The show’s guest in this episode is Liam Martin. He is from Running Remote, the largest conference on building and scaling remote teams. He’s been working remotely for almost 20 years with team members in 43 different countries and he’s going to talk to us today about how almost everyone who started working remotely during the pandemic have done it wrong.

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The Future of Where Remote Work is Going with Liam Martin

Hello, it’s great to be here with you live today on the experimental leader Podcast. I’m Melanie Parrish and I am just loving, being here with you today. I’ve also been thinking a little bit about my own inner landscape. And, and I’ve been thinking about how sometimes I’m not very resilient when plans change. I’m happy Tuesday, Ruth, I see you. Lewis was asking if leaders are born or made, and I think she said, both, which I agree with. But I so I’ve been thinking about how I’m not good at plans changing. And sometimes my, I have like almost an emotional reaction when plants change at the last minute. And and I noticed that it, it can be hard on relationships that I have this reaction. And then if I have a minute, and I think about it for a minute, I get to sort of my more intentional self, and I get to an intentional response. But in that moment, I can, I can actually sound annoyed with the change of plans. And I noticed I’m traveling a ton right now. And, and I feel like when I invest in plans, I get like sunk costs, I feel like I’ve got sunk costs, because I’ve been investing and making these plans. And then when they change at the last minute, because of someone else. I get frustrated. And it’s not useful in my relationships. And it’s, it’s like when I get back to that place, that I am intentional about it. I’m not even annoyed anymore, but I may have expressed annoyance to someone. And that has an impact. So I’ve been really thinking about this. And I’m wondering if there’s things that you find that your emotional response doesn’t match, like what your long term thinking is about something like I’m totally happy for people to control their own destiny and make plans and shift on the fly. And then there’s something that happens when plans change at the last minute and and I’m not very good at it. So I just really challenge you to think about the places where you’re not in alignment with yourself this week. I think it’s an interesting place.

Also, I am super excited to be here today with Liam Martin. He’s here from running remote. And it’s the largest conference on building and scaling remote teams. I’m so excited to talk about him talk about remote teams with him. He has been working remotely for almost 20 years, with team members in 43 different countries. And he’s going to talk to us today about today about how almost everyone who started work working remotely during the pandemic have done it wrong. So welcome to the show.

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Liam, it’s great to have you here.

Thanks for having me, excited to be here and discuss how almost everyone got it wrong, which is a bit of a hyperbolic statement. To be completely honest with you. There are plenty of people that have done fantastically well with remote work. But I think that everyone probably needs a little bit of an introduction to remote work, which they never really had back in March of 2020.

So you’ve been working remotely for a long time, I have to I mean, I’ve been working remotely for 23 years as a coach, and you’ve been working 20 years. So it’s it was interesting that everyone joined us this last couple of years. How did how did they get it wrong?

Well, I think they actually it wasn’t their fault. But when I think about remote work, everyone moved from working in an office to working from home. And I love that the media is using this terminology work from home because both of those things are not remote work. Working from an office as a place and working from home as a place remote work is allowing your employees and your workforce on mass to be able to work wherever they want whenever they want. So whether that’s from home from an office from a coffee shop, from a co working space in another country. It enables people to be able to have the autonomy to be able to as my friend Cal Newport wrote in his seminal book on the subject deep work, the ability to engage in deep work and solve large difficult problems faster than anyone else. If your organization can do that, then you will inevitably end up being more successful And then anyone else inside of your organization or any of your competitors. And this is something that I think was effectively lost when we all transitioned to remote January of 20 24% of the US workforce was working remotely by March of 2020 45% of the US workforce was working remotely. And more importantly, 75% of people that made more than $100,000 per year, were working remotely as well. So all of these high end workers ended up moving over to a completely different way of working. But no one really told them how to do it, I lovingly call those guys pandemic panic errs, because they effectively just Pemex their way from the office, to working from home, and no one ever gave them the ability to truly start working remotely.

I think that’s really interesting. You know, having, I think I’ve worked remotely. And I have, I have found recently that I really like being in a place where I control the internet and things like that, especially as I do more zoom, I get constrained, not by anybody other than my own needs while I’m, while I’m working.

