Benefits and Challenges of Asynchronous Management | ft. Liam Martin

Introduction

Pushpak Mundre
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Be remote podcast for today’s episode we have with us Liam Martin is a co founder of time doctors and staff.com. He is author of running remote as well. Thank you so much, Liam, for doing this. I’m super excited to have you on the podcast

Liam
today. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to get into it as well.

Why did Liam Martin write a book on remote work?

Pushpak Mundre
So let’s start with your book, like, tell us about your book. And why did you write a book on remote work? Like there are lots of topic in the world? Like why you chose to write a book on remote work?

Liam
Yeah, there are dozens of books on remote work, I’m actually holding up about five or six that I just mean the last couple months. And one of the thing that I recognized when I looked at all of these books is and there’s 27, actually, that are coming out in the next six months, homebrew through legitimate publisher. So there’s a lot of information is going to be coming out Damn, one thing that they all have in common was they would talk about how to do remote work from a technical aspect. So should you be using slack? Or should you be using Microsoft Teams? Should you using Google meat? Or should you be using Zoom? And what I’ve discovered is none of that matters at all? If those are the questions that you’re trying to ask, then you don’t even know what your problem is. And the fundamental issue is that remote work requires a completely different management philosophy from its on premise office counterparts. So the vast majority of the companies are using all of these tools, but they’re simply just recreating the office. And if you’re stuck in zoom nine hours a day, honestly, you might as well kill yourself is that is just as bad as being inside of a cubicle all day, every day, five days a week for the rest of your life, there’s a different way to be able to manage remote teams to be able to optimize their productivity. And that’s specifically what we studied inside of running remote.

Pushpak Mundre
Awesome. So what is that specific thing? Like? Because a lot of people, I think they will be on a zoom call if we are working right, right. That’s what people do, basically, like, so what is that hack which you have, when we don’t have to be on the Zoom call all the time. And

Liam
so I studied a few dozen remote first organizations that are all incredibly successful companies like WordPress, and Shopify, and even some of the newer editions like Google and Facebook. And a lot of these companies that were succeeding had one single thing in common, which was what we call asynchronous management. So there’s two general methodologies towards remote work or just work in general, there’s synchronous communication and management. And then there’s asynchronous communication management. And when you look at an on premise organization, which is what we call in office environments, everyone pays a cost. There’s a sunk cost fallacy into synchronous communication, because everyone gets in their cars or jumps on the train and comes to one particular place, and they spend that 90 minutes of their workday coming to one particular place at one particular moment. And then they say to themselves, well, there’s a buffet of collaboration and synchronous communication that they should implement, they should be collaborating as much as humanly possible. If you open to any NBA book, there’s probably a lot in there saying collaboration is good. What we’ve discovered counterintuitively is that collaboration actually has a exponential drop in efficiency, the more that you do it. So remote first, companies have recognized that collaboration can be implemented with an ala carte method. So what’s the minimum viable dose in order for everyone to achieve what my friend Cal Newport calls deep work, which is the ability for the individual to have everything at their disposal in order to solve a really complex problem. And if you have that methodology in place, then you can actually build companies much faster and much more efficiently than an office model

How to have synchronous management in the teams?

Pushpak Mundre
Sure. But at the same time, collaboration is important, right? So how do we like or manage all this? How can we have a synchronous management in our team?

Liam
So I think that synchronous, asynchronous collaboration is important and we actually do it in a very different way that probably a lot of people listening right now. It would appear quite alien to them if they get into some of our companies. So we have something called Silent meetings. As an example, I’m going to have one tomorrow. silent reading the sauna. Silent meetings. Yes. So in a project management system, we use a sauna. You can use anything that you want. Okay. But we have that as our platform. Right? I talked in the book about how platforms are basically new office, right? So, sauna is effectively our office. And that’s our boardroom. And we sit down, and we say to ourselves, Well, what are the main issues that we need to address in this meeting there, and we put it up on a sauna, then we debate it, and you can see 20 3040 comments on a particular issue, debate that issue asynchronously, meaning, we choose when to actually read that information, when it’s most advantageous to us. And we’ll reduce our productivity in as little away as humanly possible. And if we actually come to a conclusion on that particular issue, then what we do is we take the conclusion, we put it to the top of the ticket, and we get rid of that issue on that meeting. And if there are less than three issues, and can’t be concluded a synchronously, we don’t have the meeting. Okay, so we don’t go into a synchronous meeting, we don’t actually jump onto a zoom call. And on average, we probably have a meeting, once every month, maybe once every month or two, I probably communicate synchronously with the company about three hours a week, on average, and the other time that I spend the other, you know, basically 37 hours of my work day, I spend focusing on deep work

