make over $100,000 do you think are currently working remotely?

No idea. Do you have the answer?

I do. It's 75%.

75% of the ones making over $100,000 is working remotely.

Right. So, I mean, let that go off in your mind for a little bit. Recognize that the top-end people are all working remotely because they have the ability to be able to negotiate. They have the ability to say, yeah, I'm going to go to another job. There was a Buffer survey. 86% of people that switched to remote work in the buffer.com survey stated they would take a 20% pay cut in order to continue to work remotely. This is not something that people are just like, oh yeah, okay, well, I guess I'll come back to the office. No, they're incredibly passionate about staying remote. And if you're not providing that type of possibility to them, You've got a big issue. So, with that said, you recognize that you need to be able to go remotely. The first thing that I would do whenever I talk to someone about going remotely and what are the steps that I would put in place. Everyone inside of the organization spend an afternoon today writing down one single document. It's a 5-page document. And the document's title is, How I Do My Job. So, you can link out to other sources. But it has to be under 5 pages. And at the end of the afternoon, You're going to collect all of those digital pages. They're not going to be written down on paper. They're going to be in a Google Doc or something else that's shareable. And you're going to send that document to someone in another department. And you're going to ask that person in the other department, do you understand this document? What are 3 things that that person could do to improve on that particular document? If you do that about 3 times, you will have your first level of process documentation built inside of the organization.

Fantastic!

And that's your biggest step towards actually implementing remote work. And more importantly, allowing for, which is what a lot of these remote pioneers implemented, you no longer own a position. You currently operate that position. And it's a bit of a mind switch. But I am not the CMO of the company. I currently inhabit the position of CMO of the company. And at any point, if I want to go write a book for a year and a half as an example. I can delegate those responsibilities to other people and people won't even know that I'm gone. Love it!

That makes so much sense. And it's like it's changed the whole paradigm of how we view ourselves. Because in the past, I think I'm a baby boomer. So, baby boomers were defined by their positions. And right now, you're saying the position doesn't matter because anything you can do, somebody else can do. Sure.

And I also think that when you think about these types of positions, you have to really focus on what does a corporation do. And when you think about it, and we got this— I got this out of the book by interviewing a couple people. Corporations just solve hard problems. That is the core tenet of what a corporation does. If you can innovate better than any of your competitors, you will win. It doesn't matter if you're laying concrete foundations. It doesn't matter if you're Google, right? If you can solve problems faster than your competitors and you can innovate faster, then you end up winning the industry. You end up winning the market. And when you get caught up in a particular position, a lot of the times, it's actually reducing your capability to grow as an individual. But more importantly, it's slowing down the growth of the organization. So, by being more mobile and more fluid about what people do inside of the company. It allows for everyone to really provide the best value towards the organization. And if you're passionate about the company's problems that they're trying to solve, that's absolutely the right way to go.

It's all making sense. However, I do understand that people jumping on this can make some really big mistakes. I'd love to jump into some mistakes that entrepreneurs make And I'd like to get to that right after this. When the spotlight shines on your business, are customers applauding or yawning? In other words, how is your business performing? Make your business a star with the new book Lights!

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Welcome back! I am talking with Liam Martin and we're talking about this idea of remote workplaces. Liam, the market now is so fluid as you mentioned. What are some of the things as people are trying to kind of uncover this for themselves? What are some of the mistakes that you're seeing? that entrepreneurs are making?

