Working from different time zones can lead to many issues along the way, and it will require some sacrifices from your remote employees. There will be times when someone needs to remain up later than usual for team meetings. To prevent potential burnout in your employees, attempt to switch meeting times weekly and make them more convenient for your remote team. To manage international meetings, you should first consider all of your team members’ time zones and try to find a time that fits best into everyone’s schedule.
You need to coordinate and collaborate with your team, to avoid duplication, confusion, or gaps in the work. You also need to use the right tools and platforms, to share information, documents, and ideas, and to facilitate teamwork and problem-solving. Working remotely in a different time zone than your team can be a rewarding and challenging experience. You can enjoy more flexibility, autonomy, and diversity, but you also need to overcome some obstacles, such as communication, collaboration, and productivity. In this article, you will learn some of the benefits and challenges of working remotely in a different time zone, and some tips on how to make it work for you and your team.
Collaborating Across Different Time Zones: 5 Best Practices and Tools for Greatness
Chances are, the overlap may require your remote employees to make some sacrifices, but it’s necessary. Finding a time that works with everyone’s schedules and normal work hours might be difficult if you’re located in the United States and have teams in Asia and California, for example. One of the main benefits of working remotely in a different time zone is that you can have more control over your schedule and work-life balance. You can choose when to work, when to take breaks, and when to enjoy your personal life, without being constrained by the office hours of your team. You can also take advantage of the time difference to work on tasks that require more focus and creativity, while your team is sleeping or busy with other things.
This is a kind of meeting where communication doesn’t happen in real time and also doesn’t require an immediate response. By sending out a pre-recorded video of the meeting, meetings can take place without the need to align schedules. Slack, for instance, lists each team member’s time zone, how many hours that is from your local time, and that person’s current local time whenever you click their name. That’s an easy way to double-check before expecting an immediate reply. Or, if you attempt to message everyone in a group, Slack can let you know it’s late for some people before you hit send.
My 9 Lessons Learned for Remote Success from Across Time Zones
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. 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. It’s impossible to overstate how crucial Slack—a team chat app that makes it easy to search through all of your team’s messages—is to remote teams.
Managing teams across time zones do not have to be tough, despite the fact that it may appear to be a complex and frightening process. Virtual teams have grown in popularity in recent years due to their ability to provide specialization, variety, and greater production. “They use their free time during my working hours,” says the https://remotemode.net/ narrator “My lunch is their dinner.”. Those of us who work closely with colleagues in different time zones must be aware of their locations in order to successfully cooperate with them. Whether you’re the only one working from elsewhere or everyone is scattered across the globe, your boss should determine a home time zone.
Be aware of when you’re sending out emails and notifications
It’s an excellent tool that comes with an easy-to-use user interface. It visualizes which cities your remote employees are in at the moment and see the local times in those cities in chronological order. I shifted roles this year, so I don’t do nearly as much product research as I used to. After reflecting on what it’s like to work in a one-person timezone, I thought I’d share a bit more about what I’m working on and how I do it while most of my colleagues are offline. I hope some of the background and tips below might be useful to anyone experience anything similar or building a team with people across the globe.
“Tools like Slack, Convo and HipChat make that possible in a way that it never really was a few years ago.” Even still, odds are you’ll be working with someone who’s not online at the same time as you. Staying up a bit late or getting up an hour earlier working remotely in a different time zone isn’t a bad tradeoff for a job you love, but how about 2 a.m.? That’s what The Year Without Pants author, Berkun, encountered when he worked at Automattic. “My team had hit the natural limits of space and time on planet earth,” Berkun says.
Set up guidelines, tech, and communication expectations with your team.
If you plan to schedule team-wide meetings, be mindful of everyone’s schedule. This may pose a difficult task if your company stretches from Singapore to San Francisco to Paris. However, it’s important for company culture and for everyone to not miss out on important information from the executive team.
Plus, you’ll be able to hire the best people from anywhere around the globe. There are more time zone tools at TimeandDate.com, too, so be sure to check it out if you want to find local times around the world for your event, convert times for any location, and more. That might not be enough to schedule meetings across a number of time zones, but it’s a quick way to figure out if you’re ok to call your boss at 6 p.m. 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.
