Remember to also take advantage of video conferencing tools like Zoom or Google Meet for face-to-face communication, which can help build rapport and trust among team members. Adjusting your work hours or finding a compromise that works for everyone involved may be necessary to navigate scheduling conflicts. This might mean starting work earlier or later in the day or being flexible with deadlines and project timelines. It’s also important to keep an open mind and be willing to adapt to ensure a successful team collaboration.
Determining whether you build an organization with core hours or one that transcends time zones is ultimately your choice. Whichever way you go, it’s best to be sure to explicitly define how you think about time with your team, and then to incorporate this into your team agreement. When working with a distributed team, you don’t have to limit yourself to hiring locally. Instead of settling for local talent, remote workers give your company access to the best people in the world no matter where they are located.
Working Across Time Zones: Pros, Cons, and Best Practices
Most importantly, using task management and progress trackers make it simple for employees in different time zones to login and see what an employee in another country has already completed during their workday. With your employees located far away from each other and the company office, it can be challenging to decide on proper meeting times. Furthermore, it could be tempting to find yourself saying no to specific time meets and suggest other times instead, since these meetings could be scheduled outside your usual working hours. “Scheduling meetings and collaboration sessions can be challenging,” Erhard agreed.
We are perfect for ice breaking, striking up interesting conversations, and having a fun time together. One of Filippo’s favorite tools that he uses to respect his team’s time is the “send later” option both in Slack and email. “That, as well as everyone setting their working hours and turning off notifications outside of those hours, can really help to create and maintain a healthy work environment,” working remotely in a different time zone he said. With the proliferation of remote work comes the likelihood of working with colleagues in different time zones. This was a possibility even before many people started working from home—for example, between a home office in New York, New York, and a satellite office in Los Angeles, California. Working across time zones requires a certain level of flexibility and compromise.
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Cultural values have a significant impact on hiring approach, attracting individuals who share similar beliefs and rejecting those who do not. Not everyone will be pleased with our principles, and that is just fine. One of the reasons a remote company like Turing’s culture is robust and our team members are so united is due to the clear nature of our principles. During onboarding, make sure your communication policies and collaboration tools are properly defined and communicated. These rules can be reviewed and referred to by employees, so they know what to do and what is expected of them. When working with teams in different time zones, the most important thing to remember is to be mindful, empathic, and courteous.
The major challenge in working across different time zone is managing the streamlining of work processes. Since the employees work in their respective time zones, they tend to respond asynchronously, and it often becomes an issue for projects where you need synchronous collaboration. Despite the widely accepted benefits of distributed teams, managing professionals in different time zones can be quite tricky… If you travel the world frequently, knowing which a time zone you’re in relative to GMT is crucial—and it’s also important if you’re working with a distributed team.
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I think that time zone needs to be another criteria for building great teams. Today I want to talk about distributed teams and how to coordinate them. That’s why the last important strategy that works for us as a remote team is to get together in person often. At Buffer, we meet somewhere in the world once a year for a weeklong company retreat. We’ll work together throughout the week and enjoy some bonding time with fun group activities, too. We each get so much done in whatever places makes us happiest to work.
Our job listing template includes everything you need to know about the role, including key responsibilities, minimum and preferred qualifications, and benefits of working for our company. Abi is one of the co-founders of Himalayas where he focuses on product and growth. In his spare time, he runs a YouTube channel, podcast, and blog focused on strategy and management. Many Heads of Remote will spend time in both worlds, improving the internal experience while advocating for remote-first beyond the organization.
Frequently asked questions
It means that during those 5 to 6 hours the whole team is there and can work in parallel, ask questions to each other to get quick answers, and have productive meetings. We also have a lot of tools for asynchronous, everyone-at-their-own-pace communication, including Threads, Trello and Paper. In these tools, we can log what we’ve done, what we’re doing or questions and comments we have and know that other team members can read and comment later on their own schedule. As remote work and satellite offices become more common, marketers are discovering that global teams can be incredibly beneficial to a company’s culture and ability to hire diverse talent. Fortunately, that flexibility can be easily accomplished through collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Slack, Dropbox, etc. That could be fostered through social meetings thanks to video chat and conference calls.
- The time zones of people working in a company has a big impact on different aspects such as project collaboration and communication between the team members.
- For businesses operating in a hybrid pattern or full-remote set-up, this travelling for face-to-face interaction has become vital.
Set meetings and deadlines in multiple time zones, when necessary, especially when setting up calls with colleagues, vendors, and prospective employees. You wouldn’t want a talented employee to miss out on a job opportunity because of a time-zone mishap. Freelance Brand and Marketing Strategist Janine Maral, who is currently based in Eastern Standard Time, has experience working remotely across different U.S. time zones as well as with global clients. She too has found that working this way can allow more flexibility to structure your day. Pinterest Coach Laura Rike works with a team of remote employees across time zones and has done so even before the pandemic started. Rike believes one benefit is that the structure in and of itself lends itself well to employees setting and keeping their own boundaries around their schedule, which improves job satisfaction.