Running Remote

Liam Martin: Essentially asynchronous work, the best way that I can define it is to use a trope that I’ve been using for quite a while now, which is Netflix. I remember when I used to watch a show called “Friends” back in the nineties and if I had not watched my episode of “Friends” on Sunday, on Monday that was the only thing that people would talk about at school.

And it was a real problem for me because sometimes I wouldn’t be able to show up at that 8 p.m. time, or maybe I would show up in the middle of the episode, or maybe I had some chores to do or homework and I couldn’t watch it at all. And so that’s effectively synchronous communication and synchronous management, meaning if you actually miss the meeting, that’s it, it’s over. You can’t actually go back in time and find out what was said or communicate inside of that conversation.

Netflix, however, is like asynchronous communication and management. It allows for everyone to be able to have access to the information, the decisions, and impact those decisions, regardless of whether or not they are in Toronto or London or Istanbul or Tokyo.

And it allows for everyone to be able to access the information at the same level without necessarily having the biases of synchronous communication, which we go into in the book, which allow for a certain type of people to thrive in synchronous management environments, and other people, like me, who unfortunately can’t really work well in synchronous environments, which we can get into.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, indeed, we will come back to that, but how much is it to do with the physical office then? Can physical offices work asynchronously as well?

Liam Martin: That’s one of the points that we touch on in the book. They absolutely can and I highly encourage people to be able to work asynchronously in an office environment. Actually, most large organizations do effectively work asynchronously. If you’re in a multinational right now, you probably are interacting with people that are outside of your local office the vast majority of the time, and so implementing asynchronous management at scale is actually relatively easy.

The difference is that most remote pioneers, meaning companies that were remote before the pandemic, they recognized that you needed to actually act like this multinational. You needed to implement asynchronous management much earlier in your company’s development than these large corporations that are effectively already running an asynchronous model; they just really haven’t given it that name as of yet.

Rachel Salaman: I was interested that you share your own hierarchy of communication in the book; I was a bit surprised to see in person at the top of that as better than video, audio, instant messaging and so forth. Could you explain how that hierarchy might fit into a remote working scenario?

Liam Martin: Sure, so remote is not “I never meet anyone in person ever.” That’s not the way that remote really works, and one of the things that we do is we meet every year at a company retreat, so basically like a conference for the company, and every single year, at least once per year, everyone flies into one location and we do about a week on what are the company’s values, what did we do last year, what are we planning on doing next year, what are issues that we need to address.

And we’ve recognized that that synchronous time is so important to be able to, number one, build rapport between all of our different team members and trust, but also allowing us to be able to really close the chapter on one year of the business and open up another chapter in the business.

So remote companies do this all the time and if I could meet with everyone in person that would be the ideal state, however it is significantly, there is a cost that you pay for synchronous communication, which is your entire focus needs to be focused on meeting people face to face for a certain amount of time. There isn’t the ability to be able to consume that information at a quicker rate.

So, I don’t know if you’ve been in these types of meetings, Rachel, but meetings with like 12 people and two people are doing the talking for 90 minutes and everyone else is just playing with their phones. That’s a really bad expenditure of company resources, when in reality you could actually make that meeting asynchronous and it would have been a five-minute email that everyone could have read and everyone would have been up to snuff and ready to actually approach that problem.

So synchronous communication is important. We put that at the very top, then the next level down, if I need to be able to address particularly a difficult issue, I try to do it as in a granularly rich way as humanly possible, so video is the next step there.

So, we had a team member actually that was in Turkey and we recently obviously had the earthquake that happened in Turkey, and so that was something that we did almost entirely through video because that particular individual was scared and concerned, and that person had lost some family members.

So that’s where we were doing it on video, not necessarily because we needed to communicate the information as efficiently as possible, but because we needed to be there for that person, and we needed that person to recognize that we were there for them as well. Then past that point it’s instant messaging, it’s email communication.

The base of my pyramid is fundamentally that old version of email that people have been doing for decades now. It’s the most efficient way to be able to communicate with people and no one has really been able to crack it because it’s just such a great way of communicating short pieces of information back and forth between large groups of people.

So, we keep the email at the bottom, then we do video, instant messaging, and at the very top we do that synchronous form of communication, but recognizing that that costs us a lot from an efficiency perspective.

Rachel Salaman: How does hybrid working fit into this?