Well, here’s a perfect example. Here’s my beautiful wife coming in with a sandwich right behind me, right? This is, thank you very much. This is working from home, for me, but it’s also remote work. So she can come in and leave. And it really just is up to us to be able to figure out how we want to be able to to work. It’s effectively autonomy. That’s really, really boils down to, and almost every business leadership book today will state that autonomy is actually the biggest variable that increases employee engagement. And generally, retention inside of an organization, remote work is probably the mother lode of autonomy. But the vast majority of people right now are stuck on eight hour zoom calls. And that’s not actually remote work. I don’t know if probably a lot of your your listeners or the people that are watching us right now wouldn’t necessarily know this. But the vast majority of remote companies don’t actually interact through zoom or face to face the vast majority of the time we do something that I have talked about at length, which is asynchronous management, the ability to be able to build a company without actually interacting with people face to face.

And Deborah, I’ve worked so many places during the pandemic, and it was the most important thing that preserved my mental health. Thanks for that, Deborah. I think that’s that’s lovely. So so we haven’t freed people, we we’ve still been putting them I am a huge fan of the 15 minute meeting to avoid that. The eight hours of zoom calls, because I think that it will take a toll on people. I think it’s something that we don’t even know the implications of yet. But um, what should people be thinking about? Like right now? 2022? What should we be thinking about as leaders around? You know, remote work?

Yeah. So what assumptions are you making from your conclusions is probably the biggest lesson that everyone can learn about remote work. The vast majority of workers simply recreated the office. So this is not the way that remote workers work. They require a different managerial framework, a different managerial philosophy. And being on Zoom, as an example, more than eight hours, you know, a day is not the way to be able to do that. I think the person that ended up connecting us was by Challis. And by Shelly has worked for me for eight years. The last time that I spoke to buy Challis and we work on a daily basis together, the last time that we spoke was two years ago, on a zoom call. So we interact every single day, but we interact asynchronously, we are able to work on what we’re really good at, which is me getting on these, these podcasts, and her booking those podcasts. And we both have autonomy in terms of how we actually execute on that with an overarching amount of processes and, and systems in place to be able to make sure that if we do have any problems, we’re both redundant to the process.

Interesting, and what’s your take on things like Ed and I and remote work and where people might face more marginalization or less marginalization because of remote work?

So I think when you look at hybrid, which is the most popular option that’s currently popping up Right now 60% of the industry is moving towards hybrid work, as opposed to offices around 10 to 15%, and about 25% are pure remote work. The hybrid is actually the worst out of the three options, but I’d rather have people go back to the office than remain hybrid. The reason is because of what we’ve been talking about for decades in the remote work world, which is the concept of distance bias. So unfortunately, the closer you are to a decision maker or a manager, the more your ideas get adopted by that decision maker or manager. So if you go to the office, you end up actually becoming more successful inside of that environment counterintuitively, and then the remote workers are seen as second class citizens inside of that organization. And they actually end up becoming frustrated. And they either leave that company or they go back to the office, which they didn’t want to do in the first place. Being mindful of distance bias is absolutely critical. And this also applies to general remote kind of structuring when you think about the way that you should be solving for ideas. So I talked about how remote asynchronous teams really produce the rise of the introverted leader, I’m on the introverted side of the spectrum, I, it was very difficult for me to be able to speak on my feet, effectively. And I don’t know if this has happened to you. But generally, the six foot two white male that looks like Captain America, is usually the person that ends up having the most ideas adopted in a meeting, it’s just an inevitability, if you actually didn’t tell me what their ideas were beforehand, and I was just able to look at them, I’d be like, You know what, I think this guy’s going to have his idea adopted more than everyone else. And that’s, unfortunately, just a bias that we all hold, remote work, thankfully, and more specifically, asynchronous remote work, meaning they’re not on a zoom call. So that bias isn’t there, allows for those introverted individuals that may actually have much better ideas than the extroverted people to have their ideas adopted more often. And if the more if more ideas are adopted, that are correct, more often, then you end up with a much more competitive organization.

Yeah, I think that data is really interesting. And by the way, for those of you who haven’t looked at this data, like, go, go find some and look at it, six foot three is the point where men’s income, if you’re taller than six foot three, then your income starts to go down. So that matches really closely to what what you’ve just said. It’s like, it’s like literally a scale, like it’s, it goes up until you get to six, two, and then at six, three at Nicolet, you know, and then it starts to go down again, because you know, it’s expanding.

