Best Practices and Tools for Working Across Different Time Zones

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of working across different time zones. A complete remote organisation cannot rely on many of these shared experiences and physical venues to help create our culture as a totally distributed organisation. It is necessary to create a culture that prioritises your values and requires every team member to understand and uphold them. A remote team’s culture is conveyed in what you think (your values) and demonstrated in how you behave every day (your actions).

Your employees’ communication styles, collaboration methods, and work schedules are largely impacted by their cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Consider making a record of all culture-specific holidays to make sure no meetings or group work sessions are scheduled around those dates. Studies have shown that companies that have shifted to remote work culture have increased productivity. Adopting asynchronous communication enables each individual to stay well informed about the projects they are working on and changes that need to be made when building products.

Be mindful of international employees when scheduling meetings.

Alongside the benefits of working across time zones, there are some challenges to consider as well. Remote working isn’t automatically a freer way to work—it can be just as stressful as any 9-to-5 job. Teach your remote team to be flexible about time, though, and everyone’s lives will be easier. Plus, you’ll be able to hire the best people from anywhere around the globe. We post thoughts and updates about team projects on Slack, regardless of who’s online. Plus, each department has a weekly video call to map out that week’s work, and every Thursday we’ll have an all-hands call in order to get everyone together.

Combine this with Teleport.video for face-to-face meetings and you’ll find it much easier to keep everyone on the same page. If part of your meeting is taking place between people in the same room, those who cannot physically attend can find it more difficult to chime in. With everyone attending the meeting separately on video calls, regardless of their location, everyone is on a level playing field. It makes it easier to track who is speaking and avoids prioritising communication between select groups.

USE VIDEO CALLS FOR MEETINGS, EVEN FROM THE SAME LOCATION

His solution was to have a coding partner, someone he’d bounce ideas off of and check in with about project progress. Work together, even if there is a time gap, and you’ll find that the old adage “two are better than one” is still true. Sometimes you need someone to hold you accountable or just to work alongside you.

Take note that twenty percent of remote workers reported feelings of loneliness. Being conscious of inclusion could go a long way to maintaining your team members happy and invested at work. Such tools let you work on the same documents, share tasks, communicate more efficiently, and help resolve concerns working remotely in a different time zone easily. With all of the technology at our fingertips, many teams are no longer required to work in the same location or at the same time. “If you’re working two timezones that don’t overlap much, why not split your shift into two instead of doing the same number of hours consecutively?” asks Kelly.

Tools

Switch it up so each personality type has a chance to participate and have some fun. Plus you can play trivia games, host movie-watching parties, and take a virtual cooking class or cocktail mixing class together. If your company doesn’t currently offer any flexibility, you may find that it’s hard to attract talent as a larger portion of the workforce is made up of these younger generations. This will only get more difficult over time if you aren’t willing to make some changes to attract and retain millennial employees. People are looking for employers with a strong and healthy company culture and a leadership effort to combat burnout and value work-life balance for the entire team. If a project is due at the end of the week, make it clear what time zone you’re referring to.

It outlines the core vision, guiding principles, beliefs, and priorities of the organization as the essential driving force. More significantly, it defines who a firm is and where it wants to go in the future. But if you’re just starting out, you can probably do most of what you want with the personal version, and upscale later. The Event Time Announcer shows the local time in cities all over the world at a given time in the past or future. By utilizing Dropbox, you can access the files from any computer or phone as long as you log in.

Consider Meeting Times

For example, if you have a few messages you want to send, but notice it’s 9 p.m. In another employee’s timezone, you might either want to avoid sending til the morning or schedule an email. While creating processes that allow employees to work in different timezones is logistically beneficial, on a deeper level, it also makes it easier for diverse global talent to join your team. During onboarding, managers should confirm new hires’ working hours and understand exactly when they’ll be available. If the new hire is in a different time zone than the manager, it’s critical for the manager to clearly lay out all applicable goals, expectations, and priorities. A lot of people work from home – 59% of U.S. workers who say their jobs can be performed from home do so all or most of the time – and that comes with many benefits for employers and employees alike.

• Even the most introverted remote workers need social interaction, humans just aren’t designed for solitude.
• Each email program has its own unique features, but one that you will find across most of the common options is an alert when you are scheduling with a colleague in a different time zone.
• Distributed teams must prioritize efficient, textual communication to successfully use fundamental concepts of asynchronous communication.
• Using a single, multifunctional tool such as Pumble, to streamline diverse conversations and collaborative projects across time zones can increase overall productivity by 30%.