Liam Martin: Hybrid working for us, again it’s totally agnostic whether you want to work completely remotely, whether you want to work completely in an office or whether you want to work hybrid; asynchronous management applies to all three possibilities.

The kicker, however, is that the more that people implement asynchronous management, the easier it is to work in all three of those worlds, whereas if you haven’t implemented asynchronous management, hybrid becomes a lot more difficult and remote becomes almost impossible, as a lot of companies have recognized over the last few years.

Rachel Salaman: Right. So, we need to talk about what asynchronous management really is then, and you say in asynch environments, for short, managers must lead more than manage. In fact, in the book, you talk about unmanagement. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Liam Martin: So inside of asynchronous management, effectively the platform is the manager, not necessarily the individual, in the classic way that you would define management in basically the 20th century and part of the 21st century.

So, most managers would probably see their job as identifying what are the current blockers for different employees, reviewing how much of the work that they’re doing towards their particular goals, and then doing course corrections accordingly.

Inside of asynchronous organizations all types of documentation of goals and targets [are] actually handled by the platform, the project management systems, the technology systems that are in place, the process documentation systems, so that no one actually needs to know what is my goal.

Everyone knows what their goal is because that’s clearly defined, and any question that they have, they don’t necessarily need to ask a manager. They can actually ask the platform, the processes that you have inside of an organization, in order to find a solution.

So, the manager really is elevated to what I would call more of a leadership position where it’s much more about EQ issues as opposed to classic management issues.

Meaning, “Rachel, how are you doing this week? I see that your numbers are down. What is going on here? Can we actually talk about what’s in between the lines and maybe there’s a deeper issue that is actually affecting you and maybe we need to address that as opposed to just hammering you on why you haven’t gotten your TI83 reports in on time?”

Rachel Salaman: Does that mean there’s less of a need for managers? If the platforms are the managers, is there less of a need for them now?

Liam Martin: One of the most interesting things that I did in researching this book was I asked asynchronous organizations, “How many managers do you have per employees?” And I found an amazing result, which is asynchronous organizations have on average 50 percent of a thinner managerial layer than their on-premise synchronous counterparts.

So they’ve basically recognized you need a lot less management in order to actually run asynchronous organizations, which makes you a significantly more cost-efficient team and organization than your synchronous counterparts.

Rachel Salaman: But managers shouldn’t necessarily be worried about this, right, about losing their job?

Liam Martin: I think that managers need to actually figure out, “Where do I fit in this new world of work?”

I think that one of the biggest reasons as to why people are being pushed back into the office, and the statistics are very clear, the vast majority, and we’re talking, dependent upon the study that you talk to, by the mid-80s to the mid-90 percent of employees want to work from home at least some of the time, or they do not want to work in the office all of the time.

And on the management side it’s about 67 percent of managers want to go back to the status quo, which is going back to the office.

I think that the issue there is, number one, they don’t know how to manage remote organizations effectively, which is why we wrote this book, but then secondarily, I think there are a component of those managers that have recognized I’m effectively redundant in this new process and I need to evolve out and become more of an individual contributor than just simply a pure manager.

Rachel Salaman: Well, as you say in your book, you offer lots of tips and guidance, and you pull out three fundamentals of what you call the asynch mindset, and these are deliberate over-communication, democratized workflow and detailed metrics. Briefly, what do these look like in practice?

Liam Martin: Just to give everyone the reality, I think I booked this meeting with someone named Vishali, or at least that person interacted with you. Vishali has been one of my personal assistants for over five years and we have met in person or on Zoom six times in the last five years.

So just to give you the context of how I communicate with people that directly report to me, there’s almost no synchronous interaction effects because Vishali knows exactly what she needs to do and I know exactly what I need to do, so there is no disconnection there. All of the questions are answered.

And that comes to the first point which is deliberate over-communication, so as much communication of information as humanly possible is really important, and more importantly, all of this information needs to be very precise. I have this mindset which is if someone – like you, Rachel – does not understand the information that’s written down inside of our companies, if you were to come into it as a brand-new stakeholder then it’s not simple enough and we need to refine it.

The second one is democratized workflows which just flows into over-communication; it’s the natural progression of it, which is process documentation. So inside of the organization every single thing that has been done more than three times is written down and turned into a process document that’s then digitized and put on an online platform so that anyone inside of the organization can gain access to that information.