You know that that’s an interesting one, because I just read out, read over the air, the six foot two, Captain America, white male is probably the, you know, if I go if I looked at that person, I’d say, Man, that person is probably going to have their ideas adopted, everything remaining equal more than anyone else.

Well, and it’s interesting, if you think about the ideas, I hadn’t actually had this thought before. If your ideas are adopted them when it comes to raise time, then you think, wow, they came up with really good ideas this year. So your bias actually supports them getting a bigger raise, and takes it you know, to the financial. So those are supportive of each other, but I think it’s super, I have one kid who’s six, one, and one who’s six, five. And so we sort of joke about who’s gonna make the most money at our house. Yeah, Deborah, Deborah says, Again, great ideas coming up here. Thanks to both of you. I agree with what you’re saying about hybrid work, and would add that those who have to stay at home are at a disadvantage. This has been a gender issue during the pandemic. Yeah, I’d love to hear some of your nightmare stories about you know, night, things that went really wrong and things that went really well as people went to working to I think that you said it wasn’t actual remote work, but at least went online during COVID. What can what can you share with us?

Well, so I had a, the first couple of weeks of the pandemic, I was being called by companies that I would have never interacted with pre pandemic. I got called by a G 20. Country, saying, hey, we need to take our entire country remote. It’s like 570,000 government workers. And I said, Well, I have about 150 people so I have no idea how Do that. And the guy that, you know, he answered very quickly, well, you’re the first one that’s we found that’s picked up the phone. So there was such a small group of people that were doing remote work pre pandemic, that it was very difficult to be able to disseminate that information out to everyone else, I kind of felt like, I had a life preserver I had the answers to all of these questions. And there were just 1000s of people in the water. And I had to be really choosy about where I put my time. And so I think that that’s a big factor that we all need to take in consideration. But generally, I mean, we’ve seen working from home being men, there’s this scary virus outside that may or may not kill me, I’m under massive amounts of stress. I’m in a completely new working environment where I don’t really understand the new rules of engagement, effectively, how do I interact with my manager, you know, how much synchronous time versus asynchronous time should I be implementing. So there were tons of issues, even inside of our own organization, I remember this one team member that almost had a was having a nervous breakdown. Because someone had died in their condo complex in New York, the very first couple of days, two weeks of the pandemic. And this individual was terrified to be able to leave their apartment. So we ended up actually getting like Uber Eats groceries deliveries sent to him and this kind of stuff to be able to just reduce his anxiety. But it was a very scary time, those first couple of weeks of the pandemic and no one really knew what was going to happen. Thankfully, we got through it, knock on wood, that there isn’t going to be Omicron prime or something like that, that’s going to come after us in the next couple of weeks. But I think we’re in a much better place now. And now we can kind of take a pause, and hopefully get to remote work. Because I think everyone’s had a taste of working from home, which the data shows, employees definitely prefer, in comparison to an office environment, they they liked the autonomy and freedom to be able to work wherever they want, whenever they want. But they need a lot more training primarily on the employer side to be able to make that really successful for both the employer and employee.

Yeah, I’m like, super curious. So I’m just gonna, like play devil’s advocate and just ask you some sort of like, Yeah, but what what about this? And what about that, but your first one that comes to mind is? Is, is it? Do people need some, I know that you have a person that does bookings for you that you haven’t seen in two years? But what do we need to be thinking about about emotional connection and seeing each other? At work? Like do we need to be fostering times that we do come together and have a conversation?

Yes, we do. So in remote teams, you usually meet once per year. So that’s a team retreat, where everyone comes together, it’s like a conference about the company. And you do that for about four or five days. And then in some cases, teams would meet departments would meet quarterly. So having that in person time is really important. But that has almost nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the business, that’s just being able to build rapport and trust with those team members. However, when you actually look at the general environment that people work in, you don’t need that much synchronous time, in order to be able to build those those components of trust. I talk a lot about how, at least in North America, and Europe, arranged marriage is a bit of a taboo, but we have arranged friendships all the time, we’re simply put into an office space with some people that we don’t necessarily know. And we’re like, oh, well, these should be our friends, right? This is should be our social space. When in reality, remote workers actually do the opposite. The vast majority of the time, they actually have to strike out on their own and build social connections outside of their work lives. And it actually makes them much stronger people that the negative part of that for the employer is remote employees can join and leave companies faster than an office environment because those ties don’t necessarily hold them back. But I would argue that the vast majority of people that are saying, I hate this company, and this company is horrible, but I’m not going to quit. Because I love hanging out with Liam every Friday is not a recipe for success inside of any organization.

