Therefore, being open to different work schedules or adjusting your workday to accommodate different timezones will help create a middle ground. No one needs to be the night owl in the group all the time, and the teams can take turns digesting the schedule challenge. How many of us often find ourselves hitting loose ends and empty, awkward pauses when talking to a colleague who is 10 hours ahead of our time zone? You have to navigate not just the time difference but the difference in language, accent, and even energy levels. The person on the other end of the Teams or Zoom call is having their last call of the day and you are just getting started with the highest possible energy level or vice versa. Working during one chunk of the day caters to your timezone, followed by another shift that caters to another team’s timezone, is often called a split shift.
- Having all shifts and time zones covered is especially convenient for support and customer service as people don’t need to work past the conventional work hours in their countries, in the case of an emergency.
- If a meeting is necessary, make attendance optional so you’re not asking teammates to stay up late to get up early.
- If the companies that ventured into this kind of setup are able to embrace it and use it to their advantage, growth is, therefore, a possibility.
- Async communication allows people to process the information on their own time and respond at their own convenience, reducing the number of interruptions people receive.
- We have a few standing methods of making sure these types of communication happen often, including the daily pair call and weekly or biweekly mastermind chats.
- The Event Time Announcer shows the local time in cities all over the world at a given time in the past or future.
How does one make sure to reap all the benefits and suffer no drawbacks of working remotely in a different time zone? 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.
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It brings all communication into one shared workspace that can be accessed from a computer, a phone, or a tablet. These meetings should be an efficient and good use of time, so if you feel they aren’t productive, try scheduling them further apart. Having a placeholder on the calendar for the team to get together will help ensure that everyone is staying on task and has a place to come together as a team and hold each other accountable. Many companies are open to employees being within the same state or within a certain distance of the building. Some may be open to having teams located all over the globe and others may benefit from coverage around the clock.
- The software can follow the speaker to make it easier to follow along with a conversation.
- Consider milestones successfully met, celebrations of team birthdays, and weekly virtual water-cooler conversations.
- 😉 Meetings are not that effective at reaching an agreement or getting actual work done.
- If you are open to a global team, make sure your human resources team is aligned because there may be specific requirements if you are employing residents of a foreign country.
- If all meeting participants aren’t on the same page in terms of when the meeting will occur, some people could miss or be late to the meeting, wasting everyone’s time (and the company’s money).
Everyone should be invited to voluntarily join the meeting room at a time that works for them. This sort of impromptu, off-the-cuff discussion can resemble “watercooler chat” and enables colleagues https://remotemode.net/ to brainstorm various topics and connect on a more personal level. During onboarding, managers should confirm new hires’ working hours and understand exactly when they’ll be available.
Pros and Cons of Working With Teams In Different Time Zones
So, in today’s blog, let me walk you through the best practices and working remotely tips and tools for companies having employees from different work time zones. Remote workers and companies experience lots of benefits—cost savings, less distractions, and increased productivity, to name a few. However, some challenges can present themselves in a remote work environment. If team members are spread out over states or even countries, working across time zones can get tricky. We’ve got a few etiquette rules to help you take this challenge head on and work effectively across time zones.
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. 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. Managing a global team is more complicated than managing one that works from the same office.
Synch vs. Async: How to Have More Productive (And More Pleasant) Communication
“Setting the stage with all stakeholders at the beginning of a project and setting expectations on response times can keep everyone on track,” Hoffbauer said. You’re off-duty, but one of your team members in another country just messaged you with a question. In today’s workplace, diversity breeds new and unique ideas, allows us to look at our campaigns from different points of view, and benefits companies financially. In fact, by 2022, Gartner predicts that 75% of businesses with diverse frontline decision-makers will exceed their financial targets.
Organizations employing culturally diverse staff, especially in the higher management positions, tend to escape the echo-chamber effect and conformity since they are exposed to multiple perspectives and viewpoints. Understandably, this approach largely supports innovation and ultimately leads to more profit in the long run. In fact, one prediction by Gartner shows that 75% of companies employing diverse decision-making teams can expect to outperform their business objectives in 2022. Moreover, one McKinsey study found that the more ethnically and racially diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% when it comes to financial targets.