The Pros And Cons Of Working Across Time Zones

If this half-day concept doesn’t suit you why not use this concept and apply it to your week instead? For example, you could work some days according to your location’s time zone and then some days of the week according to the other time zone. Our next tip on how to work across different time zones is adopting or at least trying out what is known as a split shift. It is the simple act of a confused time zone that can lead to major issues such as missed interviews, overdue projects, and more. However, nothing is without its disadvantages or drawbacks. Collaboration can be difficult, as can creating a team bond and thus getting work done.

Need the best tips for working with clients in different time zones all over the world? See how to overcome challenges of communicating across time zones, and working with dispersed teams while working remotely or freelancing. In this day and age, offices seem to have no barriers, so you may have colleagues or clients living in different time zones. This is great (and almost magical—thank you, internet!), but it can also lead to headaches when it comes to staying in touch or when projects and deadlines are involved. To learn more about tools and software that can help global and remote teams, check out this helpful list. When your global teammates feel like their schedule is respected, they might feel happier at their job, less stressed, or have an easier time tuning out of work communication outside of their main work hours. Ultimately, these things will help boost job retention, productivity, and your team’s overall performance.

Best Practices For Remote Engineering Team Meetings

Whether you’re working in-office, remotely, or in a global office outside of your main headquarters, make sure you are open to discussing your own work hours and boundaries with your dispersed team. Similarly, invite your teammates to discuss their own work hours and boundaries so that way you all are familiar with the different timezones your everyone is working within. When you have a successful game plan, you’re regularly able to video chat with colleagues, what is a remote career hear their thoughts, and gain insight into what the workplace is like on the other side of the world. These benefits allow your team to work better together and can lead your international teammates to feel more included in your team’s day-to-day work. As someone who’s managed marketing initiatives at companies with remote employees and offices around the world, I’ve seen what successful and unsuccessful international collaboration looks like first hand.

Distinguishing between these types helps invite just the people who need to be there. It also becomes possible to define rules of the conversation more clearly. For example, when we adopted a status update meeting, we made it a rule to never open up design files on the spot since doing so would often derail the conversation into an impromptu working session. It’s used to describe a situation in which two people appear to be on the same page but have fundamentally different ideas in their heads. We found that Same bed, different dreams is what could happen when people in a team design in isolation and forego sufficient alignment with one another. We’ve been 100% work-from-home for the last seven years and know how to manage this lifestyle. The best Zoom tips and tricks that you can use to master conference call communication.

This is a massive benefit, even if you are located in a hub like San Francisco or New York, chances are the best person for the job doesn’t live within commuting distance of your office. Take note of the hours of overlap in working hours between the locations, making the most of it, but also adjusting work hours if the overlap needs to be bigger. Between San Francisco and Seoul, Seoul decided to start their day earlier than usual at 8AM and San Francisco often adjusted by working until 7 or 8PM to create an overlap of at least 3 hours. Trying out the adjusted schedule is crucial as it may or may not be sustainable. Be honest to your own physical energy levels and suggest adjustments to the team. We share some lessons into why it’s hard and how design teams can plan and run projects effectively when people are apart.

• My brain likes to convert the wrong direction when I’m dealing with just an hour or two.
• Many remote teams schedule their annual get together around a conference.
• The ultimate resource for remote work – actionable insights and advice for remote job seekers, employees, and employers.
• Remote work has presented employees an opportunity to get their jobs done from home rather than commuting to the office.
• Asynchronous communication is an excellent way for managers and remote employees to be mindful of different time zones.

One client in India was 12 hours ahead and another in Australia was 15 hours ahead. Oh, ye who think a one-hour time conversion is simpler than an eight-hour one. The shorter the time change, the more likely I am to screw it up. My brain likes to convert the wrong direction when I’m dealing with just an hour or two. Even when you’re working with a colleague in the same country as you, not getting as specific as possible about dates or times can cause confusion or slow your processes. «There’s a give and take. So long as you check with the person on their preferences, it’s fine to ask. Some might even prefer to work a non-standard shift anyway,» Kelly explains. If you’re based in your office headquarters, Kelly says you should «remember that your counterparts in most international offices are accustomed to working odd shifts all the time.»

Productivity Boost

Some of the most effective meetings I’ve had with clients take just five or 15 minutes. It allows me to connect with a client, show my face, discuss pertinent details, and then move on with our day. I find these meetings to be the least disruptive and the most efficient. Be aware and sensitive to the fact that you might be starting your day when someone else is ending theirs. As a freelancer and part-time digital nomad, this happens to me year-round, even when I may be in the same time zone as a client.

The rest of the year, we manage to work together across 17 time zones, using Slack, Zoom, and some sheer effort to all stay connected. If you work in a nation where half of your team is located, ask your manager if you may work a half-day in the office and then work remotely one or more days each week. A split shift is when you work one shift that caters to your timezone and then another shift that caters to the timezone of another team. It’s not always possible to plan meetings that fit everyone’s time zones, no matter how hard you try.

• «You are simply looking for high-performers who can get stuff done.»
• And for the person that’s listening, you feel like you’re part of the team, even though you weren’t at the meeting.
• Before leaving for my travels, I outlined a lot of deadlines to keep myself accountable.
• This helps your team in other parts of the world align the outlined time zone with theirs.
• It grinds my gears when I’m in the work groove, my battery flashes red at 5%, and I look up and see all the seats near outlets are gone.