Pushpak Mundre
there. So this is like a legit silence meeting like you guys don’t talk only

Liam
all through Asana. So it’s all through asynchronous communication and collaboration. There’s very little synchronous communication. So when we have a blocker, inside of our asynchronous form of communication, do we move it to a synchronous form of communication?

Pushpak Mundre
Yeah. So is there like, do you guys like do give a time a specific time, a time, this time we’ll having we’ll be having a challenge meeting. So everyone is responding and all like, it depends on person to person? And how does this exactly how

Liam
because then that reinforces synchronous communications. So if everyone actually has to show up at a particular time to answer questions, then they’re just as distracted, because then they can actually focus on what’s really important to them. What we tell everyone is, let’s say you’re having the meeting on Friday, all of your new issues need to be in by, you know, three days before that meeting, actually, is, is set to go. And then once you’ve done once we’ve debated all these things. Again, if we end up with three issues, more than three issues, that we can’t solve a synchronously, only then do we actually have a synchronous meeting in which we all meet at the same time and discuss those issues.

How do introverts’ thoughtfulness help in working remotely?

Pushpak Mundre
Okay. So you have mentioned something about introverts, right? Like, introverts climb on the top faster in remote first companies, like because of their thoughtfulness is seen as an asset or liability. So why do you think this matters? Like I don’t see any an angle to like, or does it really matter being an introvert or an extrovert, when it comes to walking the motoric.

Liam
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in some board rooms where people are making business decisions. But there seems to be a very interesting bias that occurs, okay. The, the coolest person, the most charismatic person, the, you know, in here in Canada, the person that looks like Captain America, the six foot five, you know, white male is usually the person that ends up having most of his ideas adopted. And inside of asynchronous organizations, those ideas are generally the most charismatic person generally does not have the best ideas. This is inevitable. This is just the reality of the situation. And usually, the person who is the most thoughtful, the most intelligent, is the person who has the best ideas. But unfortunately, because those people may not be trained in charismatically, getting everyone over to their perspective, that wrapper that they have is all that they see only see the wrapper, you don’t actually see the candy bar, the actual thing that needs to be done. So inside of asynchronous organizations where you’re reducing everything effectively to text, it’s a lot easier to have good ideas translated and proliferated inside of a synchronous organizations. And this basically removes a lot of bias inside of these companies, and they grow faster due to less stupid ideas getting moved Forward simply because someone is charismatic.

Pushpak
Yeah, make sense.

Liam
Now, take into consideration myself, I’m slightly on the extroverted scale of the spectrum. But in comparison to your stereotypical corporate America, you know, person executive, I nowhere near as convincing as some of those people, they’re very, very good at convincing people of their ideas. But what I’ve recognized is that organizations that pursue that type of mindset, will not be able to compete with a synchronous organizations, where more of those right ideas that more intelligent ideas are actually being adopted. And this is the big crux that I don’t think a lot of people really recognize, we’re not really talking about asynchronous can be done in an office or outside of an office, it’s just the methodology that you implement, can actually provide long term a much faster kind of direction and growth architecture inside of inside of the, the, the capitalistic market that we have, because if you adopt more better ideas faster, you’re going to be more successful in your organization.

How growth and productivity of the employees affect synchronous and asynchronous communication?