The third thing is detailed metrics, so as we communicate and we build this process documentation, we allow for a concept which we call radical transparency throughout the organization so that everyone should have the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company. This is very, very difficult for executives to be able to get their heads around because a lot of management is protecting employees from gaining the whole picture.

But if you trust your employees enough to have access to all of that information then you actually start to see some really magical things occur, which is employees start making much better decisions and decisions that look much more like a manager or an executive because they simply have access to that information.

Rachel Salaman: Obviously, the way that the process documents are written, in fact all communications are written, has to be really clear, but how can you guard against a person thinking that they are being really clear, when the reality is they don’t know what other people don’t know, especially if it’s a multinational team?

Liam Martin: Rachel, that’s such a good question and it comes into one of the biggest reasons why asynchronous organizations fail, which is people thinking that they’re being easy to understand instead of making sure that they are impossible to misunderstand, and I’ve stolen this specifically from Napoleon who had this famous quote which is, “Orders shouldn’t be easy to understand, but impossible to misunderstand.”

And it’s a small shift in your mindset, but once you implement that way of thinking it completely changes the way that people understand all of the communication that happens inside of your organization, particularly for asynchronous companies.

One of our biggest wins that we’ve implemented about five or six years ago that has been huge, is write process documents in the language of the person that is going to receive that information, meaning if I’m writing process documents for people that speak French as their first language, well, then write the process document in French and have that person review that process to be able to make sure, again, it’s not just easy to understand, but impossible to misunderstand.

And the way that we do this is we will usually send those process documents to someone that does not exist inside of that department, or someone like you, Rachel, that is completely outside of our organization, and I would ask you, Rachel, “Do you understand what this process document is asking you to do?” And if you don’t, then it’s not easy to understand.

That’s the simple trick and if you implement that, again you’re going to see such a huge change in not only the consumption of that process document, but the adoption of process documentation across your organization. I know that this stuff is kind of boring, but that is the meat and potatoes of running fast-growing organizations. You need efficiency bureaucracy in order to succeed.

You’re listening to Expert Interview from Mind Tools.

Rachel Salaman: The importance of information, a lot of information, is coming across there, but are there any tricks to make sure that people actually read emails and read process documents, the attachments that go along with emails for example, and don’t glaze over thinking that they’re too long?

Liam Martin: This is actually one of the biggest problems inside of asynchronous management, which is there is a lot of reading. There’s much more reading involved than speaking. However, a recent study that came out with companies that went remote during the pandemic showed that on average a worker in a newly remote company spends 67 percent of their time on video calls, which to me is insane.

I spend 22 percent of my time on video calls and that includes podcasts like this with you, so I spend a very small amount of my time and most asynchronous organizations spend about less than 10 percent of their time on synchronous forms of communication, effectively video calls or in-person meetings. So you do do a lot more reading. However, that reading can be offset by being able to consume that information whenever you choose.

So if you want to actually pay attention to, let’s say, a particular issue that you’re addressing, and maybe in a classic organization you would meet at 3 p.m., well, maybe I don’t want to meet at 3 p.m., maybe the best time for me to consume that information is at 9 p.m., I can read all of the information that’s involved and then make a mindful response that isn’t just in the moment, so that I can provide as much good information to the other stakeholders in that meeting as possible.

One other thing that I would mention as well, which I think is going to completely revolutionize asynchronous work and is currently being done, is using AI communication models like ChatGPT. So there are a lot of companies right now, there’s a really great company called Slite that does process documentation and management for asynchronous organizations, and they’ve simply built ChatGPT modeling inside of all of their product management process documentation tools.

So you now can ask a question like, “What is the PTO policy of the company?” And it will simply give you the answer, but then it will allow you to be able to reference the eight or nine process documents or emails or project management files that were associated with that particular issue.

So, it’s effectively like having a real manager that’s just able to get that real human information to you as quickly and easily as possible, and I think this is really going to revolutionize the way that most people are doing asynchronous work today.

Rachel Salaman: But it also sounds, from what you’re saying, like there’s no obvious or instant way of knowing whether the person who has received your email or the person who is supposed to have read a process document has actually done it.

Liam Martin: There are ways of doing it, so internally we do a lot of quizzing, so whenever there is actually the opportunity to be synchronous, I will ask people what’s the mission statement of the company, what are our values, how do we implement those values, and that’s one way of doing it.

