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Exploring how humans connect and get stuff done together, with Dan Hammond and Pia Lee from Squadify.
We need groups of humans to help navigate the world of opportunities and challenges, but we don't always work together effectively. This podcast tackles questions such as "What makes a rockstar team?" "How can we work from anywhere?" "What part does connection play in today's world?"
You'll also hear the thoughts and views of those who are running and leading teams across the world.
[00:00:00] Dan: The rapid increase in remote working triggered by the Covid Pandemic has brought enormous benefits in terms of inclusion, flexibility, access to talent, and productivity. Also, many teams have been globally dispersed for a long time, even before the pandemic, and this presents challenges for connecting for conversations across the time zones. And we find many leaders struggling to help their teams to connect and perform in this new world. Do we need to take a radical approach to this and learn a totally new skillset? Our guest on this episode of We Not Me is Liam Martin, author of Running Remote and an evangelist for what he calls asynchronous management. He shares some approaches that can help any remote team and avoid some of those red eye end of day meetings.
[00:00:42] Hello and welcome back to We, not Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect to get stuff done together. I'm Dan Hammond.
[00:00:54] Pia: And I am Pia Lee. Dan, how did you realize that this is five years that we have been co-running, um, Squadify and every day we are communicating, not Saturday and Sunday, I'll make that clear, but every workday
[00:01:12] Dan: is some of that.
[00:01:14] Pia: Across 16,000 kilometers. And our other team members are in the Philippines, um, in Columbia.
[00:01:24] and we've got the team, as I say, in the UK and down here in Australia. So it's quite a feat and we've learned a lot in that process. And we, I think we have a. A really strong connected team five years in, and actually some of those people are still, have been with us from the beginning and some are are new.
[00:01:44] So I think this is a great topic to talk about asynchronous management and leadership because. You when you've got these goddamn awful time zones,
[00:01:56] you've gotta lead in a different way and you've gotta pass information in a different way. And you've gotta influence and you've gotta know when is the right time to stay up until 10 o'clock at night? And how, you know, how, how do we, how do we make those decisions about
[00:02:11] what's the right, right time?
[00:02:13] Dan: You know, definitely it's, it's, we've learned so much and I think this is such an important show because also with our clients and the teams we work with, we see very mixed ability in doing this where people, when they're away from their team, they get a bit stuck and don't feel they've got the tools to, to lead them.
[00:02:31] So, um, yeah. Talking today to Liam Martin, author of Running Remote. He's a strong advocate for, remote working and for, um, what he calls asynchronous management. So let's go and, uh, let's go and hear from Liam now.
[00:02:50] Pia: and it's a really warm welcome to Liam Martin. Welcome to the show. My Liam,
[00:02:54] Liam: Thanks for having me guys. I'm excited to be able to do some long form conversation for once. I have been on quite a few podcasts recently where they just asked me for the soundbite about remote work. Is it falling apart? How much is it falling apart? And I'd love to be able to talk about the reality on this podcast if we can get into it.
[00:03:14] Pia: we like that we like a proper conversation. So I, I've never heard of myself being a long form, but I, I'm gonna
[00:03:20] Dan: Yeah, there you go. I certainly haven't either, but So the, um, and it's, uh, yeah, and most of the topics we talk about, this is definitely one of them. It doesn't seem that well suited to sound bites and simple oversimplified summaries, so let's get deeply into it. That would be great.
[00:03:35] Pia: I bet other podcasts don't have you go and answer a really tricky question from, from, from one of the podcasters. So that's the first thing we're gonna do is put, put you, um, put you in the hands of Mr. Hammond and, um, and see, see randomly what, what he asks you.
[00:03:51] Dan: uh, well, I, I've shuffled the pack. I've cut it at this one, which I don't think we've had before. It's a green card, so it shouldn't be too hard. But then, um, it's a, they're always interesting. The living person I most admire is.
[00:04:03] Liam: So my mind immediately jumped somewhere, and I think that it would be politically incorrect for me to actually give this the response that's in my own head. I'm gonna do it
[00:04:13] anyways. So the person that Immi admire right now, who's currently alive is. I've only gained this level of respect for him.
[00:04:24] Essentially in the last two to three years has been Elon Musk.
[00:04:28] Dan: Oh, whoa,
[00:04:29] Pia: Oh, that is contentious.
[00:04:33] Dan: contentious.
[00:04:34] Liam: So everyone else has had the reverse philosophy towards him, and I believe that a man or anyone for that matter, an individual who is clearly focused on. His commitment towards a particular goal and would burn everything down in order to be able to achieve that singular goal is someone that I have a massive amount of respect for.
[00:04:58] There are very few people in the world that would not bend the knee.
[00:05:04] Would've Ben the knee years ago, to be completely honest with you. And he's just a man who's, who's without, um, those types of barriers in his life. He's just saying, this is what I believe. This is my philosophy. This is what I want to be able to do with my time and to hell with anyone else in terms of achieving that particular goal and that type of grit.
[00:05:24] Is something that I have a lot of respect for. Now, you, you said, I believe it is who I have the most respect for, right? Dan?