Pushpak Mundre
Okay. Okay. So, you know, like, you must have worked with a lot of remote companies, and like, you know, all that you have to work with a lot of remote leaders, and especially those who are doing the asynchronous communication, right. So, like, what are some interesting facts, like, especially like, you know, on the level of productivity and growth, by adopting the asynchronous mindset, like, what are the some interesting facts that you have observed? And in terms of growth, like, suppose the companies are asynchronous, and they are having asynchronous communication? What is their growth? And another, there’s this other company, which is like synchronous. So, what is the difference between those two companies, and like in terms of growth and productivity of the employees on Yeah.

Liam
So, it’s very difficult for me to be able to provide you any type of statistically significant feedback on that, because the world of asynchronous companies was a very small cottage industry before the pandemic. But when you actually look at remote work, remote work, before the pandemic, I would probably say 50% of those companies were asynchronous as a structure. And post pandemic, we went from 4% of the US workforce working remotely, pre pandemic, to a month after the pandemic hit 45% of the US workforce working remotely. And I know that it’s effectively happened the same everywhere else on planet Earth. So we have billions and billions of people working remotely. Now, I’d say probably less than 1% of companies are currently using asynchronous management in order to be able to manage the remote organizations. So with that said, the companies that I reviewed, are some of the fastest growing companies in the world. A case in point one is Coinbase, which is a company that is a cryptocurrency. And they debuted the IPO last year, and the IPO did a $141 billion valuation. And they ended up IPO in at number 89 on the s&p 500. So the 500 most powerful companies in the United States, and probably effectively the world. They are number 89. That’s their debut on the stock market. And for the first time in the history of the SEC, the Security and Exchange Commission, they were able to state their headquarters is nowhere, because they said anything else would be a lie. And this is really the future of what I see fast growing companies being is stripping away all of the BS that is connected to building these organizations, and really focusing on people solving hard problems. That’s effectively what companies do write, how can you solve hard problems faster than your counterparts than your competitors. And asynchronous Management provides the ability for, again, people to be able to optimize themselves towards deep work. If you can have more of your workforce optimized towards deep work, you are going to have faster growing organizations it is simply an inevitability.

What are the challenges in asynchronous management?

Pushpak Mundre
Sure, ma at the same time, like we know, like, doing deep for can have like managing everything asynchronously. Like don’t do think like employees need to have kind of training because it’s a new for a lot of people as you said, like, you know, only done 1% of the companies were you know, following the asynchronous management. So how do we like go So how will companies will start adopting to this? And do those? Do you think like company, companies in future like a lot of companies are going to adopt adopt to asynchronous management in future? And if they do, how it will happen? Like, you know, I think there’s a spatial training is required, like, as you said, deep for a lot of people can’t do deep work, like they want to be surrounded by people like this kind of challenges are there, right? So how do we solve these kind of challenges?