So, the first thing is a lot of the people that I'll call lovingly pandemic panickers, the people that switched to remote in a day in January, February, or March, they've unfortunately turned working from home into living at work. So, 8-hour Zoom calls, people being asked to be on Slack or Microsoft Teams 24/7. Getting email notifications at 3 o'clock in the morning. This doesn't really help with dividing your workspace from your social space and your home space. And it's really important to be able to reduce burnout, to have those tenets in place. I actually work in my— this is my walk-in closet. My shower's right behind me. Got a really nice lens on so it disappears. But I have a real clear division between my workspace. So, my laptop, all of my computer equipment, my work stuff stays here and it doesn't move from this space so that when I go over there, that's where I hang out with my wife and daughter. When I'm here, I am at work. So, that's one of the biggest things. I would also say secondarily to that, just making sure that everyone recognizes that they're on the same page when it comes to remote work. So, as we're moving back to a hybrid model, which is by far the most successful model that people are implementing, there is an interesting phenomenon that seems to be popping up called distance or proximity bias. And distance or proximity bias is effectively that the closer you are to the manager or the decision-maker, the more your decisions end up getting adopted. And if you move to the office and your manager also moves to the office, you will fortunately have more of your ideas adopted versus your remote worker counterparts. So, it's really important as a manager and a leader to be able to give everyone equal access to decision-making because otherwise, a lot of those remote workers will feel disenfranchised like second-class workers and will end up either moving into the office when they didn't want to. Or they'll end up quitting and finding another job.

Yeah, so there is an intentionality that's required. How does one maintain that level of intentionality? Like how? Because a lot of decisions that happen in face-to-face meetings can be incidental and in the moment.

Yes, I call them undocumented conversations. And so, inside of asynchronous remote companies, there are no undocumented conversations because everything is documented. Everything has a record. And you can, inside of my company and any other asynchronous organization, you can kind of act as an anthropologist. Go back 5 years and figure out exactly why we made the decisions that we're currently making today due to the decisions that we made 5 years ago. But inside of on-premise companies where nothing is recorded, nothing is documented, you don't have that capability. Unfortunately, so it's really important to be able to make sure that all those workers, when you're giving them access to you know your manage your your ability to be able to create a decision or have a decision be adopted, you need to be able to make sure that you're biasing yourself towards the remote worker in reality actually, as opposed to biasing yourself towards. The on-premise worker. I'll give you one little story that kind of connects to this. I did have an office at one point and we had some of our salespeople in that office. We had 3 of them. And I was sitting in one corner and they were sitting off in the other corners. And they kept asking me for these really big monitors, right? These 49-inch massive, massive monitors. And I said, you guys don't need that. You're sales guys. You've got a laptop. You know, you just need that. And they kept asking me and they kept asking me. When I was at lunch, they would ask me. When I'd leave, you know, at the end of work, they would ask me. And finally, I bought these monitors for everybody. The next day, I had at least half a dozen salespeople that were working remotely saying, Caleb got a monitor. Mick got a monitor. Joanne got a monitor. Why don't I get a monitor? And it's because I was giving them that bias, right? I basically Broke under pressure. I bought them these stupid monitors. And then, all of those other workers felt disenfranchised because they didn't get the same level of equipment that the workers that were inside of the office were getting.

I could see how easily it could be for somebody sitting at home going, I don't know why I'm getting punished for the fact that I'm using my productive time. Right? I can absolutely see that. Now, you mentioned the word asynchronous. Can you describe a little bit about what that is? Sure.

So, asynchronous management is the ability to manage people without interacting with them directly. So, it's building the processes and the systems so that the manager becomes the platform, not necessarily the individuals inside of your organization. So, inside of our company, we have project management systems, task management systems, and processes that manage everything inside of the company. They are effectively our office, right? When I jump into a Zoom call, that's like a board meeting. We record those calls and we actually dictate them and they can be communicated. The minutes of those meetings can be communicated inside of our project management systems. So, everything is recorded, documented, and accessible by everyone else. So, we have another philosophy that we refer to as radical transparency, which is that everyone should theoretically have the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company. This empowers every single individual to be able to, number one, make better decisions inside of the company because they have access to all of the information. But number 2, when difficult decisions are made by the CEO of the company, a lot of the times, all of the employees actually understand it because they recognize that if we hadn't made a difficult decision, we would have been out of money in 6 months as an example if we didn't cut down the sales team or reduce the engineering costs.