[00:05:31] Dan: It that is cor admire the most.
[00:05:34] Liam: Admire. Okay. Admire doesn't mean that, don't that I like him,
[00:05:37] Dan: Yeah. Right,
[00:05:39] Pia: There's a few things that he says that are not that likable,
[00:05:42] Liam: Yes. So I, I, I've chosen my, my
[00:05:45] Dan: Yeah. Well, yeah, you, you, you've taken it by way. Yeah.
[00:05:48] Pia: Yeah. You have well done that.
[00:05:50] Dan: Good stuff. Well, that's, that's, um, yeah, and I think that's as usual, those questions always give us a little whiff of what we're about to, uh, about, to have, so, uh, you know, to hear from you and your, your, your approach to life.
[00:06:01] So that's a really great start. Thank you, Liam. But on the subject of life, tell me, tell us a bit about you. Where did you, where did you come from? How did you get to this, uh, this point today? What have you been up to in the last X decades?
[00:06:15] Liam: Well, I, uh, the story of me could really kind of be boiled down to kind of coming out of the entrepreneurial closet fundamentally. So I feel like I was a closeted entrepreneur free, very long time. I actually started very business through my adolescence. But I grew up in a family where entrepreneurship was seen as something furious people didn't actually do. And so for me, you know, I remember, uh, having to show my mother, my bank account literally five years ago because she told me that there was some great government jobs out there that I could get. And it wasn't something that, she was actually very surprised to be able to see that number.
[00:06:52] But I digress. I, really kind of started entrepreneurship in high school. I ran a few relatively small businesses throughout university and I actually had to sell them to get into graduate school. So in graduate school, I, my parents were essentially telling me, we need a, you can get a doctorate. That's a really good thing to do. Go out and do that. And I was at McGill University.
[00:07:16] I remember this so clearly. I started teaching a class, so most graduate students teach a first and second year class, and I started the class with 300 students. By the end of the semester. I had less than 50 in the worst academic reviews in the history of the department.
[00:07:31] I remember walking into my supervisor's office and saying, I don't think I'm very good at this, and he said, no, you are not.
[00:07:40] And I said, so what do you think I should do? And he said you can either get pretty good at this teaching thing, or figure out something else to do with your life. And six weeks later, I threw a master's thesis under his door and I was out into the real world. And that's actually where I started, yet another business, which was an online tutoring company. And so that online tutoring company had a couple dozen tutors throughout North America and Europe.
[00:08:03] And one of the biggest problems that I had is it was all online. So this was back in 2008, where Skype was really the form of. Video telecommunication that you could really do. It didn't work 90% time it. Very, very difficult to be able to run that type of business, but the biggest problem that I had is I couldn't actually equate for the amount of hours worked between a tutor and a student. And so I would bill a student for 10 hours and then the student would say, I didn't work with my tutor for 10 hours. I worked with them for five. So I'd end up having to actually refund the student for five hours and pay the tutor the full 10 hours. And this was really destroying the business. So then I met my now co-founder Rob in 2010 I think I wanna say that 20 10, 20 11 at something called South by Southwest, which is essentially basically like, it's like spring break for nerds. It's a really fantastic spot if you're a tech nerd. And he this crappy little alpha called Time Doctor, which is the tool that we still running today, which could actually solve that problem perfectly. So it's remote time tracking tool to very clearly identify how remote worker worked on a particular project or a task. then off that, we built running remote, which has turned into the largest conference on building and scaling remote teams. And then I also wrote a book, but a year and a half, two years ago, that became a Wall Street Journal bestseller of the same name, specifically focused on asynchronous management which I believe is the methodology that people need in order to be able to scale a remote organization and why so many people are actually going back to the office today. 'Cause they just don't know how to manage people properly when they're working remotely.
[00:09:47] Pia: Well, I love the fact that you showed your mom your bank account. I think that's a very lovely, uh, uh,
[00:09:52] Liam: You know, it was, I, I, I was just so frustrated and, and it's really one of those things that I don't know whether or not you have entrepreneurs in your family, but I was really the first entrepreneur in one or two generations in my family, so no one was really excited about me doing this. Like, it was just one of those things that, you know, and everyone is encouraging to a certain extent, but there's a little bit of that back end of Do you really wanna do this? This seems really risky. This seems really stupid. You shouldn't, and I actually recognized. That essentially I have been fired or quit almost every job I've ever had. Within about three months, I was essentially unemployable and I knew that entrepreneurship was really the only direction for me. It was an issue of making sure that I had food on the table.
[00:10:40] And thankfully those risks all panned out. And right now we have employees in six different countries all over the world, and we're living a life that, at least I dreamed of. But it took a lot to be able to make that transition, and I think for anyone listening right now that has maybe non entrepreneurial family members that are encouraging but not really encouraging, you need to be able to find a network of people that think like you and act like you, and then get that feedback directly, as opposed to people I wouldn't go to a dentist about, you know, a sick dog as an example, right? I go to, I, I would go and actually hospital and you need to be able to find those same types of people to be, to really move from an entrepreneurship perspective yourself forward.