Liam
For the manager, I book running remote, because pre order the book reading remote, because that’s going to allow you to lay out the general architecture. There’s not really anything written on this subject, which I think is really interesting, and, and quite scary, actually, because this was how remote first companies like we’ve figured this out over decades. And when remote work was adopted by everyone on planet Earth, they kind of just didn’t really pay attention to what we’ve been doing for the past decades. And they just said, Oh, well, we’re gonna just recreate the office, bad move. Definitely, in a lot of unhappy workers. Term methodology of implementing asynchronous work, one of the things that we touch out in the book is that the platform is the manager. So another thing that we found in analyzing all of the remote First Nations, he discovered that they had a managerial level, percent thinner, then they’re in office synchronous counterparts, meaning you need less managerial overhead to actually run an asynchronous organization, which again, makes you a lot more efficient, you have more workers doing work, then workers who are managing other people that are doing work. And so inside of that, that’s a big factor to take into consideration. But when you have someone that starts in an asynchronous organization, the first thing that they’ll usually get is the company wiki. So we have an internal wiki, as an example, a really great one to go check out that’s open source right now is about gitlab.com/handbook. It has the largest open sourced process document, I believe on planet Earth, there’s about 8000 different processes that are inside of GitLab. And everything inside of GitLab is actually public. It’s open source. So if you want to know how to do a demo at GitLab, it’s documented inside of their wiki inside of their processes. Yeah, so we have this internal process document, we give that to our employee. And we say your job is to accomplish x, we’re clearly identifying what your goals are, and what your metrics are. Every employee inside of the company has longitudinal quantitative metrics. So we don’t have any metrics that are ill defined. And that’s another thing that we’re we saw in corporate America, that was quite confusing to us was, a lot of the times, you would just say, Well, you know, I really like John, I think that John’s a really good worker. Right? Well, what did John actually do? Was John, just being charismatic, and the office clown. And that’s why everyone likes John. And that’s why John is gonna keep his job, or is John, is John actually adding to the organization? And if he is, what quantitative? How much is he adding to the organization? What numbers can you show me, that are convinced that he’s going to convince me that he’s basically got a positive return on investment. So that’s the second thing that we do. So we have these processes. And we have quantitative metrics. And then from that point, you’re really left to your own devices, to be able to look inside of our project management system, our wiki and our metrics based documentation to accomplish what you want to accomplish inside of the organization, it requires a significant amount of autonomy. And this is something that we have also found a lot inside of these remote first organizations. Autonomy is absolutely critical. But autonomy is also the number one thing that makes people happy in their job, is the ability to be able to accomplish their goals the way that they want to accomplish them. And so if you are basically an organizer, and an individual who says, I don’t want my manager to tell me everything that I want to do, I just want to actually get things done my own way. And I’ll ask for help when I need it. An asynchronous organization is the perfect fit for you. Yeah.

Why should remote teams operate on autonomy?

Pushpak Mundre
So you also mentioned about the remote teams or you know, operate on autonomy basically. Like if you if everything is automated, then you will have more freedom like the employees and the managers and the founders of the company as well. So how does it exactly what and how to automate everything? First of all, I think that is important. Okay,

Liam
so I, I have a an internal saying on this, which I use, I stole it from Napoleon. Napoleon said, orders shouldn’t be easy to understand they should be impossible to miss understand. And that sounds like a very small shift in your thinking. But when you actually implement this to an organization, it completely changes the way that that organization functions. So you could write a document out about how to publish a blog publish a podcast as an example. Yeah. But then, and we actually have a section of the book, where I go through and I process document, how to pour a cup of coffee. And I go to an insane level of detail on pouring a cup of coffee. Where do we source the coffee? From? What kind of kettle do you need? You know, how long should you leave it to steep? What machinery do you need, and actually it to be able to steep the coffee. And when you actually build all of this documentation, and then it is adoptable by everyone inside of the organization, and it’s also reinforced inside of the organization, it’s going to move your company much faster in the long term, than if you actually directly explain it to someone in the short term. This is the core piece of about asynchronous and synchronous communication and management that a lot of people don’t really understand. Getting the answer right now from someone else synchronously, may seem like it’s speeding you up in the short term. But actually building the processes for everyone to find their own answers to their own problems, actually massively speeds up the organization in the long term, because you can add people very quickly, people aren’t necessarily confused, we have team members in 43 different countries all over the world, it is almost impossible for managers to be able to manage those individual team members on the team, same timezone, you know, out there, as an example, all of our team members in Asia as an example, I might have one to two hours of overlap, where I’m in the same time zone in the working at the same time. So it really is important to be able to implement this. And once you have it, you can scale your organization as fast as you want.

Pushpak Mundre
So as a company how, like any example, which happened with you guys, like how does it really helps? Can you like give? Can you give us the real life example? Which happens, you know, happen in your company? How does it really helps, basically?

What are the major advantages and disadvantages of asynchronous management?

Liam
well, I’ll give you an example for reaching out for this podcast. I’m just looking in my wiki right now. There’s about 17 different processes for how to reach out to podcasts. Okay. By Challis was the person that ended up reaching out to you yeah, and we have email copy, we’re optimizing that email copy, we’re doing split tests on it, we have the the scheduling link. And we have a bunch of other processes that are kind of connected to this. When I had this meeting, I was able to look about five minutes beforehand, I had what you do the website that you’ve come from the background on you. And within five minutes, I was up and running. And I’m going to do seven more podcasts today. And I didn’t notice I can be hyper productive, because I have someone else that’s doing the other part of the job. And then I’m just focusing on the job that I need to do. Whereas if I was doing this task on my own, maybe I’d get one podcast a day. And I can now do seven podcasts a day.