This is a completely different way of thinking about leadership, isn't it? Like I can see that some— I could see the heckles on the back of some baby boomers' necks going up going, what do you mean it's fully transparent?

And they Well, I mean, and that also kind of reinforces that for me, inside of asynchronous organizations, we don't have managers. We have leaders. So, a lot of the bureaucracy, the nuts and bolts of management, when you actually look at what a manager does, the vast majority of the time, it's basically just checking up on people. But if you have a system, if you have a process, if you have a platform that does that automatically for you, you're not a manager. You, then you don't necessarily need to focus on that. Inside of asynchronous organizations, I found that their managerial layer was on average 50% thinner than their on-premise counterparts. So, there are more people inside of asynchronous organizations doing work than there are people managing people doing work. And again, that goes back to my innovation perspective. If there are more people that can get into what my friend Cal Newport quotes as deep work, the ability to be able to have everything at your disposal to dip to solve difficult problems, then your organization will inevitably become more successful.

Fantastic! This is great information. Liam, how can people get in touch with you if this is really triggering something for them and they need to reach out?

Well, if they're really triggered, I apologize. But outside of that, you can go to youtube.com/runningremote. All of our talks are up there for free from the Running Remote Conference. If you'd actually like to go to the Running Remote Conference, go to runningremote.com. It's a fantastic conference. We've got dozens of speakers. We've got the CIO of Zoom. We've got people from Slack, from Twitter, and they're all focusing on transitioning their companies towards a remote-first mindset. And then lastly, if you want to check out the book, go to runningremote.com/book. And actually in there, I have the process to be able to build that, how I do my job processes that you can implement in one afternoon and you could get that first layer of process documentation inside of your company.

Love it! And so, we do have the link to your website in the show notes. But right now, you're running a remote conference that's coming up. Can you tell us a little bit more about what people can expect to get out of it if they've never really considered doing remote working or they're now toying with the idea? I'm imagining that this would be a really good resource for them? Sure.

So, we kind of have 2 different categories of people that come to Running Remote. There are the people that are incredibly passionate about building remote teams. Companies like Coinbase and Shopify and GitLab, which are all, you know, deca-unicorn companies that are incredibly successful and all remote. On the other side, we have people that are interested in implementing remote work or at least recognizing that it needs to be part of their companies' lives. And then, there are also the people that have tried remote work and maybe they failed at it. But they're actually really interested to figure out why they failed and maybe they want to give it a second shot. So, those are the 2 major groups. If you're part of that group, you're absolutely welcome. It's a fantastic venue. You know Montreal better than most. So, it's a fantastic way to spend a week.

Well, so out of curiosity, what's the venue?

It's New City Gas, which is a 200-plus-year-old smelting plant that's been turned into a huge venue for conferences. It's effectively a nightclub venue. One of the core tenets of the Running Remote Conference is we'll only do a one-of-one venue. So, we will never run a conference in a Howard Johnson's. If you're inside of our venue, And it could look like 1,000 other rooms, we've failed. I've sold out. Please come after me.

Love it! I love it. It sounds like such a unique event. And it is happening May 17th and 18th, right?

Correct, yeah. May 17th and 18th.

Go ahead. And people could sign up to attend it virtually as well?

They can attend virtually. However, it's a lot more fun to be able to attend in person. But yes, there are virtual tickets available.

I believe it. It sounds like it's going to be a good time. I did manage to take a look at the lineup of your speakers and it's like, damn! How come I didn't get in on this? We have to talk about that.

You're always welcome to come. You let me know.

Yes, absolutely. Hey, so as people are looking at this information and getting this information about making this transition because they want to be competitive, because they want to be able to— I mean, the huge benefit is that you can engage people from all over the world. It's no longer that you're limited to hiring people within a local market anymore. So, as people get into this, what are some of the cautionaries that they should be looking towards in order to make sure that they're on the right track?

