How Time Doctor Manages a 28-Country Team Asynchronously (Liam Martin at SaaSOpen 2023)

Opening Question: Why Did Some Companies Thrive During the Pandemic?

Liam Martin

00:00>> I wanna start this talk off with a question that I've had off the top of my head for going on almost three years now. And if you are a remote founder, you probably have had this same question in your head as well. This question is, why did some companies not just survive but thrive during the pandemic? How did some companies seem to defy all of these assumptions that we made about work? Because to be completely honest

00:29>> with you, we didn't have any office parties during the pandemic. We didn't have any team building lunches during the pandemic. I didn't get a birthday cake on my birthday, company didn't buy me one of those. I also didn't get any pizza Thursdays. I didn't even get any nap rooms during the pandemic, although I did sleep a lot more often pre pandemic than post pandemic or post pandemic. So why did some companies not just survive but thrive

The March 2020 Remote Work Explosion

Liam Martin

00:58>> during the pandemic? To explain this, we need to actually talk about what actually happened during that pandemic. So what happened in March 2020? I love to show people this slide. This is a buddy of mine's corporate VPN company for remote workers. That's what happened during March 2020. He 4x'd his business in three days. And here's an even scarier number. In February 2020, 4% of The US workforce was working remotely. By March, 45% of The US workforce

01:37>> was working remotely. That's the biggest shift in work since the industrial revolution, but the industrial revolution took eighty years and we did that in March. So more than that, Google has this fantastic dataset that I love to show people on mobility changes over time. Unfortunately, they did take it down because they don't want everyone to know that every single smartphone that you carry is collecting all of this metadata. They still do it. They just took down

02:02>> the reports, but thankfully, I was able to get a pull off of it. And this is retail and recreation over time. As you can see, we had the pandemic, we had a huge drop off, and then we had a return to the mean. This is park usage, actually where I'm from in Canada, but again it applies almost everywhere in the Western world. We had a big pop up, and now we're returning to the mean with regards

02:26>> to parks.

Remote Work Mobility Data and Long-Term Trends

Liam Martin

02:29>> This is workplace attendance. I don't know if any of you guys are statisticians, but that graph looks a little bit different from everyone else's. So from the peak in March 2020, at 45% of the workforce working remotely, dependent upon the data source that you look at, and there's lots of different data sources out there. Today, 26 to 44% of The US workforce is currently working remotely. And here's an even crazier statistic. That number is going back

Projections: 50% to 62% Remote Workforce by 2030

Liam Martin

03:03>> up. So by 2027, it's projected to be 50% of The US workforce, and actually by 2030, we're projected to be at 62%, dependent upon the dataset that you take a look at. So if you're thinking remote work is just this singular thing that happened during COVID and we're all gonna go back to the office, the harsh reality is that you have to actually adapt to that business model right now. Now I have a bit of a

03:29>> crazier statement to make. A lot of people that hear this think I'm kind of nuts, but I believe that remote work is a permanent civilizational shift. I think that it's a consequence of the internet that's maybe even more important than the internet itself. Now you might think to yourself that's just some weird guy talking to you and he he loves remote work, so this is You don't wanna put any weight on that. It's not actually me,

03:54>> that's Marc Andreessen from Andreessen and Horowitz, who is arguably the best investor in the history of western civilization. So even though Marc Andreesen is a genius, I'm going back to that same problem. Why did some companies not just survive, but thrive during the pandemic? A couple years ago, I actually figured out the answer. I had that moment. And it completely changed my perspective on how remote work is currently done and how we operate remotely inside of

04:25>> our company. I was so passionate about it that I took two years to write this, which is my book, Running Remote. Where I interviewed dozens of seven, eight, and nine figure remote first entrepreneurs and understood what they do differently from everyone else that transition towards remote work. And as it turns out, successful remote companies, they work in a way that's so alien to you that if I described it to you, most of the people that see

04:53>> this talk or read my book, the biggest response that I get is, you're full of shit. This is not actually the way that people operate their businesses. But it is the way that they operate their businesses and it's just based off this singular, simple, relatively counterintuitive rule.

05:13>> And we've also seen this, and I've gotten a lot of comments from people as I've been walking around talking about remote work. There's a very aggressive and I would honestly border on conspiratorial pushback to the office. I see that Mark Zuckerberg just said after he basically cut another 20% of his workforce that remote work may not be for him. Well, to be honest with you, when you completely change your corporation over to VR from social media,

05:41>> there's probably gonna be a couple bumps along the way.

