While you still want to be cognizant of others’ time zones, setting one official time zone for your company can help alleviate confusion. If each manager is setting meetings according to their own personal time zone, that leaves everyone else scrambling to translate it to their own. Adopting an official time zone means everyone will set and communicate meetings or deadlines with the same time zone, regardless of where they’re located.
The key to successfully working across multiple time zones is good communication and setting clear expectations is the first step. Once companies open the options for flexible work locations, it’s important to set clear expectations. Are you expecting team members are able to travel to the office multiple times each year? By setting clear expectations, you won’t be faced with unwelcome surprises in the future.
Think about how important and time-sensitive the update is and act accordingly
We’re breaking down the seven tested and tried steps geographically dispersed teams can implement to strengthen formal and informal communication and build more trust and better collaboration across all teams. Of course, there’s the argument that the vast majority of meetings may not be necessary, and flexibility is pretty much a part of the remote job description. Still, some form of meetings is vital for organizations looking to keep the connection and interaction across distributed teams.
- And that’s ok on a distributed team, as long as you can manage the time shift.
- Sometimes you need someone to hold you accountable or just to work alongside you.
- While you still want to be cognizant of others’ time zones, setting one official time zone for your company can help alleviate confusion.
- To ensure you work effectively across time zones, you can follow RICS’ seven top tips.
- That way you’ll not have to deal with changing the time according to each recipient’s time zones.
Cloud-based technology allowed a number of industries to adopt some form of remote work model. Naturally, organizations jumped at the opportunity to select from a global pool of talent which is, essentially, the key factor that led to the formation of teams that span across different time zones. Still, as much as it might be pretty seamless for a tech company to adjust their operations to working across time zones, for some industries and teams, this practice is simply not viable.
Learn your coworkers’ schedules.
It’s a great collaboration and communication tool for teams that are all over the place. The other great perk is that you can include people who are not on your internal email servers, like freelancers, contractors, or clients, to be part of certain working remotely in a different time zone channels and conversations. It was popular to organize volunteers during election season thanks to this feature. If you have the option, turn it on and at last save yourself from accidentally scheduling a meeting during an inconvenient time.
Your team will likely get more done, and you’ll be able to provide better support for your customers—but you’ll also need to figure out how to make the world feel a bit smaller. I know personally, I sometimes like to get stuck in at various points in my day for focused work without too many distractions. Scheduled synchronous communication like planned video calls/syncups allow me to better mentally prepare. The post outlines how to build an effective time zone agnostic team as a company leader, people manager, colleague, and as a geographically remote person. This is foundational to working in a distributed team spread across time zones where quick check-ins aren’t feasible. This is probably the most obvious challenge of working across multiple time zones, and rightfully so.
What’s your team up to?
“Many of us tend to work crazy hours, which mitigates being in different time zones.” It might not be possible—or even desirable—for each team member to take ownership of part of your company’s work, but you can break projects up in a way that everyone has their own specific area to focus on. This strategy makes your projects asynchronous, which remote developer Mutahhir Ali Hayat suggests is the best way to make remote development work out. If you’re always waiting for someone to tell you what to do next, and that someone’s asleep while you’re working, you’ll never get anything done. That’s why the most crucial part of building a remote team is hiring self-directed workers—”managers of one,” as the Basecamp team calls them in their book Rework. “You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. Finding these people frees the rest of your team to work more and manage less,” the book explains.
Your colleagues might sometimes forget the time zone difference, so you might need to remind them every now and then. Eventually, you and your counterparts will build a clear, mutual understanding of each other’s availability to set a solid base for future collaborations. In addition to confounding my brain, time zones also provide some fun and interesting challenges when it comes to how we all work together at Buffer as a fully remote, distributed team. Sometimes, scheduling a meeting at a time that works for all timezones is easier said than done.
The reality is that, often, somebody will have to stay up late for a meeting. To be productive and efficient when working across time zones, you should be respectful, organized, and adaptable. We have put a lit of our best pointers and practices to help you get through your intercontinental workday by working remotely in different time zones. It can also be helpful to allow your team members to set certain times as ‘off-limits’ for meetings. For example, you could set a rule that no-one will be forced to attend meetings between 11 pm and 7 am.
Knowing the difference between Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time alone isn’t enough anymore. You’ll need to know which times of the day your colleague in London will be awake, and the times you’re most likely to get support tickets from your Australian customers. If you have a large distributed team, you might not need to try so hard to stay connected. “Since there are people working from nearly every time zone in the world, there was always someone online to help with a problem or joke around with when you’re working,” he wrote in his book. It might work out great for you, if you like to work nontraditional hours anyway. Software engineer Kevin Furbish found this to be true about his remote team at Intuit.