How do you manage working in different time zones?

It’s even possible to take your Meeting Owl to happy hour if you wish. However, from a business standpoint, it is hard to argue against operating across multiple time zones. In spite of the challenges, the upsides far outweigh the drawbacks.

One of my favorite stories about time zones comes from a flight I booked in 2012. To make the story short, I booked a flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and, after two years of living abroad in Asia, assumed that my flight was quoted on international 24-hour time. Explain that you have a particular schedule working remotely in a different time zone in order to function as productively as possible, and your available hours for meetings are X, Y and Z. Avoid forgetting to mention that you have moved and that time zones will be affecting your work. Set a calendar reminder to advise the team before your move, so that you look organized and responsible.

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Multiply that by a few “taps on the shoulder” each day, and you’re looking at entire work days of compromised productivity. We’ve worked hard to improve our asynchronous collaboration⁠—more on that below⁠—and it’s paid off big time for us. With a remote team spread across the globe, this isn’t unusual; as every day ends somewhere, a day begins somewhere else. And if you want to learn more about how you can work from anywhere, visit collaborationsuperpowers.com, a website full of tips and best practices for the practical remote worker. My fourth tip comes from the creating a team agreement process that I take people through. If you want to learn more about team agreements, then go back to episode number 42.

Don’t forget to factor in daylight savings time when it kicks in for the approximate 70 countries that use it. This app also automatically syncs your current status on slack https://remotemode.net/ with the calendar. So if you are in a meeting, your slack status will automatically reflect that. Clockwise is essentially a calendar extension from Google for Chrome.

Avoid micromanagement and set appropriate expectations.

Vietnam and San Francisco, don’t stick one person with the late night or early morning shift. Everyone should feel and share the pain of time zones when you’re working on a team. Meanwhile, time zone overlap is the silver lining that allows companies to hire a workforce from different geographical locations while maintaining seamless communication. Below, you’ll learn about the hassle of working in opposite time zones and why time zone overlap should be a consideration when you’re hiring workers for remote jobs. The best way to be mindful of different time zones is to disregard time entirely and rely on asynchronous communication. By setting a clear expectation that communication won’t happen in real-time, you can take the pressure of people in different time zones to be “on-call”.

They were created in the nineteenth century because the world needed a unified system to keep track of time. There’s no need to wait for a conference call or meeting to start talking when you work together from the same office. But when working with a distributed team, communicating takes more effort. 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.

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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. Simply put, it keeps things from slipping through the cracks. A fun way to put an exclamation point at the end of each meeting. Lately our word of the day has come from a random Cards Against Humanity card that Lesley pulls each day.

Partly because of this, he said, he felt as if no one got to know him, meaning he and other West Coast-based employees were “getting passed for awards, promotions and raises.” The good news is that working in a globally distributed team can be very rewarding. With the right tools and processes, you can make the most of your different time zones and create an effective high-performance team. We’ll show you what those are, and how to work efficiently with teammates across different time zones in a way that’s productive (and not intrusive!). We’ll also show you some of the key tips to take into account to be more aware of the experiences of remote employees. The major challenge in working across different time zone is managing the streamlining of work processes.

Pro: It’s easier to value output over time-in-seat

Guidelines for your communication policies and collaboration tools should be clearly outlined and shared during onboarding. Employees can read and refer back to these guidelines so they know what to do and what’s expected of them. When it comes to working with teams across different time zones, the number one rule is to be mindful, empathetic, and respectful. Collaborating across different time zones can be a challenge for teams used to working in the same room or state.

• In this blog, we have discussed some crucial challenges of working in different time zones in the remote work setting and how to address them.
• Sometimes you need someone to hold you accountable or just to work alongside you.
• By hiring remote workers, you’ll never have to worry about geographical limitations again.
• These moments didn’t require planning, and were crucial to helping us agree and get on the same page about what needed to be done.