The Remote Productivity Research: 17 Studies and the Stanford Attrition Data

Liam Martin

05:45>> Here's the stats. I have studied 17 remote studies that were published in 2021. On average, remote workers are 13% more productive than their on premise counterparts. Remote workers work on average a day more per week than their on premise counterparts. That can be good or bad. We really don't know about that one. And the craziest study, this is 16,000 subjects out of Stanford over a nine month period, identified that remote workers have an attrition rate that

Introducing Liam Martin and Time Doctor

Liam Martin

06:14>> is 50% lower than their on premise counterparts. Everyone here knows churn. I'm telling you this is employee churn, this is money in the bank. So if remote is so great, why are we seeing this push back to the office? Well, let me first tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Liam Martin. I'm the co founder of timedoctor and staff.com. I'm also the co organizer of running remote, which is the largest conference on building

Defining Asynchronous Management

Liam Martin

06:40>> and scaling remote teams. We have employees in 28 different countries all over the world, and we all work seamlessly based off of this fundamental rule that I discovered, not just three years ago, actually a little bit before that. But the real focus of me trying to speak to you today is to understand how you can unlock this singular concept. And that singular concept is something that I like to call asynchronous management. So that's the practice of

07:09>> leading teams without simultaneously or synchronously communicating with them. So work focuses on individual autonomy, allowing all team members to maximize their own productivity without being dependent upon others to provide updates. Now, let me give you an example. I don't know how old everyone else is in the audience, but I remember watching Friends, the TV show. Has anyone I mean, obviously. Hopefully, everyone has seen Friends, the TV show. Thank you. When I went to school, 08:30PM on

07:42>> Friday is when you would watch Friends. And if I showed up at school on Monday not watching Friends, I was exercised from from my class community. Everyone was talking about that episode, oh, what did Ross do to Chandler? I don't really know. I can't remember. It was so far ago. It was so far back. But the reality is that if I didn't show up at 08:30 to sit my butt down on the couch and watch Friends,

08:08>> I had to wait six months before there was a rerun. That is synchronous communication. Today, we have things like Netflix. Netflix is asynchronous communication. The information is available for us when we want to consume it, not when it's most advantageous to the organization to be able to deliver it to you. This is effectively asynchronous management. This is the concept that almost all successful remote teams were using before the pandemic, and there are simply three singular tenets

The Three Tenets: Deliberate, Democratized, Detailed

Liam Martin

08:41>> that I go over in the book that I wanna review with you right now.

08:45>> First off is deliberate over communication. The second one is what I like to call democratized workflows, and the third is detailed metrics. I call them three d's. My publisher wanted me to call them that, but I think it's kind of stupid. So deliberate, democratized, and detailed. First off, my friend Nathan Barry, spoke at our conference about six months ago, he's put this much better than me. There are two types of companies. There's remote first and remote

09:13>> forced. So which one are you in? If you're in a Zoom call eight hours a day, you're getting Slack notifications on your phone at 9PM. You're told to report to your weekly company team culture meeting where you sit around a Zoom call and you play cards against humanity, but not the fun one by the way, the one that's like HR approved that isn't actually enjoyable for anybody, you're in a remote forced culture. This is exactly counter

09:39>> to deliberate over communication. I don't know if you guys know Simon Sinek, the Find Your Why talk, which is I think one of the most famous talks on TED. This is a infographic from a company called Doist, which is a very famous asynchronous remote company. And they really focus on understanding why everyone is trying to measure culture through how you work together. When in reality you actually need to focus on why you're doing the work. What

10:08>> impact do you have as an organization? And that needs to feed through every single person in your company. Identifying why you're here, why the work that you do matters, why you think that this company is doing great things will literally change the world. That's all a deliberate form of communication that most companies that are remote don't truly understand. Effectively, you need to get your culture locked in order to be able to run remotely. Second is you

Building a Culture of Written Async Communication

Liam Martin

10:39>> need to build a culture of written asynchronous communication. So in our company, everything that can be documented is documented. So that you are no longer the actual manager of the company. The platform is the manager of the company. So if someone asks me for researching for this book, I was able to be a fly on the wall for a company called GitLab. Multi billion dollar company, public now, incredibly successful. They don't do meetings at all. They

11:10>> have a couple thousand people, they don't do meetings. So I was able to be put inside of their organization for a couple days and I started asking questions. And whenever I'd ask a question, they would respond with a link. So, what's the HR policy for the organization? It's this. Here's the link. Well, how do you guys run your your operations in APAC region? Here's the link. And so after about nine or 10 of these questions,

11:40>> someone jumped on to an actual synchronous call with me, basically a Slack chat, and they said, hey dude, you need to stop asking questions. You don't really understand how this system works. You're being disruptive to your managers. And I was like, I'm being disruptive to the manager? I thought the manager's job was to be able to actually give me the information. He's like, no. No. Your responsibility is to understand the platform so that you can answer

Thinner Management Layers in Async Organizations

Liam Martin

12:02>> your own questions, so you can leave those managers up to be able to do more meaningful work. One of the most interesting statistics that I found in researching this book, asynchronous remote organizations have on average a managerial layer that is 50% thinner than their on premise counterparts. So there are less managers doing more work and they have by extension a more profitable business model. So essentially, when you build a culture of written documentation, there are no