This time should be used for the daily standup and also should have enough time left in the day for the team to exchange notes and ask doubts. The meetings and time for which the team would work in overlap should be decided mutually. Along that line, it’s really helpful to mark your offline hours and “out of office” days Tips on Working in Different Time Zones on your calendar so those scheduling meetings or looking for you know you are out of pocket. Alternatively, by switching to your calendar to your local time zone, you can get a good sense of which meetings you can realistically make. Plus, adjusting to the local time can help to beat jet lag if you have traveled far.

Set Some Time For New Employees

Those blocks of time are going to be crucial in helping your work and team in the long-term. I ended up naturally allotting more of my time than expected to calls, meetings, documentation, reading everything on Slack to keep up with all that I was missing while I was offline. Since there was no way I was going to get up any earlier than I needed to, I started making a habit of ending my day by looking at my calendar for the next day and prepping for those future meetings.

Sometimes design terminology to describe our process differed between our own studio locations, making it hard to communicate ideas precisely. Group video calls wandered and dragged on for 3 or more hours. We’ve worked hard to improve our asynchronous collaboration⁠—more on that below⁠—and it’s paid off big time for us. Last Tuesday, I was getting ready to wind down for the night, and I opened up Slack one final time to check for anything that needed my attention. There are many other factors to consider including cultural sensitivity within the team.

How To Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones

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.

• With regular earbuds from behind, how will people know you’re in the zone?
• Help your client understand your availability – i.e. when you will and won’t answer email or messages.
• If the meeting owner doesn’t set the meeting up to be as effective as possible, then maybe the meeting can be better executed over email.
• Scheduling and assigning a task list at the start of a week gives your employees a scope to analyze the target work beforehand.
• As mentioned earlier, this can cause misunderstandings that can seriously affect operational processes and cause unnecessary delays.

For example, as a customer champion at Zapier, I have a lot of experience with how error messages are misconstrued, confusing, or ignored by our users. But I’m not able to be there every time engineers are talking about how to deliver these error messages. Whether it’s due to time zone differences or simply not knowing the conversation is happening, I’m not able to contribute as much. Our internal blog lets me review any conversations I might have missed and jump in on my own time. If you have a video call, record it and share it for folks that weren’t able to make it. That way anyone who missed the meeting due to time zone issues can still stay in the loop and contribute.

Create An Agent On Call

Download TravelBank for iPhone and Android today or try our free Travelatorto calculate a budget for your next trip based on real-market rates. At one point or another, you are going to have to call in to meetings. If you are traveling internationally, make plans so you either have usable cell phone data or reliable wifi. When traveling in Europe, our team loves to take the morning to explore, before logging in to work in the afternoon or evening. Whatever works best for you, just make sure you set a consistent schedule so your coworkers know when to find you. When I traveled to Australia and New Zealand, I stacked all of my meetings in the morning, got some work done before lunch and then headed out to explore in the afternoon.

«My team had hit the natural limits of space and time on planet earth,» Berkun says. «For us to speak at the same time, someone would have to be miserable.» «A remote work environment should encourage performance—not presence,» says entrepreneur Neil Patel. Then, you won’t have to worry about time off and how many hours people are working. «You are simply looking for high-performers who can get stuff done.» 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.

If you keep your calendar in your home time zone, you have a good sense of what’s going on back at the office but may make miscalculations when mentally converting meeting times to your local time zone. The shift to remote work and the rise of outsourcing have made globally distributed teams a reality. This has numerous benefits for companies, including the potential for round-the-clock productivity and the possibility of working with top talent worldwide.

Alternatively, Kelly says you could also consider picking a few days per week where you’ll work on another international team’s schedule entirely. When the time changes in the United States, that time zone app will become important again as you figure out who changed and who didn’t. Dani is an editor and writer based between KL and Mexico City.

Schedule regular virtual meetings with your employees to review their work progress and stay connected. It is ideal to use an exclusive communication platform modified for your organization’s employees. By embracing virtual project management and meeting tools like progress tracker and Mobile Developer task management software, you can rationalize your overseas communication system. To work successfully across different time zones, organizations need to focus on building a positive company culture, by removing all barriers that have originated due to the difference in time zones.

There are a lot of benefits to be gained from such diverse teams and here are just a few of those advantages. How to increase visibility at work as a remote worker Learn how to increase visibility at work when working from home.

Keep a dialog open about work-life boundaries and communication windows. Employees should feel comfortable and safe discussing what’s helping or getting in the way of productivity.

Research shows that organizations spend around 15% of their time on meetings. We can only imagine what these numbers mean for distributed teams that need to put extra effort into planning a perfect schedule that won’t disturb the regular work and sleep schedules of the people involved. An overwhelming amount of research has been conducted over the past year to analyze the effects of the pandemic-mandated remote work.

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. If you are thinking about hiring people outside your time zone and want to retain those valued employees, you need to make sure that you manage their respective time zones and make them feel appreciated. It takes an exceptional leader with organizational skills to effectively manage a remote team. Here how you can oversee different employee’s time zones in a remote environment.