9 Tips For Working With Teams In Different Timezones

The calendars should include working hours, scheduled time off, and national holidays. Managing employees across time zones forces business leaders to do the hard work of really figuring out what makes a team cohesive. If there is a certain block of time in which all employees are working and availability overlaps, consider designating those as core meeting hours. For example, if you have employees across the country, perhaps the middle of the day is best for meetings.

• Their time – even though it’s the middle of the workday for you and it feels normal.
• One of the primary reasons why developers and employees from around the world prefer the remote work culture is because of the flexibility that they get about their working hours.
• The key to high productivity is having a streamlined process where employees can work in tandem on common objectives, goals, and projects.
• As the world is moving toward a fully distributed work model, there’s still plenty of value in in-person team meetups.

Setting some clear ground rules might chafe at first, but will act as a safeguard over time. Headphones not only block out the noise, but I particularly like to use my headphones as a non-verbal social cue that I don’t want to engage or talk. With regular earbuds from behind, how will people know you’re in the zone? This tip also applies to block out working across time zones chaotic family members at home or even for those moments on Friday when everyone is feeling chattier at work. I joined ProductPlan in the summer of 2019, excited to sink my teeth into creating product management content. The time zone in Cuba is also the same as EST, allowing companies in the aforementioned states to hire workers from the country.

Working Across Time Zones Can Be Tough Heres How To Manage

Fried and Heinemeier Hansson offer another upside to remote work in their book on the topic. “The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration,” they write. “Not only do we not have to be in the same spot to work together, we also don’t have to work at the same time to work together.”

In a physical office setting, personalities, idiosyncrasies, and preferences come into play for both productivity and atmosphere. For a team with some remote members, it can be difficult to accommodate people who aren’t in-house. A team solely made up of delocalized employees, it can be even harder to find a rallying point for everyone. While I was abroad, we moved all meetings to overlap with my time difference. That meant meetings were the first thing on my calendar at 5 am and the last thing on my co-workers’ schedules at the end of the day. When I logged on, we were in slightly different headspaces and quickly learned I don’t effectively think on my feet at 5 am. If you can bear a slight difference in time zones, Brazil is a remarkable option, with the local time zone being only 1 hour ahead of EST.

Heres How To Manage Remote Developers Across Different Time Zones

She brings with her over ten years of working within Client Relations, and is very excited to bring this experience to the company. In her spare time, she enjoys attending cultural events, and spending time in nature and with her pets. Jacqueline joined CIA Insurance & Risk Management in September 2016. She came to us with over one year of experience in financial services and life insurance. At Hillsdale College Jacqueline studied Latin, a discipline which cultivated her detail-oriented, organizational skills that she now brings to the Employee Benefits department.

• Employees no longer need to be in the same location to collaborate on projects.
• Jon Russell, a Bangkok-based reporter for TechCrunch, says remote work is what enables their site to run a 24-hour newsroom.
• A general lack of distractions, in addition to reduced commute time and the overall comfort of the home or other chosen work environment, have made the significant productivity boost possible.
• 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.

On Fridays in the US, the Melbourne team is already gone for the weekend, and on Mondays in Australia, our US folks are still wrapping up their Sunday dinners. Here are a few tools we use to stay connected and some tips on what we’ve learned about operating and having meetings as a distributed organization. The key to high productivity is having a streamlined process where employees can work in tandem on common objectives, goals, and projects. There are various ways in which you can efficiently manage the time zones of different developers. It is important to follow the standard guidelines and steps to ensure that there is uniformity, organization, and streamlined workflow in your organization. Coordinating across time zones might be tough, but it’s worth making the effort not just for work-related conversations but for fun. In any work environment building relationships fosters trust, increases collaboration, and raises productivity—but it’s especially important for remote teams.

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If you are providing information, invest the additional time upfront to answer any questions or solve any issues you think the person may have ahead of time. Attempts to reinvent time zones to make them easier for everyone have failed, we just can’t come to a universal agreement. Setting expectations for communication is one of the biggest and most impactful things you can do to reduce frustration for asynchronous communication at every stage of the process. Teams can help enable distributed employees by providing a discretionary budget for tech like noise-canceling headphones, microphones, high-quality laptops with cameras, and high-speed Internet access. Having the right kind of gear empowers remote employees to actively participate in the conversation—to literally be seen and heard.

Clockwise is essentially a calendar extension from Google for Chrome. This application or extension helps in raising productivity to the next level and avoiding scheduling conflicts between the team members. NTask is designed as a collaboration tool for businesses that is a full project management solution. Then, if you want another easy way to know what time it is everywhere your team’s located, you can turn on the World clock in the Calendar Labs settings. It’s a simple, text-based world clock provides an at-a-glance update. You can work at opposite times from the rest of your team, and still join in on all the office banter.