Another way that we do it is we literally measure everything inside of the organization. So let’s say that I wanted everyone to be able to spend half an hour a day analyzing something on Jira which is a project management tool that we have internally.

Well, we can actually measure inside of our organization how long do people spend on Jira and I can send a message to anyone that spends under five minutes on Jira per week saying, “Hey, I told you to spend 30 minutes. You’ve really got to commit to this. This is really important information. Please spend the extra time to be able to work on this.”

Rachel Salaman: Quizzes sound like a good idea. In a way there kind of has to be something because it’s so easy to hide in a remote organization, not necessarily in an asynchronous one, but when no one is looking, unless they’re analyzing your time on the platforms, then you can easily hide, can’t you?

Liam Martin: You can in a certain context; however, there are other ways in which it’s much clearer. So, when you ask a manager, let’s say that a manager manages eight people and this was a famous study that MIT did about eight or nine years ago, so they did this analysis and they said can you rank your employees from first to eighth?

On average a manager has eight employees, direct reports, so they ranked them and then they actually ranked the work that they did and the output, and the correlation was like 22 percent. So the managers, on average, 22 percent of the time they got it right and almost 80 percent of the time they got it wrong.

And the reality is that there’s a whole bunch of human error inside of management – it’s I really like Rachel, Rachel brings me cookies on Thursdays, I’m having so much fun with Rachel, and that is just a natural bias that works inside of the organization.

Another one that we address quite a bit in the book is what we like to call charisma bias, so if I go into an office and I don’t even have to hear what people are saying, but I just see a meeting being conducted, generally the person who has their ideas adopted the most is the six foot five white guy that I like to call Captain America.

These Captain America type characters are very good at charismatic communication, they’re very good at getting their ideas across, and they’re also very good at debating those issues in the moment, whereas someone like me, I’m much more introverted, I can’t communicate in that way, I can’t come up with those ideas as quickly as the Captain Americas of the world.

And that’s not necessarily good or bad, Captain Americas are absolutely central to our organization and how we operate as a business, and there’s lots of them that are in our companies, but the reality is that for me to be able to do my best work, I need to be able to sit and reflect on what’s been said and then come up with a really mindful piece of information to be able to add back into the conversation.

And this creates an environment in which those Captain Americas that have that charisma bias built in, their ideas are adopted more often, not because their ideas are better, but because they’re better at delivering the idea, and that’s a problem towards an organization.

Rachel Salaman: But there are other kinds of unfair advantages that can come to the fore in a remote environment, like having good keyboard skills, being tech savvy, or even having a home office when your colleagues are working at their kitchen tables. How much do you think leaders should try to level this new playing field?

Liam Martin: I think when you think about the advantages that you just mentioned, I would personally state that that’s really the company’s responsibility, so creating a space for every single worker to be able to do their best work I think is going to be more important as we move forward.

I do have my own home office in my home, but we have plenty of people that work in our organization that don’t have access to a committed space and they have the ability to be able to work at a co-working space if they choose, so we offer co-working space stipends.

We also do testing for people’s internet connections. If they have less than 5MB up and down and a ping rate of below 50 I believe, if I remember the process document correctly, then we upgrade their internet and we basically just augment that for them on their behalf.

So, there are all these things that we’re trying to do to be able to equalize that bias, but I would also mention that having the Captain America charisma bias is a huge bias towards the overall trajectory of someone’s career.

I have a story that I always mention which is I have an old friend called Faheem and he was a top designer on an online platform called Fiverr, so one of the best designers in the world, and one of the things that no one knew about Faheem is that, number one, he was from Bangladesh, in Dhaka, and number two, he has cerebral palsy, so he can only move his hand very slowly with a mouse.

He would have never been accepted inside of a lot of these in-office, on-premise organizations, simply because of the bias that he held with him, but when you remove those biases, when you remove that he’s from the developing world, and when you remove that he has a physical disability and he’s just allowed to compete openly, he actually succeeds much more so than everyone else that was able bodied, and for me that’s a world that I want to live in.

Rachel Salaman: You’ve talked a bit about platforms. I wonder if we could go back to that and you could tell us what exactly is a platform and how are they best used on a day-to-day basis?

Liam Martin: Sure, so any system, and effectively what we’re referring to is a digital system, that is collating and communicating information, so a project management system is a platform, a process documentation system is a platform, email is a platform, instant messaging platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams is a platform.