Pushpak Mundre
It’s a true. Yeah, actually,

Liam
if I could do 24 podcasts today, I would try to do. But that’s physically impossible, because I just don’t have the energy to actually, you know, I would I would probably die within two days. Yeah, we’d be spouting off insanity around the 30 hour mark. But, you know, if I wanted to, if I Shali thought that she could actually apply another worker to this process. She could do it because she has the autonomy to be able to do that her goal is to hit certain metrics for the launching of this book, which is I need to get on 500 podcasts before August 16 is that’s when the book launches. By the way, you can pre order the book at this point. It’s not that big of a deal. But August 16, is when the book launches, so I have 500 podcasts in the can by that date. That’s a goal. And then she’s working towards that and we’re working together but she has complete autonomy as to how we actually achieve that particular goal. Right. And here’s the other thing. I think the last time I spoke to my Challis synchronously over a zoom call, was about four months ago.

Pushpak
Damn, that’s huge. But we work together every single day. Now, that’s

Pushpak Mundre
amazing. This is a real life example. Because yeah, I’ve seen it. That like she reached out to me. And all this happened to be my asset, set up this call and all Yeah, make sense? This is a museum. Can you just give me a minute? I have to? No worries?

Oh, yeah. So what are the major advantages and disadvantages of asynchronous management? As for you?

Liam
biggest advantages? I think we’ve already addressed the.

Liam

you can easily be more cost efficient. Oh, can you hear me now? Yeah,

Pushpak Mundre
I can, you know, yeah. Okay.

Liam
I’ll just run the question over again. So the biggest advantages are some that we’ve already stated before, which is the ability to scale your organization much faster than an on premise organization, the ability to actually hire people much faster, if you don’t have to actually put them in an office. Now, it’s much easier to be able to build your organization that way. And also, having the world stage as your environment to hire is much easier than just having San Francisco or New York or Toronto or London, to be able to hire out people. Some of the disadvantages are the disconnect between individuals. So it really is dependent upon those processes. In order to be able to run an organization effectively, as I said, the platform is the manager. So if your platform is no good, you’re not going to have a really refined organization. So you need to be able to make sure that you have a fantastic platform in place that people can communicate on asynchronously and can share information back and forth. The other part of it is disconnection from individuals. So a lot of asynchronous organizations, people can get on board very quickly inside of those organizations, but then they can also off board themselves very quickly, they don’t necessarily have as many ties to a company, as you would if you go into an office every single day, a lot of people will not quit a job, not because they don’t like the job, a lot of people don’t really enjoy their jobs all that much at all, I think it’s something like 80% of people don’t like their jobs, but they like the people in those companies. So they’ll stay there because they’ve got their office, best friend, Suzanne. And they’re going to continue to work there because Suzanne’s her friend. And, you know, they don’t want to leave because they have a social network. They’re okay, we don’t have as many of those types of ties. But actually, that’s not necessarily a disadvantage for us. We personally believe that if people aren’t happy with the work that they’re doing inside of an asynchronous organization, they shouldn’t do it any longer, they should go find another job. And really give that job to someone who’s a lot more passionate about it, this is the great thing about having remote work is planet Earth is your hiring pool. So you can find people that are very, very good at a very unique type of thing. And if they’re not happy with that work, we’ll find them a job somewhere else, we’ll move them to another position, or we’ll actually move them to another company, we’ll help them transition. They’re there. Because for us, there’s no sacred knowledge inside of the organization. It’s not necessarily inside of asynchronous organizations. The workers are the operators of the company. They’re not critical parts of the business, that if they left the entire business would fall apart. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be by design. Yeah.

Does having fewer managers help an organization?