I would agree with you there. I think I mean, my mind’s twisting a little bit as I think about you’re actually you’re actually you know, knocking out some one of the assumptions I have, which I think is really interesting. And it’s it’s fun to think about so. So you’re essentially saying that, you know, if you’re doing asynchronous remote work, you’re not getting your needs met from like your emotional needs met from your co workers, you’re taking care of that elsewhere.

Absolutely. Post University and College. Adult social circles degrade up until about their 60s. And then they start to expand again. Right? And why did they expand? Because they’ve retired, and they’re forced into the process of actually going out and socializing? Why don’t we go ahead?

I have a friend who just started going to the pool. And she’s 55. So she’s going to senior swim. And she’s like, Oh, my gosh, everybody there wants to be my friend. They want to socialize, they want to do stuff. She’s like, nobody ever does, like just meets me and wants to do stuff. But it’s this like totally what you’re talking about, it’s a different demographic.

Well, so why not do it at 30? Why not do it at 25, there’s nothing holding you back, I have a very active social life that has nothing to do with my work life whatsoever. And then it creates an environment where I can say, you know, I don’t really like my job. And there are people that are fun. In this particular position, I definitely have friends that are work friends. But it’s not, I’m not putting all my eggs in that particular basket. Again, this is more for employees happiness than the employer happiness, because sometimes the employer actually wants to retain that person for an extended amount of time. But it’s making sure that those social ties do not necessarily define your decisions, which is important. And then I think also just being mindful that the entire concept around socializing is really a broken concept. I think, as it applies to the office environment. In the book that I’ve been writing over the last couple of years, I got the first recorded documentation of the office, I think it’s 1825. And when the first ever recorded office environment was documented, and it was three of the most horrible pages I’ve ever written or read in my entire life, it was just like this hot, you know, steamy, combative environment where people are on top of each other. And there’s no respite and people are stuck inside of these dark halls all day long. And unfortunately, that hasn’t changed for the last 200 years.

Okay, I have another question. Sure. What about the leader who says, How will I know if my people are working? If they’re just doing it on their own time? How will I know? You know, what, whether or not there’s a, I’m gonna put some words in here that they might not say, but like, what, how do I know if it’s a fair value exchange?

So another thing that asynchronous companies do, that I identified was, on average, their managerial layer was about 50% thinner than in office environments. So there are more workers doing work than there are workers that are managing people doing work, which is really good for the organization. And that’s an important factor to take into consideration. So there are more people actually producing a return, then in office environments. But also, everyone has very quantifiable goals. And the vast majority of those quantifiable goals are actually automated. So how many leads Am I getting to the website might be the goal for me? Well, I can very quickly create some automations and can have that documentation put up on a scorecard relatively easily, because we have technologies that can enable us to be able to do that inside of Office environments. And this is my perception, based off my research, because I’ve never worked in an office before. But it is. Well, you tell I tell you what I did. You tell your manager what I did. And then that manager tells the boss what I did in asynchronous remote teams. Everyone has the same informational advantage as the CEO, or at least that’s the goal. So when someone joins the company, they have access to our P & L. They know who our customers are, they know everyone’s quantifiable metrics. They know whether they’re on them or not hitting them. There’s not that doesn’t necessarily need to be a discussion. And that ROI is very instantaneous. We also are very, very focused on documentation and instrumentation inside of remote teams. So Do I measure as an example, how long I’m working on a particular task, and that information is communicated to everyone inside of the organization. I’m currently on podcast, the experimental leader task inside of a tool that I use called Time Doctor. And it’s under the project management of podcast outreach. And I can, at the end of the month, identify how much time I spent on that, what were the returns, how many backlinks I generated, how much traffic that I generate from that particular activity, and then that information can be communicated to the CEO of the company. Very simple, very easy. And very, like, non there’s no debate involved in that that’s not a soft goal. That’s a hard goal.