So, the first one is making sure that your feedback loops are built in. So, what doesn't— what you don't manage doesn't get measured, right? Sorry, what you don't measure doesn't get managed. It's the reverse. And It's important to be able to create all of those metrics. So, everyone inside of our company has longitudinal quantitative metrics that they need to meet, at least one inside of the organization that they are personally responsible for. So, making sure that you have that measurement in place so you can instrument against it is absolutely critical. The other part of this is making sure that people are paid attention to from an EQ perspective. So, how are people doing emotionally? The vast majority of the meetings that I have as a manager for my direct reports, it's not about whether or not you got your numbers in because that documentation is already there. It's not about how to actually do your job. It's more specifically about focusing on the barriers towards your job. So, maybe your dog died and your kids are having a real difficult time with it. Maybe we could get your kids a psychologist to be able to help them out so it relieves some of your stress so you can execute on your job. Maybe you're having a conflict with one of the other co-workers inside of the organization and you need to be able to address that and get that out in a forum that would make both of you feel safe in that process. I mean, that is fundamentally what I do in my job. Very little of my job is actually spent paying attention to like the dollars and cents of the business because the platform handles that for me.

So, you're saying that because you have these platforms and these systems in place, you no longer have to worry about the day-to-day minutiae No, we have platforms like QuickBooks and Xero and Asana and Jira and Slack.

And we have Zoom. And we have this technology stack that enables us to be able to automate the vast majority of what a classical manager does when they're inside of an office so that I can actually focus on the deeper problems with a lot of my team members. So, I can get past the Oh well, how are your numbers doing this week? Well, you can describe that and you can say, hey, well, my numbers aren't doing well and here are the technical reasons why. But the real reason is that I've actually got a real problem with my wife and I need to be able to figure out how I can address it. And none of those conversations because managers are so stuck with the bureaucracy of work, they're not actually getting able to talk to the person behind that bureaucracy. And that's what remote workers have the advantage to do. They can spend a lot more time working on the EQ issues and less time focusing on the boring menial tasks of being a manager.

Right. It does mean that managers have to become more trusting and trustworthy in their own right.

Absolutely. I mean, I've been— I think I actually just hired someone who is going to be working very closely with me and managing a lot of the people that I used to manage. And I told this person, the biggest thing that you can do is to make sure that you don't pretend that you know what you're talking about. Because if— because you don't know this aspect. She basically knew the aspect she knew, this certain aspect of the business, and she knew nothing about this other aspect of the business. And I said, if you come in there pretending that you know what you're talking about in this aspect of the business, they're going to see right through you and they're not going to trust you and they're not going to want to work with you. So you have to be open and honest and say, my job here is to be able to address this particular problem inside of the operations of the company and not this particular aspect of the business. My job is to be able to get you guys to help me to figure out how I can become better in that aspect of the business and hopefully one day be able to add into it. Very different from I think probably classical managerial kind of processes. But we're able to do it remotely.

So, one of the things that I've been a big proponent of is the idea that managers should become more coaches and mentors. Does the system of remote workers allow that to happen if you're only speaking to a remote worker Once a month or 5 times a year?

So first off, when we do meet, it's almost entirely, how are you? It's not about the metrics. It's not about the numbers. But also, you can actually have very in-depth conversations through asynchronous forums. A perfect example is Reddit forums, reddit.com. If you go to those communities, They're incredibly rich communities of people that communicate asynchronously, right? They comment on a particular piece of information. They joke about it. They have internal internet memes that they share around. And we have exactly the same thing inside of our company and almost every asynchronous remote company that I've encountered that's successful. So, the ability to be able to build rapport in an asynchronous way is actually quite easy once you implement the right technology to be able to do it. There's a company called Doist, which is an incredibly successful company. They run a tool called Todoist, which is a task management app used by tens of millions of people all over the planet. And they're completely asynchronous. And the way that they build rapport is they built a video game, which was a textual video game as a group. So it's implemented inside of their task management system. And they literally, as a group, say, okay, should we go left or right? I don't know if you know, like, those old 1980s video games where—

That's exactly what it sounds like.