[00:11:30] Pia: Oh, no, no, a hundred percent. we could waffle on about our journey as entrepreneurs, which there's quite a lot of similar similarity there. Um, so let's dive into, in, into the work that you're doing now and I really wanna understand, this asynchronous management And and how you're developing and supporting managers. around the world. So tell us a bit more about that, what's happening today
[00:11:55] Liam: so asynchronous management is my favorite topic, so when I wrote the book. and this was actually before we came up with the thesis of asynchronous management. I started to look at remote companies that were remote, the pandemic before the pandemic. So I started to figure out what they all had in common.
[00:12:11] And the singular thing that they all had in common more than any other variable was, is something that I call asynchronous management. so think about it in this context. What if you had to run an entire business through voicemail? What if you could never communicate with somebody like this?
[00:12:26] So Dan, you could never talk to Pia Pia. You could never talk to Dan Synchronously. It was all through. You writing
[00:12:34] a video loom you, you know, you sending a slack message, you leaving a, um, you know, a, a voicemail for somebody, you writing an email. So there's this infrastructure of asynchronous communication, which was a forcing function that came out of employees being distributed all over the world.
[00:12:52] So these little tiny remote companies, which is very, very small, right? So pre covid, 4% of the US workforce was working remotely in February 2020. By March it was 45% of the US workforce. Like not many people understand the exponential shift that we had in terms of remote work. And so there was this methodology of communicating asynchronously that all of these remote companies had mastered and why they were scaling and turning into multi-billion dollar companies.
[00:13:22] But then when everyone switched to remote, they just simply took the same philosophy of, oh, it's the same management philosophy. It's just in the office, when in reality actually, you need a different management operating system, which I call asynchronous management, which is the ability to be, to essentially communicate to people without synchronously interacting with them.
[00:13:43] Dan: I mean, we spend a lot of our life in this world, but, but I'm, it's, your expertise is gonna be really interesting to tap into. So on the outside, that sounds logically sort of quite simple, but what are What challenges do people have and how do they overcome them?
[00:13:58] Liam: So I often tell people inside of organizations, and there was a chapter of the book that was, um, that was left out specifically about those particular failures. But I tell managers all the time that your biggest responsibility is to reduce the amount of distractions that your direct reports have. Unfortunately, the manager is the primary source of distraction for those direct reports. So allowing team members to be able to execute on the tasks that they have throughout their day is probably the most important thing that you can do. So the amount of execution on tasks versus planning to execute on tasks.
[00:14:42] If you can minimize the planning and you can expand on the execution side, then you'll have a more successful organization, right? If you look at any other, if you look at any company, I don't even care if you're pouring concrete or if you're Apple computers. Where you generate profit is through innovation, right?
[00:14:58] It's. I've decided to be able to pour concrete in this unique way that other people don't do. And because of that, I'm able to cut out a certain part of this particular market and serve it in this particular way. So if you look at any historical, massively successful company, they all have that in common.
[00:15:16] And how do you actually execute on that? Will you allow people to get into what a lot people call flow state? So just the ability to be able to have everything at your disposal, to be able to solve a very difficult problem and then execute on actually solving that problem and very few times does that actually connect to collaboration.
[00:15:37] So, and collaboration doesn't necessarily mean the. Interchange of ideas because we actually have ways of solving this inside of asynchronous management that are, that I, I can go into in depth if you wanna, but it is more focused on the reporting side, right? If I'm trying to tell you how to build chat TPT as an example, well no, I need, need to go ahead and do it.
[00:15:59] And the ability for me to be able to constantly talk to my manager and say, Hey, here's the next update on what I'm currently doing. Everyone in the organization should know what they're doing. They should know what their milestones are, are the managers should be able to know that information without that information being communicated synchronously.
[00:16:17] And if you can build that type of a business, then you will build a very scalable business very, very quickly. It's just that the vast majority of managers don't work that way. there, I think there are a lot of reasons as to why we don't. Uh, I think the biggest ones are ego, to be completely honest with you.
[00:16:34] I think that they've essentially recognized that they're redundant in this process to a large degree. So when you look at asynchronous management, the managerial layer in those organizations are half the size of what they are in regular brick and mortar office companies. So there's way less managers and there's much more what we call individual contributors, ICs. So if you can increase the percentage, the ratio of ?ICs to management, you have a more successful organization. And this has been found in every single successful business for the past hundred years, but we've just kind of forgotten about this and asynchronous management brings that up to the surface. up to
[00:17:13] Pia: So the business you have today is supporting other asynchronous businesses to thrive.
[00:17:19] Liam: in, in some part, yes. I think that when we look at like running remote specifically, half our talks are about asynchronous management, to be completely honest with you, which has evolved. Uh, so in 2018 we did a talk on asynchronous management and, and we said how many people know what asynchronous management is? I think maybe 10% of the room put up their hands. Now I go into a, I go into a conference and we're probably sitting around like 30 to 40%. So it's definitely getting more and more traction. But it's still not.