And how does that fit with your goal of autonomy? Like when I hear that, I think, oh, my gosh, I don’t want I don’t would not want that kind of tracking? And because I you know, it’s like, it’s like my ear have a conversation with my husband, who would say, why did you spend $27 at the grocery store today, which doesn’t actually happen in my life, but but I would never ever wanted to. So that’s the closest thing I think of is like, oh, is somebody going to call me out on the way I micromanaged my time with that tool?

So, at least inside of remote teams, there’s a counterintuitive perspective that is, the more bureaucracy that you have inside of an organization, the more efficient it becomes. I love the quote from Jocko will, Nick, which is discipline equals freedom, the ability to be able to have that documentation in place creates an environment where you might want to ask yourself, Well, why do I not want to be open with that information? What is the issue connected to that? Is it that I don’t necessarily want to be second guessed? Is it maybe because I’m concerned about my own performance, or I’m able to defend everything that I’ve done? And also inside of remote teams, if you’re creating an environment of autonomy and trust, then everyone should be able to there shouldn’t necessarily be an attack or defense on anyone. But it’s simply an issue of, well, how much time is it taking you to do podcasts? Liam? Oh, well, the average podcast, from beginning to end actually takes me two hours and 17 minutes. As an example, I’ve done 537 Up until this point, that’s prep, outreach, the entire piece of that, and then my family actually on the other end, has another 45 minutes attached attached to her. So we can quantify the exact dollars and cents to a podcast. And then we can apply that towards the output, and effectively boil it down to return on ad spend, which is really not truly what it is. But fundamentally, if you just reduce everything to those core metrics, it allows for you to Again, be very easy with understanding, is this working? And do we need to make a course correction as quickly as possible?

And I know that you do a conference, and I want to hear more about that.

Sure. So conference is running remote.com. And it’s the largest conference on remote work. We’re doing the next one, May 17 and 18th, in Montreal, Canada, and it is solely focused on building billion dollar remote first companies. So if you’re an employee, that’s not the conference for you, if you’re a digital nomad, that’s not the conference for you. But if you’re interested in building and scaling, large scale, remote first organizations, this is where you’re going to learn all the tactics and strategies to be able to implement that.

That’s amazing. Well, and where can people is there any other place you want people to find you?

I think outside of run remote.com, if you’re interested in learning more about the conference, or anything that we do best spot would be YouTube youtube.com/running remote, we put all of our talks up there for free. And I also do some musings about remote work there as well. So either of those spots are perfect.

That’s great. And thank you so much for being here. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. Liam, I really appreciate you being on the show.

Thanks for having me.

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It was really lovely to speak to Liam and I love this idea of in the experimental context. Like we tried some experimenting on just taking remote work home or taking the Office Home. But what do we need to think about about actually doing some continuous improvement asking some really key questions about what do we want to do? And I’m fascinated by this idea of a synchronous, remote work, helping to build more A diverse and inclusive work environment and to get rid of some of the some of the biases that we might have. I am fascinated by this idea. I want to continue to explore it. And I want to challenge you to look at what are your assumptions around remote workers around people who work you know in the office next to you pay attention to who you like more, who you feel more connected to and why and how much of it is proximity bias. I think it’s a really interesting question. I hope that you have a great week. Go experiment.

Important Links: 

• Running Remote – website
• Running Remote – LinkedIn
• Running Remote – Facebook
• Running Remote – Twitter

Liam Martin

Liam is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Time Doctor and Staff.com — one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the world’s largest remote work conference — Running Remote.

Liam is an avid proponent of remote work and has been published in Forbes, Inc, Mashable, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Next Web, The Huffington Post, Venturebeat and many other publications specifically targeting the expansion of remote work. The mission statement that feeds all the products and services that Liam is involved with stem from empowering workers to work wherever they want, whenever they want.

Liam has an undergraduate and graduate degree in Sociology from McGill University. He lives in Canada but travels 3-6 months out of the year due to his ability to work wherever and whenever he likes. He chooses a new place to travel a few times a year but usually spends time in Austin, Las Vegas and Ubud each year and loves to encourage others to work remotely on his travels.

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