Benefits Of Working Across Time Zones

For one, organizations should consider setting and respecting their team’s time zone boundaries. For example, teams can create shared calendars showing their availability across different hours in a day to ensure no time zone boundaries are crossed. As the above example from Help Scout’s design team demonstrates, working across time zones doesn’t mean you have to work 100% asynchronously. The value in real-time chat doesn’t go away for remote teams — it just takes extra effort to do it effectively.

• Suppose you live in California, which follows Pacific Standard Time .
• These negatives aren’t helpful for retaining employees or building a positive company culture.
• Some tools can help managers and teammates have an easier time of scheduling meetings, booking flights, planning calls, etc.
• To prevent this common hurdle of working across time zones, organizations can set an official time zone for all team members to reference when scheduling meetings or setting deadlines.

As part of this process, your company might want to put together an org chart that shows both employees’ roles and locations. Consider adjustments of your own schedule to accommodate one-on-one meetings with employees. Conversely, problems will undoubtedly arise when your employees are on the clock but you’re not. Let employees know how to best reach you outside your working hours in case of an emergency. If you elect to have one, you’ll have to cover employees’ travel and accommodations.

Be Mindful Of National And Local Holidays Around The World, In Addition To World Time Zones

To cut down on any confusion, it’s critical to include exact dates and time zones for deadlines, calls, meetings and other critical components of your workday. Working with a team across multiple time zones poses unique challenges to some of our more traditional ways of working. https://remotemode.net/ When done right, it opens up a whole new world of talent and allows people to live in the places where they do their best work. Hopefully, by applying some of the above lessons, your team will be able to work effectively and collaboratively – no matter where they are.

• We also need to keep in mind daylight savings, which starts and ends at different times of the year across our offices.
• Improve your employee experience with expert resources for people leaders.
• Luckily, there are many scheduling software tools on the market that help automate this process.
• It can also be rewarding for the individuals involved, who are each able to build a routine and a schedule that works for their own situation.
• If you have a few extra hours before your colleagues are online – finish tasks ready for their feedback when they log in.
• As mentioned earlier, this can cause misunderstandings that can seriously affect operational processes and cause unnecessary delays.

This will ensure all your colleagues can attend and participate in discussions without having to be up early or stay up late. Asynchronous communication means working without being in direct contact with people, such as through email, online chat, or by sending video messages such as Loom videos. It also means that you’re not necessarily communicating at the same time. Time zones are geographical locations where people experience similar daylight hours at any given time throughout the year. To work effectively with a remote team, you’ll need to put in the effort and build strong relationships across time zones.

Remote team selling requires careful coordination and clear communication. By applying these lessons from remote work, global teams can collaborate across time zones with confidence. Communication tools like Slack, project management platforms like Asana or collaboration solutions like Lucidchart help teams work together no matter where they are.

Try a “digital huddle board,” the virtual version of the office whiteboard. Make it available any time for employees to access, obtain the latest information and update. Expectations and due dates can sometimes get tricky – especially if the time gap is bigger. For example, if you’re in London and need a report by Monday morning, an employee in California might not deliver that to you until the end of your day. We also encourage team members to meet via our Camper Coffee Lottery. The slack bot, Donut, connects Campers across offices for casual chats every few weeks.

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If your team or freelance client is planning a meeting and proposes a time, make sure to express your opinion on the timing for the meeting. Some of the year, I was 12 hours ahead of my family in New Jersey, and the other half of the year, when the US changed clocks, I was 13 hours ahead! It wasn’t so hard to keep track of – rather, I just had to know which dates were going to affect my 9 am morning calls with my parents and etc. A common assumption is that someone’s hours are a ‘standard’ 9-5 or 9-6 pm; however, location is not always equal to working hours. Abi Tyas Tunggal Nov 29, 2021Abi 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. We’re Himalayas, a remote job board, that is focused on providing the best experience for remote job seekers and employers.

Planning meetings across time zones might sound so painful that you’d rather just never have meetings—but don’t do that either. It makes scheduling meetings difficult, but we can also hand off work to keep the wheels turning 24/7.

At first, it was an opportunity that was important for me to experience personally. In the end, it was a great remote learning experience for me professionally. I’ve carried many of those learnings into the remote work I still do to this day. Another benefit of hiring employees from Peru is the country’s high English proficiency. Statista reports that Peru has a score of 505 in terms of English proficiency, which is much higher than other Latin American countries like Colombia and Ecuador.