[00:17:51] So there was a chapter that I left outta the book. The publisher wanted me to keep it out because I ran 20 case studies with companies that I was trying to get them to move towards asynchronous management, and it was an absolute failure. the, the vast majority of these companies couldn't actually do it, and there were three major, major reasons why the first one was there was not executive buy-in. So the CEO was really excited about it. But if anyone else. That executive team is not entirely focused on, Hey, I'm not just gonna call people to solve the problem.
[00:18:26] I'm gonna build documentation so that the problem never happens in the first place. That feedback loop was just not happening. And then the second reason was lack of documentation inside of the organization, which is an absolute cornerstone and of asynchronous. So we have thousands of different documents throughout our company. We have, um, atually, I just had one that popped up last week about how to sign our emails, so what you can and cannot say in the email signature And that was a big problem. And then outta the people that we had executive buy-in, in, they built process documentation. The third problem, which I never even recognized beforehand, was the ability to be able to query this data.
[00:19:10] So the answers would be in the documentation, but then if someone wanted to know what is my PTO policy, they couldn't actually find it in all of the Google Docs that existed inside of what they were saying. So they also had to build the muscle of actually saying, I'm gonna go to the documentation first before just asking Dan or Pia what's my PTO policy of which you'd be able to accelerate in that moment, right? So I asked Pia, what's PT policy? Pia? In that singular moment, you've accelerated that single transaction, but what you're doing en masse is you're actually slowing the entire organization down because now Pia, you are a bottleneck for that information as opposed to, let's say a thousand people wanted to find out that information from you.
[00:19:56] Well, if you had documentation in place, where no one had to ask a human being in order to, to answer, then you can scale the organization much faster, but if you're dependent upon people to share that information, it basically slows you down organizationally. So small companies, let's say like, you know, if you have five people, synchronous communication works really, really well. It completely implodes at 5,000 people, it will not work. And so, and lots of organizations know this. Go to the military, it's primarily an asynchronous organization, right? You have orders that are sent to you and you are told to execute on those particular orders. And if you, you can ask for information and it be, it can be given to you.
[00:20:39] So big, big companies and organizations know how to do this very, very well. It's that remote organizations that were relatively small were had a forcing function where they said, well, we have to start this work at 10 people before we get to a thousand people.
[00:20:53] Dan: we do a lot of this ourselves, and I, I, it's, it's, um, fascinating to hear that how much expertise you've built in this area. But if I pick up that, the, the sort of. But in my mind is about, you know, where's the balance? You know, what, what, how much, how much synchronous time is there?
[00:21:10] But more importantly, if we take that example of the, um, armed forces, yes, they receive orders sort of asynchronously, but they also have, if you're a soldier on the ground, they have a, A sergeant major or a sergeant, they have an officer. They have people there who spend their time with them looking after their welfare.
[00:21:28] They have a huge sense of attachment to their unit. All of those sort of warm, fuzzy things, um, supporting them. And in the, in the enterprise, of course, people want to, there's sometimes a need for that. What, how much of that can be. What does that mix of synchronous look like and or how is the, are those softer things looked after the sort of more human side of things beyond task distribution? How is that handled in the model? 'cause I'm sure it is.
[00:21:55] Liam: So what I've defined it, no one really defined it yet, so I, I basically just kind of gave an educated guess, which is asynchronous organizations spend approximately 20% of their time interacting synchronously. So 80% is asynchronous and 20% is synchronous. That's just an educated guess. That's something that I pulled out the back of my head.
[00:22:15] There are some organizations where no synchronous communication whatsoever. is done inside of the organization. A perfect example of this is GitLab. So GitLab's a multi-billion dollar company, they do not talk to each other synchronously under any circumstances whatsoever. The longest form of synchronous communication you have at GitLab is when you're hired during the interview process. Process, and then after that you simply are, and the way that GitLab works is it's something called a GI repository, which is documentation of different code bases. So it makes perfect sense that an organization like that would work very well asynchronously, because I can say, well, I have a certain part of this piece of software that I need to write that Connects up to everything else inside of this software package.
[00:23:01] So therefore, I'm going to write this piece. I'm gonna inject it inside of the main system and see whether or not it works. And that's essentially what GitLab does. Uh, but 20% is really where I'm currently at. And what we reserve that time for is connection. So we do two to three company retreats per year, as an example. We do not ask people the nitty gritty details of, you know, what happened last week? What happened last month?
[00:23:30] It is everyone has rocks inside of the organization. So we follow a version of Entrepreneur Operating System, which probably a lot of your listeners, know to some degree. And so from that, we have implemented a, what's the big, hairy, audacious goal? What do we wanna do in the next five years? How do we break that down into weeks, quarters, months? Whatever, and then we specifically talk about those, but then we also talk about what's happening behind that. So what I've identified is almost any issue that is really problematic, has nothing really to do about the core fundamental problem that we're currently being presented with. It has a, it has to do with much deeper problems that kind of fall behind it, that no one really talks about it.
[00:24:17] I, I talk about this in, uh, the book, which is like pointing out the elephants in the room. So, are you good enough to do this task? That's a very difficult question to ask. Right? It, it may very well be that you're not, and maybe we need to find someone else to do it. Maybe we can find another place in the organization for you to do something else, but fundamentally we have to identify that
[00:24:38] Dan: like your lecturing, experience.