12:33>> private conversations. Everyone can be everywhere at once. All of that documentation is open to everybody. You basically come up with a company where you have like, if you had like a business archaeologist, you'd be able to take that person, put them inside of your company, and say, why was this feature built two and a half years ago? You'd be able to go into one of my Basecamp threads, go into my Asana boards, go into my Jira,

12:58>> and actually tell me the answer. That oh, it was Bridget that built that and we fired Bridget three months after she made that decision. So why are we actually thinking about this as a new feature or something that we should add on inside of the organization? So it allows you to be able to have a history inside of your organization, again, without no one holding that sacred knowledge. There's a process for doing it, I call it

The Four Ds: Discover, Design, Deploy, Debug

Liam Martin

13:24>> the four d's. Again, the d's, my publisher really like d's. Discover, design, deploy, and debug. The beginning process, you discover the actual process. Why is it there? Why does it exist? Spoiler, the vast majority of the time, the process is there because the founder or the VP or the c level executive just put it in place. It's not that it's actually any good, so you actually have to figure out how to design it. The second stage

13:48>> is you go to the design stage. The first time that you do something, you do it for yourself. The second time that you do it, you think about turning it into a process, and the third time, you turn it into a process. Reason why you don't do it the hundredth time is because you forget all of those small details in building out the process. And the reason why you don't do it the first time is because

14:04>> you don't know how to do it. You take that process, bring it to your team and you deploy it. You do not ask your team, do you like this process? They'll all say yes and then they'll never use it ever again. What you say instead is, what are three things that I can do to improve this process document? That's it. Three things. You're then in the debug stage, and then you go back through design, deploy, and

14:29>> debug till you get to a perfect process where you're getting no more meaningful feedback.

Detailed Metrics and Radical Transparency

Liam Martin

14:35>> Third thing, detailed metrics. Every single person in the company must have at least one longitudinal and quantifiable metric that they report on weekly. And here's the tricky part, this is the part that, and I love that this is a conference for founders because this is the part that's really gonna piss you off. You need to take those metrics and you need to give it to everyone in the company. Ideally, giving everyone the same informational advantage as

15:01>> the CEO of the company. So I know that probably the vast majority of you are not going to do that because you're very scared about giving that information over like, hey, the raise didn't work out properly or churn is looking a lot worse, we might have to do some cuts. But the reality is that if you arm everyone with that type of information, they start to act like CEOs. They start having a lot more autonomy in

Silent Meetings and the Time Doctor Leadership Model

Liam Martin

15:24>> their decision making and it's not because you're smarter than anyone else, it's because you have an informational advantage. Asynchronous companies give people access to everything inside of their companies. So here's a couple examples. This is our leadership meeting. Here are our core values. We go over that every single day. We do it inside of Asana. The vast majority of the time, we actually make we have something called silent meetings. So basically, if we go to our

15:53>> issues here, these are our company rocks, these are our issues. I pulled this this week. First one is f b SVB could be a huge opportunity for us. We want to buy some companies if everything melts and goes into the shitter. If we have less than three issues that we have not discussed asynchronously and completed, we automatically delete the meeting. So we meet on average about two out of every four meetings per month. And also counter

16:22>> intuitively, the issues that always stick up there are generally issues that are connected to HR. Susan doesn't like Jack, Jack thinks that Charlie's an idiot. Those are the ones that usually stay on and we have to actually work them out synchronously, but generally for us, we don't meet. We have these silent meetings where we debate all these issues asynchronously. We come to a conclusion and we're able to move forward. And here are some of our top

16:50>> metrics. I pulled these off of literally this week. We've got Andy who is in charge of marketing. We've got Rodrigo in charge of growth. We've got Charles in charge in charge of sales, and Nina in charge of success. Every single person is measured by these and then all of those links lead to other opening metrics for department heads inside of the company.

Benefits of Going Async: Inclusivity, Hiring, and Results

Liam Martin

17:12>> So if you implement async, this is what's going to happen. You're going have greater inclusivity in culture exchange, you're going to have women and minorities become leaders in your organization, charisma bias disappears, this is my is my Captain America story. Basically, if you go into a meeting and you see eight people, I don't even have to hear what they have to say. Usually it's the six foot five guy that looks like Captain America that ends up

17:37>> having his ideas adopted. Not because he has better ideas, it's because he's actually charismatic and he's able to communicate his ideas more effectively. Asynchronous removes that ability. Hiring becomes faster. Leadership will be agnostic to anything but results. You'll have a global talent pool which means better talent period. We hire in 28 different countries and managers will stop paying attention to presence and instead on results. So remote work in my opinion gives employers and employees the opportunity

18:05>> to find the best of each other. Remote work is not going away, so I suggest that you adapt now. I'm gonna be doing a book signing over there. If you wanna get a free book, let me know. If you wanna come to running remote, let me know. Thanks a lot.