That's exactly what it is. But everyone as the group actually is in the video game together. And it's a really fun thing. And you can jump in whenever you want and kind of play with your coworkers. And maybe, you know, one of your coworkers is a wizard or something like that and gets killed by a demon, and then you've got to revive them. It's a really interesting process. And that's how they really build rapport and communicate with each other.

Amazing! And so, it's not necessarily now we're also shaking the structure of how we communicate as teams. It's not like you said. It's not, okay Liam, we got to get on a call. I want to hear about your metrics. I want to hear what, you know, and do a checklist of deliverables.

So, immediacy inside of business is poison towards the business. I know that that sounds like a pretty strong statement. But in almost every instance— so, we have a chat room in Slack and it's called Red Alert because we're internet nerds and we like Star Trek a lot. So, whenever someone posts a message in the Red Alert chat, it's effectively sending the shields up. So, everyone gets a notification on their phone even if they turn notifications off. So that's the definition of immediacy. There is an emergency inside of the business. We have that. I get a notification from that once a year. It's very, very rare that I will actually get people that will say, oh yeah, this is an emergency. And the other thing that's funny is about half of the times that we get a notification, it's not actually really truly an emergency. It's It's something that wasn't necessarily something that we had to take action on immediately. So, when you think that there's a task that requires immediacy, you may be speeding yourself up by getting the answer to that problem fixed. But en masse, you're slowing down the organization because you're pulling people out of that flow state they were in before and getting them to work on something that aligns to your needs as opposed to them focusing on the deep work that they need to do in order to accomplish the jobs inside of the company.

And so, what's the alternative to that then?

The alternative to interrupting people constantly?

Well, you have a problem that you've tried to solve.

Yeah. So, that's a good way of kind of communicating this. One of the companies that I was a fly on the wall for was a company called GitLab. So, GitLab has the largest process document on planet Earth that's open source. It's about.gitlab.com/handbook, and you can go to it right now. It has about 8,000 entries, and it has everything that happens inside of GitLab. And when I worked with GitLab and started asking them questions about how their operations worked and all this kind of stuff, they would always respond with a link every single time. How do you guys, you know, do sales meetings? Well, here's the link. How do you manage the P&L? Here's the link. And after about 8 or 9 of these questions that I was asking different people, someone pulled me aside and in a text message, by the way, and said, hey, Liam, maybe you should spend 2 minutes looking at our internal wiki before you interrupt other people's focus and ask these questions. And that's how asynchronous organizations work. So, spend the 2 minutes to look at the platform. The platform again is your manager, right? It's not the individual. It's the platform is the manager. So, you need to go to that platform. You need to ask your question there. You need to type it in the internal search bar and you'll get an answer. And you can spend 5 minutes looking for it. If you can't find it in 5 minutes, absolutely ask somebody. They'll point you to where the right process document is. And they might even actually give you a little lesson on how to navigate the internal wiki more effectively. Because deep work is really, it's self-autonomous work is really the focus.

Right. And nobody hates— I mean, in the best of times, even when we're in our offices, when we have our heads down, when we're in that flow state, the last thing we want somebody to do is come to the door and knocking on the door say, hey, can I ask you a quick question? It's a great way to ruin it. But this becomes now a whole different corporate culture definition Because this is going to be something that you're going to teach right from the onboarding stage. So, you create a whole culture around this.