[00:24:40] Liam: Sure. Yeah, that's it. Or you were originally very good at completing this task and now you are not as good at completing this task. What's going on? Let's talk about what the issue is. Do you have an issue with your manager? Do you have an issue at home? Um, I remember very clearly a direct report of mine. She had a very serious problem and essentially her just productivity went down in about a month and a half, like we're talking, got cut in half or output, and it was to the degree to which I had to give her a call and just say, what's going on, And she gave me a bunch of BS at the very beginning, and then as we got one or two hours into a call, I just realized that she had been going through a lot of problems. She was in the middle of a divorce. the family pet just died, and the kids were absolutely taken aback from this. I said, okay, well, the most pragmatic way to solve this problem is for you to take a month off. Deal with this issue. You know, let's, we, we literally got this person, a therapist for kids to be able to try and solve that. So your job is to, like, get, what is this issue that you need to be able to overcome? The manager's job is to solve that problem so that they can continue to be productive. So can you identify output inside of your organization? And then can you make sure that the people are, that are creating output are just given as much runway as humanly possible to be able to execute in which they feel like it's a trusted environment where they can do their best work? So that's what we reserve our asynchronous, our, our synchronous time for. And it's, um, we, like in an asynchronous meeting, we'll never have a, Hey, what was your, what was your number this week? Because we already know it. It's inside of all of our dashboards.
[00:26:31] Dan: Yeah, we, we've certainly seen a lot of people starting to have offsites again and they tend to get together to present PowerPoints to each other, um, which, as you say, could be a loom. So that point about getting together for connection is really well made
[00:26:44] Liam: and one of the things that we make sure that we address is we only discuss issues. So no one ever should present a stupid PowerPoint to 20 other people That all cost $200,000 a year when we could all watch it at two x speed. All identify what the issues are, write it out asynchronously, discuss it in a project management system, come up with the ones that we don't actually agree on and spend our hour talking about that as opposed to spending 45 minutes just laying out the problem. Because to me, I find it so incredibly frustrating when you have people that you know, it's like, okay, well we, this could have been an email 10 times over, uh, and literally in our company it's, so we just make sure that we're, and we use Asana as a project management system, but any large presentations, presentations in a Loom. Here are the three things that I need to make a decision on based off this presentation. Let's discuss it. And some of these, I mean, some of our comment threads are 90, you know, 90 comments deep, but we're working it out, right? And then there is documentation of that later on.
[00:27:53] So another big thing is you need to be an archeologist of the organization. That's a great advantage of asynchronous management. If you look at synchronous management, people make decisions because, they'll make a business decision and then they'll forget why they made it two years down the road. But with us, you can go right into our project management systems and you could say, well, why did we choose that feature? Why did we choose to build that? Oh, well, a year and a half ago, Dan said, XY Z, and this is why we should build it. So maybe we should actually think about reflecting on this and figuring out whether or not we made the right decision so that documentation is there and you can, you know, if I were to drop you guys inside of the business and I just said, why did we make X decision three years ago, you'd be able to find it.
[00:28:39] Pia: you've gotta have a bunch of really good systems here and you've got to, and I know that, um, working a synchronously when I'm on the move And I'm traveling a lot. It's keeping up with the communication and getting the right channels to be able to do it is where your brain fries, you know, it's that feeling of being waterboarded by your emails or Slack messaging, particularly when you're dealing with jet lag or your, your, so, so What's your recommendation for that system? Like, choose one, stick with it, or integrate what's the most efficient way to get that information flowing?
[00:29:20] Liam: There are some really great tools out there. I just ended up using slite.com S L I T E .com, and what this tool does is it creates. Documentation on autopilot. So you write no documentation inside of your organization, but the answers to all of your questions exist.
[00:29:44] I do an email between Dan about PTO policy as an example and how we should structure this. So all of that information is pulled in. This database, it's using a large language model, and then Pia asks, what's my PTO policy? It can pull from all of those different sources and can actually create a custom answer to your question in that moment that then becomes the documentation. So that's incredibly powerful.
[00:30:14] But then. In terms of like daily updates and logistics, there's a lot of these LLM tools that are currently coming. Notion has an absolutely amazing one now, and it almost made me switch to notion from Asana where now you can simply ask I have 10 minutes. What are the most important things that I need to know in the next 10 minutes about the business from the perspective of Dan Hammond, and it's amazing. It will literally just tell you, and it's just like that's the kind of stuff that's incredibly powerful.
[00:30:44] Now, a year ago I had a lot of different gated pieces of, of the way that information got to me. So I have an executive assistant that essentially deletes 90% of the emails that I get before I actually see them. On Slack as an example, I will only respond to the keyword. at, Liam needs to look at this so you can create these specific tags.
[00:31:08] Dan: rule. Yeah. Right. Okay.
[00:31:09] Liam: And so it's a rule so I'm not just thrown into conversations that are completely redundant towards what I need to actually learn. So there a lot of ways of controlling that information. But I would probably say in the next year, all of these project management systems are jumping into LLMs like crazy, and I would say in the next year we're probably gonna see the biggest transformation in project management than you've seen in the last 50 years.