And when you combine all of those things together, it really creates an environment where I don’t necessarily need to speak to my manager at all, if you’re doing it really well, to be able to accomplish the work that I need to do. There is a seminal book on this subject by my friend Cal Newport that was really great. He reviewed the book for me, and he wrote a book called “Deep Work.”

And really the entire purpose of asynchronous management and communication is to simply allow for people to maximize the amount of deep work that they do inside of their jobs, and deep work is I have everything at my disposal to be able to solve the hard difficult problem that is ahead of me.

And so, by having an asynchronous platform where the platform is the manager, and not necessarily individuals or sets of individuals, you can create an environment where I can start to work on something at three o’clock in the morning because I can find all the answers to my questions that maybe my manager could only answer from nine to five.

Rachel Salaman: I think I’m getting this now because I was thinking I turn off my instant messaging platforms because I don’t like the distraction on the screen and then I miss things, but I think from what you’re saying the whole point of asynchronicity is that you proactively look for the information you need on your platforms in order to do your deep work.

Liam Martin: Yes, and Rachel, you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Turn off your instant messaging platforms as much as possible. They’ll always be there when you turn them back on again.

It’s really important to be able to get that deep work and get yourself into a state of deep work as quickly as possible, because when you’re constantly getting pinged on Slack or on Microsoft Teams, that’s not really asynchronous work, that is synchronous work. If you’re required to respond within 30 seconds to a Slack message as an example, that’s incredibly distracting and doesn’t actually allow you to be able to focus on what’s truly important.

Case in point here, I still have Slack open, but I do not have any messages that pop up around Slack, so I get zero notifications from Slack on my phone, on my iPad or on my computer for the purpose of being able to allow myself to focus on deep work, so that when I’m ready I can actually go into Slack and respond to all that information when it’s most opportunistic for me, not necessarily my manager.

Rachel Salaman: There are lots of useful lists in your book including 21 top etiquette rules for working in an asynchronous remote company. The importance of decision making runs throughout this list and it has through our conversation as well: deciding what to do when, proactively problem solving without being asked and so on. How can a team leader have ownership or responsibility for an area if someone else is free to make decisions about it when they’re not around?

Liam Martin: You as the manager, your goal is to actually accomplish the project, move from A to B, it doesn’t really matter how you accomplish that particular goal. Ideally you should accomplish that as efficiently as possible.

And one of the other points that we make in the book, which is the person who is closest to the problem is generally the person that should be making the decision. So, I shouldn’t be making the decision; my direct report should be the one making the decision.

Maybe they come to me with two options and we want to be able to work it out and discuss it, but fundamentally it’s up to them on how to actually achieve those particular goals, and if you implement that inside of your organization the data is very clear: you’ll actually accomplish your goals much faster than you did before and you’ll need less managers.

Rachel Salaman: So, looking ahead then, how do you see the future of asynchronous working developing? Is it inevitable for all or most organizations? Is it even essential?

Liam Martin: I think it is absolutely essential and I think it is inevitable when people realize that they can switch over to an asynchronous management philosophy, and this is particularly happening in a lot of tech start-ups right now because they’re brand new companies that are just popping up and they don’t necessarily need to be held down by all of those managers that are saying, “Hey, we don’t want to work that way. We want to be able to work a different way.”

You’re going to effectively almost have like a Model T moment versus a horse and buggy moment and it’s 1915. We’re starting to see this new way of working roll off the production line. They are significantly more productive. They produce much more output for the amount of input that you are asking for. So, I see the next ten years, half of the S&P 500 is working remotely. We’re already starting to see that right now.

There was a point that I made at the very beginning of the book, which is a company called Coinbase which is a cryptocurrency platform. They, for the first time ever, were allowed to be able to declare their corporate headquarters as nowhere when they went IPO, and that company has actually experienced the greatest growth of any technology company in the last two decades.

The one that got the closest, which has still beat them, is Netflix. Outside of that they are the fastest growing organization in the world and they have no office. Their entire organization is run remotely and I think we’re going to see a hundred or two hundred more of those within the next five to ten years.

Rachel Salaman: Fascinating. We’ll watch this space. Liam Martin, thanks very much for joining us today.

Liam Martin: Thanks for having me.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Liam’s book again is “Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote Work Pioneers” and it’s co-written with Rob Rawson. I’ll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.