Pushpak Mundre
So one one more thing which you have mentioned, right, like remote first company have on average, half as many as you know, as managers as synchronous, like non remote companies. So how does that help? Like, means like, is it a good thing like having less managers or like, what are your thoughts on it exactly?

Liam
Well, from from the shareholders perspective, it’s great having less managers The more people that you can have doing work, solving difficult problems. And the less people you can have managing those people that are solving difficult problems, the faster your organization will operate and the more cost efficient organization, yes, this is quite literally, a horse and buggy versus Model T moment. I don’t know if you know about the history of the Model T, but the first model T rolled off the production line in 1915, also happened to be the time in which there was the highest population of horses on planet Earth. So do you want to be in the, you know, the buggy business in 1915, probably everyone would have thought all these crazy Model T’s they’re not going to catch on this is this is incredibly stupid. 20 years later, the market was completely dominated by cars, it was something that 90% of the industry was using cars as opposed to horses, because it’s not just an issue of, oh, a car is 10% better, we’re talking about exponential shifts forward in work. And when you think about that managerial layer being reduced, effectively, you would like to have no managerial layer inside of an organization, if you can remove that part of work, then you can actually make your company way more efficient and more cost effective than your competitors. And you can invest that money into things that will grow the business, as opposed to simply keep the business running.

Pushpak Mundre
So can we do this? Is it possible, like building a company like without managers have without having managers or like operating it?

Liam
I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of examples that we just mentioned here, Vice Challis. I mean, I technically managed by Shelley. But the last time that I spoke to her was four months ago. You know, am I, her manager, I don’t know, I might call it something different, we might even need to redefine the term. Or give you an example of someone else who’s in the book. Amir, who is the founder of Todoist, which is a task management app that has 10s of millions of users all over the world, incredibly popular application, he had an engineer on his engineering team that worked for him for almost five years, okay. And he never met this person in person, he never did a video call with him. And he never did an audio call with him, he only communicated with this person through project management systems. Now, and through instant messaging. This person was a fantastic engineer, one of the top engineers in his company built a incredibly successful application that’s used by millions and millions of people. And yet, they never actually communicated synchronously, it is possible, if you give your people the autonomy, to be able to actually solve their own problems, they’re going to not only grow your business faster, but your employees are going to be a lot happier because of it.

How to start and lead an asynchronous company?

Pushpak Mundre
So how you not like, building this kind of sustaining system in organization is like really difficult. So how do you as a leader, manage and lead asynchronous company, or if someone wants to start a synchronous company, how should to go ahead and you know, what kind of person they should go for?

Liam
Sure. So you said managing lead. And that’s actually a core premise that I want to kind of bring up. You shouldn’t manage, you should lead. So forget about management. Okay, the platform is managing everything. What you need to focus on is leadership. So when I have one on ones, with some of my direct reports, I don’t ask them about their metrics, because I already see their metrics already documented. It’s very clear. They know whether they’re hitting them or not. And we’ve discussed a synchronously why they’re not hitting or are hitting those particular targets. What I want to talk about instead is we I had a team member whose dog died a few weeks ago, and she, her children are heartbroken over this and trying to figure out how to help her children through this difficult time. And obviously, the rest of her family, that is leadership, focusing on the direction that we’re going to go as a company and why you’re here and why you should be excited to actually work in this company. That’s leadership, making decisions as an example to get your team out of Ukraine, before war breaks out. That’s leadership. That’s not necessarily management. And that’s when people should really be focusing on not necessarily whether they achieve their goals, these games of telephone, where I tell you what my numbers are, you tell your manager what my numbers are, and then that person tells the boss what my numbers were, why can’t we just cut all of those people out and have the boss directly look at my numbers?

What should someone do if he/she is starting an asynchronous organization?

Pushpak Mundre
They’re amazing. That makes sense. So let do this like tactically, if you want to transition and a synchronous company to a synchronous company, or if some if I’m starting a synchronous or organizations, asynchronous organization, suppose. So what should we do like in the first three months, as a company like to build platforms? And like, what are the right steps to go ahead and build this?