[00:31:32] Dan: Liam, could we zoom out a little bit to the sort of, overall, I'd love to hear your thinking now. we, we said we'd have a deep conversation, but about the overall global perceptions and, and attitudes towards remote work.
[00:31:47] Liam: It's not very good. I
[00:31:48] Dan: it's not very good. Well, uh, I mean, a. cheeky quote would be that Elon Musk, um, said that anyone, the work from home crowd is detached from reality.
[00:31:57] Liam: Yes. And that it's morally wrong. the way.
[00:32:00] Dan: morally wrong, great.
[00:32:01] Liam: I don't think I like him
[00:32:02] Dan: No, no, no, exactly. And, and clearly, and he has different views from, from us on a few things, but, but that's a good example of an opinion leader who's, who's out there saying this is not just. I guess he's saying it's dumb, it's even morally wrong. And I think that the thing is in slight retreat, I mean, we remote, we work remotely totally. So we're, we're on, we're advocates here. But I, we had, um, Jose, um, Barrero, um, from ITAM Business School on the podcast who studies work from home, and I think he said it's down to about 23% of people in the US now have some time working away from it. So it's sort of hard from that high. So we seem to be slightly in retreat. What's your, what's your thinking on this if we look at that big picture?
[00:32:44] Liam: There's a really good data set that anyone can follow right now at flexindex.com, and so they are following up on this and, and they work with Stanford quite a bit. Um, Professor Bloom from Stanford who wasn't running remote last year. He is working with them quite tightly. And so the data and I, I follow about seven different data sets on remote work adoption and where it's going.
[00:33:09] And you're right, there are different varying opinions. However, the last three quarters we've been flat. So we came from a peak of about 46%. And full salinity remote work in the United States, meaning anyone that could work remotely, would work remotely is 62%. So we were almost at full salinity point for, for remote work during that peak, right? And we were there for a good year, right? So everyone got a really good taste of remote work and now we're down to some data sets, say. 32%. Some data sets say 25%, but they're all in common saying that it is flat.
[00:33:48] And
[00:33:49] this is quite interesting because the reverse would seem to be true when you look at the media.
[00:33:54] So a lot of the media right now is saying remote works done. Remote works over, I am working on a, I'm working on a presentation right now which blows me away. So the largest office building in St. Louis in 2006, it sold for 205 million dollars. It has, um, 55 floors, right? It is the center of St. Louis. It sold for $3.5 million
[00:34:21] Pia: Wow.
[00:34:21] Dan: Oh.
[00:34:22] Liam: receivership. So when you look at corporate real estate right now, the Reason why. I, I don't care anymore. I'm gonna very much like on my YouTube channel, I'm just laying this out and I may sound like a crazy person, but I wanna document all of this stuff on YouTube so that years from now, everyone will be like, that guy was right.
[00:34:45] Dan: Yeah.
[00:34:45] Liam: So when you look at the articles, the academic research that talks about how remote work is not good for employee productivity, of which, by the way, there's like less than 5% of all academically source articles show that remote work is less productive, bad for mental health, bad for these other, bad for the company's productivity, bad for the company in general. Right? It's like very, very clear. It's almost like climate change. 95% of academics agree that climate change is happening and there's this 5% that isn't. So when I looked at that 5%, the majority of those articles, the people behind them were funded by banks and large multinationals that were primarily focused on, they. Like Blackstone is one of the largest ones, and 67% of their portfolio is commercial real estate. They're the largest single corporation on planet Earth, but 67% of their portfolio is commercial real estate. And what was a better buy than commercial real estate until 2019? It was the bluest of blue chip stocks.
[00:35:56] It essentially produced a 10 to 15% return like clockwork every single year for almost a hundred years.
[00:36:04] Dan: Even Donald Trump succeeded in it. So
[00:36:06] Liam: There you go. But, These properties are not going down in value. On paper. They're all on paper. Still worth $200 million, $300 million, but eventually this entire game of cards has to implode in on itself. And that's the thing that I think these corporate interests are doing with regards to remote work, is they are trying to make sure that everyone thinks that remote work is absolutely horrible for your business.
[00:36:35] You remember the first six months of COVID? How many articles did we see about remote work being the absolute best thing for workers and for employers? Every single article was coming out about that, and it's, it's not that it came out, it's that they were all based off of articles that had already been written, right?
[00:36:52] Like the data was very clear that this was much better for everyone. The data is still clear. But they're now implementing these propaganda campaigns to be able to change it and move it in the opposite direction. And I think it's gonna be a bloodbath. And I can tell you I'm completely outta commercial real estate. I have removed that from my portfolio completely. Uh, I don't touch it. I don't invest in banks because I think that there's a lot of problems that are connected.
[00:37:19] Dan: Really interesting. So, um, Liam, you're fighting the good fight. Um, you're trying to help us all to be better at this, uh, while remote working and asynchronous management. If you were talking to our listener who's a team leader or running a business, an entrepreneur to, and they, they just find this a confusing thing or they dunno where to start, what's your advice them to just kick into this thing and get some early wins?