And more importantly, if we're talking about distractions and a lot of distractions, a lot of collaboration is distractions in sheep's clothing unfortunately. So, when you think about those distractions that occur, that knock on the door, hey, can I talk to you for 5 minutes? Asynchronous organizations still have that. But we do it in an asynchronous way. So, it might be on a chat log on Slack where we're talking about whether the Montreal Canadiens are going to win the Stanley Cup. They almost made it last year. We had a very long discussion about it for some of the Canadian workers inside of the company. Maybe it is that Elon Musk is buying Twitter and this is crazy and we want to be able to talk about it. I mean, there was probably a 70 comment thread channel about that particular issue 2 or 3 days ago that I read and was interested in. But the beauty of it is I can become distracted when I choose to be, not the other way around where someone just comes in and knocks on the door and says, hey, did you know that Elon just bought Twitter? I don't need to know that information right now. What I need to do is complete my task, and then when I'm ready to become distracted, I can then go in and go into these chat logs and say, oh wow, That's really cool. I wonder what Marc thinks about that particular issue. Let's ask him about it. That type of stuff.

It really seems to me that you're bridging now from this in-house kind of team-based mentality now to community-based mentality. That's the way it's feeling to me through all your descriptions of what this is, is that we actually have a community of stakeholders within our organization who are responsible for their different aspects and stuff. But it is very much a community.

Absolutely. And I think at the end of the day, a company is a community, right? So, we're aligned more about not necessarily the people inside of the company but the work that we do inside of the company. That's another big differentiator for remote teams that are asynchronous and on-premise teams. So, remote asynchronous teams are really focused on the work Meaning the vision and the mission of our company is we want to empower the world's transition towards remote work. That is the core tenet of everything that we do. It touches everything inside of our organization. If you are not super excited about that, then you shouldn't join the company. And we directly filter for that. So, we're constantly trying to sniff out whether or not you're still excited about that. Because if you are not, then let's move you on to some other company that is that you're probably going to get a lot more excited about fundamentally. But it's not about whether or not you have pizza Fridays and a birthday cake on your birthday. That has nothing to do with the core vision of someone being incredibly passionate about that particular issue and being up at 3 o'clock in the morning and working on it just because they're incredibly passionate about it. We want to align those types of people towards the company. And if you filter through that, as opposed to filtering about who you work with and whether you get a corner office, you're actually going to have a much more successful organization in my opinion.

Brilliant! It sounds so intriguing. I look forward to getting to know you more, Liam, because I think you're sharing a cultural shift, a cultural innovation I think that organizations need to jump in on. As we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts about what we're talking about today?

I would probably say for anyone that's listening right now, remote work is not a choice anymore. It's table stakes. And if you don't adapt to that new reality, you're going to unfortunately get left behind. So, it's really important for you to build those processes, those systems to have a successful remote-first organization. And more importantly, don't turn working from home into living at work. Allow for people to be able to embrace remote work the way that they want to be able to embrace it. And you're going to, in my opinion, get this back in multiple forms of dividends inside of your organization. You're going to have a faster-moving organization with happier people that are more passionate about your company and solving your core mission than if you force people into something that they don't necessarily want to do.

It just makes sense. It absolutely makes sense. Could you remind everybody one more time, Liam, how they can get a hold of you?

Sure. So, runningremote.com. You go to the conference there. If you're interested in the book, go to runningremote.com/book. And if you can't afford a book or the conference, go to the YouTube channel, youtube.com/runningremote. We have all of our talks up there for free. So, if anyone's interested in learning all of this stuff at scale, that's a fantastic free resource.

Liam, thank you so much for doing this with us today. This has just been absolutely mind-blowing. Again, a new way of thinking about how we lead our companies, how we move our companies forward, and how we deal with the people who are stakeholders in our companies. It's just been absolutely brilliant. Thank you for this. Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate it.

Why don't you let me know if this was of value to you? As always, My offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, please feel free to reach out and book yourself on my online calendar. The link is in the show notes. It is the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. It would be my absolute honor to be of service to you. And if you haven't done so yet, why don't you go ahead and subscribe to this show? That'll give you first dibs whenever I give you first dibs Or it'll give you first dibs whenever I bring you fresh content each and every week. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.