Liam
So first thing is your right start to develop the platform as the manager. So the first thing that I would do is, figure out what are the biggest things throughout your work day, that if you weren’t in the company, no one would know how to do them. This is what I call sacred knowledge inside of the organization, take that sacred knowledge and document it, write it down, create a video, create a screen capture, get that information out of your head, and into some type of format that can be digitized, and share with everyone inside of the organization. We have this mindset, which is everyone inside of the company should have the same informational advantage as the CEO of the Corporation. Once you have that, and you have all the information at your disposal, then you can actually move towards the communication side, which is really making sure that everyone knows exactly what they need to be doing. So they’re, they’re clear on what they’re going to do tomorrow, next week, next month. And they don’t need a manager to tell them what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week or next month. And then very clearly documenting that information and communicating it back to effectively the mothership. Right, I talked, I talked a lot about this. It’s like someone in another podcast kind of told me that I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Star Trek before. The television show, yeah, intelligent series. So there’s a there’s a organization in Star Trek called the Borg, which is like the cybernetic organisms that are all connected to each other. And they’re just simply connected to the platform, think about asynchronous work, somewhat like the Borg, but maybe the friendly version, where any single individual can be removed from the collective and the collective will still function and operate without any problem whatsoever. Because it’s everyone’s collective knowledge that’s actually solving problems. It’s not necessarily the individual that has some sort of sacred knowledge in that, you know, can hold the company, effectively at gunpoint, then once you’ve done all of those things, then it’s just reinforcing that. So figuring out, when people ask questions, try to respond with the actual answer inside of the process documentation that you have. So if you ask me, Well, how should I email people to reach out for podcasts? Well, here’s the process document on that. Well, how should I sign my emails? Here’s the process document for that. I’ve been in some of these asynchronous organizations where I’ve asked these questions. And after them very politely responding in that way, about a dozen times, they’ve come to me and said, Hey, so you’re asking too many questions, you should really just spend two minutes looking at the actual processes that we have inside of the organization. And if you can’t figure out in five minutes, absolutely contact us. But take a little bit of time to be able to figure out the answer to your own question, as opposed to disrupting someone else’s productivity by asking that question directly.

Do employees like being managed?

Pushpak Mundre
Right, right. Like suppose someone new is coming from a synchronous organization to asynchronous organization. So it can like it could be hard for people like, I think a lot of what people are used to is like, someone manager or the employees, they tell us like, Yeah, this is what you need to do. And this is what you know, how things works. That’s what’s been happening with

How documentation is essential in an asynchronous organization?

Liam
companies, like managers, like if we pulled everyone saying, Do you like being managed? No, no one likes that. Yeah, probably 90% of people would say, I don’t like being managed, I would like to do my own thing. Well, asynchronous organizations provide you that type of opportunity to be able to have your own autonomy to solve problems in your own way and not necessarily be bothered by reporting information to individuals and again, playing this game of telephone that no one really needs to do. We’re in the 21st century, we can basically collect and distribute information all over Planet Earth synchronously as quickly as humanly possible in the front in a fraction of a second, but we seem to not be doing that when it applies to work. No.

Pushpak Mundre
So you know, like Yeah, so when we’re late, I think having the dog documentation and having like information like maybe videos or document that that is like one of the most important thing when it comes to like running asynchronous organization by talking to our like concluded one thing for sure that having a write documents, right information like that is like one of the most important thing if you’re running an asynchronous organization,

Liam
I absolutely it’s it’s so it, I would probably say that step one, and then go to the communication, and then go to your management. So if I were going to basically tell you three things to do in the first 90 days, yeah, month one, document, month to communication, month three management in that order,

Pushpak Mundre
in territory. And when it comes to documentation, I think some people don’t like to do like, I don’t know, some people would might want to watch videos, right. So we could do like, we could also create the videos. And we could also like the documents as well, like as per the

Liam
Absolutely. So inside of the vast majority of our process documentation, we have a text format. So steps that people go through, you know, to be able to accomplish a particular task. But in the vast majority of cases, we also have a video, we use a tool called vid yd. And a really great tool is loom that does a screen grab of your computer, and then it will basically you can put your webcam on, you can you can even point to things you can edit the video however you’d like. And then you turn that into a cloud based link. That is a video link. And you can put that inside of your process documentation.