[00:37:43] Liam: I would. Try a asynchronous week so you can get my book. You cannot get my book. It's much easier if you do we break that down specifically. So prepare the organization for an asynchronous week, meaning there will be no communication with any, any two individuals inside of the. For one particular week. So you need to get processes together.
[00:38:09] You need to be able to get standard operating procedures together. You need to get project management systems. You need a way to be able to communicate goals and tasks being completed to the rest of the organization. Uh, I talk a lot in the book how I believe that information. in companies should be democratized. So everyone should have the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company, because if that's true, then they can all make much better decisions inside of the organization. So expanding out and giving everyone as much information as humanly possible in preparation for this week will be valuable.
[00:38:47] And then
[00:38:47] poll everyone before and survey them and survey their, uh, employee net promoter score. What do they like about the company? What they not like about the company? And then survey it after asynchronous week.
[00:39:00] Pia: and tell us. Liam. So, um, I'm sure everyone will be out there looking at you for your book running remote. What else, what would you, what else would you now recommend in terms of something to watch, listen, read, that would be really valuable?
[00:39:16] Liam: Yeah, I mean, as it applies to remote work, I think the biggest one that I can really source for you, and I don't wanna necessarily be egotistical towards this one, is the running remote YouTube channel, youtube.com/running remote, because all of our talks are up for free. So our philosophy is that if you come to the conference, and please, we would love for you to do that. Um, because I think conferences are about networking and about communication more than anything else. Again, we like synchronous communication, but it's about creating connection with people. But if you just want the information, then that information is available asynchronously on our YouTube channel, which you can consume, and I think we have like 250 talks up there, so you can consume that however you'd like. And then I think in terms of other sources, Flow State is another really great book just to kind of communicate. My philosophy is that if you can get everyone into that state of flow inside of your organization, your organization will just run so much faster than any management philosophy that I can really teach you or anyone else can. So getting everyone to be personally more productive and taking personal productivity responsibility, I think is, is paramount in, in terms of an organization succeeding.
[00:40:28] Pia: Fantastic. And are you, are you traveling currently? Are you, because I know that you do a lot of your work remotely with your family, so where, where have you been on your travels?
[00:40:38] Liam: Oh boy. Well, in the last year I was in Thailand, uh, I was in Marrakesh for a few weeks. I was in Thailand for two months, and I was in Marrakesh for, for, um, a couple weeks. I'm gonna Paris next month. The kids, uh, yeah. I'm just kind of popping around everywhere.
[00:40:57] Dan: Liam, give us a little bonus extra because when I spoke to you, you were in Thailand, I think actually standing in a, in the corridor of the hotel because your kids were asleep or something.
[00:41:05] Liam: That's another really great thing that's happening that came off of covid or so many horrible things that came off of Covid. But some of the silver linings is the infrastructure that's currently being built for remote workers. So I stayed at a place called HOA, and I wish they could pay me for this.
[00:41:20] That would be Homa is a network of remote work condo complexes, so they're short stay. I think you can stay a minimum of a week, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly leases, and it comes equipped with coworking and it comes equipped with super high speed internet. Uh, you can have daycare. Through an app delivered to your room, which is absolutely amazing.
[00:41:51] So if I need to go for a podcast, I can basically push a button and within 10 minutes someone shows up and takes care of my kids for an hour, which I thought was just, I tried it a couple times just for fun. Um, it was, it was amazing. And then you also get all the amenities of a hotel, so you know, you get room service, you have, uh, cleaners that come in and clean your home as much as you want, and they're all homes, so they're not just hotel rooms.
[00:42:16] But it's an amazing system. And when you think about that type of infrastructure being built, it allows for people, particularly if you're an employer right now and you're thinking, Ugh, I don't know if I want my employees to be able to go wherever the hell they want, well, listen, you have that infrastructure right now, and what you really need to be able to measure is not necessarily how much fun Liam is having, although if you. Probably Liam having more fun would mean that your business is gonna run faster, but you need to really just kind of clearly measure the output. So if Liam is in Thailand, is that going to significantly decrease his output? And if it isn't, then let him do it because it's gonna make him a much happier, better worker.
[00:42:56] Dan: it's just, it's a really exciting time, I think. And, uh, Liam, thank you for fighting the good fight. This is a really exciting moment for, for everyone. I think we can, if we make the right moves now, but thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I hope you've enjoyed a deeper conversation and, um, we certainly
[00:43:12] Pia: Long form. Hope we've lived up to our long form reputation.
[00:43:16] Liam: Absolutely. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.
[00:43:18] Dan: When Liam the start of that conversation when Liam was talking, I sort of start, I got this vision that he was talking about purely asynchronous leadership that you, uh, or management and when you are, you know, when you're leading someone that, that is all asynchronous. But it, it was, I was really pleased.
[00:43:38] He has a, his focus I think is on efficiency. Um, and, and that he. Is very clear that you have 20% synchronous time, which is really about the human side of things. Connecting, asking questions, and sort of building that sort of sense of connection. I think in a way, what he's talking about is how do you use the other 80% and build the skills.
[00:44:00] To do that as well as possible. And I think in this world where so many teams are, um, globally dispersed, um, and even working different and working in different time zones, particularly, this just seems like such a valuable skill that, um, that we all need to hone actually.
[00:44:17] Pia: And it is, I think it, if I reflect on our own journey, you need to see information as not something that is stop and start, but something that sort of evolves in waves. And what I mean by that is, is that, you know, sometimes you're working on a strategy, sometimes you're working on, you know, client.
[00:44:37] Work and you are, sometimes you're working, you know, on pitch decks for instance. So I think there's a, like we've always had the follow the song, so what can you be doing when the other person is lying down and sleeping? And how that information can pass between you. And really that's only just got better and better.
[00:44:56] You know, the ability to, you know, in Slack to be able to send videos, to be able to send commentary, to be able to mark up. PowerPoint documents. and it's the ability to use multimedia and to feel comfortable with the written word. And then knowing sometimes, and you know, you and I have had this where we've had to go, okay, we now need to have a conversation about this.
[00:45:22] 'cause we're not. Because if you start to get the same type of email on that asynchronous or any type of communicate and you're not getting somewhere,
[00:45:31] you need to pick up the phone
[00:45:33] and you need to talk.
[00:45:34] Dan: Yeah. It's, that's so interesting. And you've got to have that sort of radar always on having to say, is this, is this actually working or do we need to, and actually, will it be quicker just to have a quick, quick conversation about this and, and I think that's right.
[00:45:49] And equally as you say, you can do so much, with that following the sun. A asynchronous working as, uh, as Liam said that it's, um, their skills that are really, really essential, even in the same time zone because just sort of saying, oh, when you available I can't do one o 11 o'clock. You know, I can't, oh, moving the meeting time so that you actually happen to be together.
[00:46:12] it's an unnecessary burden actually, and if you are looking, as Liam does at efficiency, just being able to use that asynchronous. Uh, capability is really important with that radar always on that. Sometimes there's a need to actually just have a proper conversation and actually. You know, I think, I do think still a a, an actual face-to-face, even virtual is the place to be, to touch on that human side.
[00:46:37] If you want to give someone some feedback, if you want to check in on them, if you want to really sort of have a quick follow up on convers, on a, on, really have a deep question that go, go, a conversation that goes beyond a single question. Yeah, get on a call,
[00:46:51] speak to them in person, and that's, the
[00:46:53] Pia: uh, again, when I reflect on us, I think we have to be very respectful of our time because it's always a morning or a. A night, and we do have families and we'd like to keep them actually,
[00:47:06] Dan: Yeah, that's right. That
[00:47:07] Pia: not, end up, oh, we were really successful and, and we lost all our families.
[00:47:11] Um, so I think that's, that's really, so we then have to get quite conscious about what we choose to spend our time doing. And could we do it asynchronously and could, you know, is there preparation that can be done asynchronously? And how does that work? So I quite like it because you're not, you're not dialed into this, sense of having to be in meetings.
[00:47:34] I also really like that we are all autonomously working. During our own working days, there's something quite, quite liberating about that. So you have autonomy and then you have your connection points. And I think that's, yes, you've gotta be organized. Yes, you've gotta be motivated, you know, and you've gotta use your time well, but you're not in that checking up mode, you're, you're all constantly working on the same big rocks in your time and in the way that you can make it, make it most efficient.
[00:48:07] Dan: no.
[00:48:07] I think that's right. And your, your point about the preparation is, is so right. I mean, I, I think we mentioned in the, in the conversation, people are having offsites, they get together and they present to each other from PowerPoint. You know, that's, don't do that. Um, and, and it's in a way sort of shines a light on How much can I do asynchronously? 'cause it's really powerful for passing information. But, and is that the right thing to do asynchronously? And similarly, when we're together, is this really the right thing to do synchronously, um, to just to be really deliberate about it. Do, you know, do whatever you want, but know why you're doing it, at any one time.
[00:48:46] So just keeping that, um, keeping that there. But it's a set of skills, this, that he's talking about, that many people don't have. And I really encourage our listener to, to, to sort of polish them. Get the media and get that climate as well. Um, to be able to use voice notes, use videos, use the emails very well.
[00:49:04] Hey, Peter, the only other thing I'll mention that pops to my mind is, and I've had to learn this, is that, um, the written word in these cases seem, is very important that I've had to really hone my written com, What, uh, in the culture map, they call, low context. So being very deliberate about this is very clear language to everyone and not using phrases that might be misunderstood.
[00:49:30] So, that, that's something I've really had to learn is just. Get very specific and very clear. So it works across cultures, it works across time zones, and it's less likely to be understood, and it's nothing like my spoken word. I have to really hone that. So that's a skill, that's a competence that I've had to really build. But that is it for this episode. We, not Me, as supported by Squadify. Squadify is the complete system for helping your teams to connect And perform. You can find show notes where you're listening and at squadify.net.
[00:49:59] If you've enjoyed the show, please do share the love and recommend it to your friends. We, not Me, is produced by Mark Steadman. Thank you so much for listening. It's goodbye from me.
[00:50:10] Pia: And it's goodbye from me.