Favourite remote companies and remote spaces

Pushpak Mundre
No. So tell us about your favorite remote companies like companies and remote space.

Liam
I think it’s a really interesting time for remote companies. So even three months ago, I probably would have had a different list. Okay. Basecamp and Git Lab, which are some of the original companies that really built remote first asynchronous organizations at scale are really great ones to take a look at. Another really fantastic one that’s a Pioneer is buffer. And they run a social media app. But incredibly successful organization, that’s a relatively small business, but has been has been incredibly successful commercially. There’s also other big businesses that are going remote in big ways and to a degree are actually implementing some asynchronous policies. Twitter, as an example, is a remote first organization at this point, they’re shutting down their offices, Shopify shut, shutting down all of their offices. Facebook now Maeda, is saying that within the next two years, they want 50% of their workforce, entire workforce, to be remote to not have to go inside an office, even Apple, right, yeah, but the biggest company in the world by valuation, they were trying to get people to go back to the office and their employees actually wrote a massive letter signed by 1000s of Apple employees saying, We refuse to go back to the office. So this is not an issue of the pandemic really opened up Pandora’s box, where we’re at a point now and saying, everyone’s had a taste of remote work. They don’t want to go back, but 80% of people want to impart work remotely. That’s what the vast majority of the polling is giving us. Yeah, you can’t just say remote work is a nice to have anymore. It’s a requirement. And if you want to actually get a players inside of your organization, they’re going to demand remote agreements. So you have to be ready to implement remote work inside of your organizations. And as I said before, 99% of them are just simply recreating the office, you need to manage those people differently. Asynchronous management is the answer. Yeah.

Favourite three books

Pushpak Mundre
So tell us about your like, top three favorite books and remote space? Yeah, enjoy,

Liam
right here. So remote comm. Basecamp is a really great book, that’s going to give you a lot of base knowledge about how to run not only a remote organization, but also to a degree an asynchronous organization. Another one that’s really good, which I’ve been going through is remote teams work. That’s a really good tactical document. And then this one, which has been good is working from home by a current member named Karen Pangea. And this one just came out recently, but really good to understand work from the employees perspective and work from the employees predict perspective, not necessarily from the employers perspective, and there’s a ton of others. There’s so many that are coming out in the market right now. But as I said before, if you’re trying if you You’re trying to get out of a book whether to use Slack or Microsoft Teams, or zoom or Google meat. Yeah, you’re asking the wrong question, you actually need to figure out how to manage remote first organizations. And that’s the big thing that you should be starting from, then figure out whether or not you’re going to use Slack. Teams.

About Liam’s book

Pushpak Mundre
Amazing. So your book is coming on 16th August, write your book as well.

Liam
16th of August, yes. And you can pre order the book. Now it’s available on Amazon, and everywhere else that books are available. If you just go to running remote.com, you’ll be able to check out everything connected to the book, we have a bunch of extra kind of like cool. bonuses for anyone that pre orders the book at this point. And then outside of that, if you just want to learn more about you know, running remote in general, YouTube is probably the best place youtube.com/running remote, I put up talks there. And all of our talks are free and available on that YouTube channel. So if you don’t have the money to actually attend our conference that we do every single year youtube.com/running roads the best spot?

Pushpak Mundre
Yeah. Awesome. So we can also put up a link down here of for your book. Field. I think we can do that as well. Perfect. Awesome. Yeah. So it was really amazing talking to you LM like we got a completely different perspective, especially the silent meeting. I’ve never heard about it, and a lot of things. So yeah, it was a mind blowing, talking with you. And I think like our listeners will get a completely different perspective, especially on like, you know, very deep we have before also have talked about asynchronous management. But this time, we got to, you know, really deep into it, and I think there’s still a lot to it. Maybe we can talk about it again sometime. So thank you so much for doing this. It was really amazing talking to you.

Liam
Thanks for having me. Really appreciate being on awesome