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However, more people than ever before desire to work remotely these days. Therefore, team members working across borders and time zones may become the norm soon. If each of your international teams keeps a 9-to-5 schedule in their own time zone, it could be impossible to communicate directly with some of them. Instead, experiment with different shifts to keep the conversation flowing between teams. Options could include one or more days per week on which employees work a half-day in the office, then remotely at night or early in the morning.
Including your office hours in your email signature, work chat profile, LinkedIn account, and Google profile will prevent misunderstandings. To help you manage your workday, we’ll share eight tips for seamless collaboration with overseas partners. For teams working across time zones, it can be tempting to respond to notifications that come in after your normal working day has finished. That’s particularly true when your input is essential to the progress of a project. By making sure the same people aren’t always being inconvenienced, you can avoid the perception of a ‘core team’ in one location whose needs are always put first. Switching up the times of your meetings will help to ensure everyone in your team feels equally valued.
Avoid micromanagement and set appropriate expectations.
“Any remote worker knows you have to be flexible, so I feel time zone differences don’t impact your remote work life too much,” says Zapier’s Smith. “I’d quite happily sacrifice staying a little later or getting up a little earlier to avoid the stresses of a morning commute in rush hour traffic.” This may not always be possible, but being mindful of international schedules ensures that all employees feel included and that their time is respected. To learn more about tools and software that can help global and remote teams, check out this helpful list. If a meeting is necessary, make attendance optional so you’re not asking teammates to stay up late to get up early.
This means their time is equally distributed between their own office’s time zone and another team’s time zone. Teams working remotely and across time zones lack the spontaneous chats in-office coworkers are accustomed to. The social disconnect can breed various productivity and personal obstacles that could wreak havoc on your organization over time. Speaking of connection among teammates, working across time zones makes it almost impossible to keep the team spirit and social engagement up. Almost by definition, remote work tends to facilitate isolation among team members, and the matter only gets worse once we add the time zone dimension to the equation. Companies employing smaller internationally distributed teams are more likely to have staff members experience feelings of isolation and being left out from the company culture and general social interactions.
Mind the cultural norms
Do you or a team member need to be available for a conference call at a specific time? If so, make sure it’s clear that this is the only time you’re available e.g. by accepting an invite with the comment “my only time-frame that day”. Otherwise, you could end up with several random requests, or fixed calls from other people who aren’t aware of your schedule. If you frequently change schedules for time-sensitive yet repetitive tasks, consider offloading them to AI instead. Automated systems can handle tedious matters like appointment scheduling, time recording, email sorting, and project tracking. For example, if some of your meetings have meant that your team members in France have had to attend at 1 am local time, try to arrange your next meeting so that they can attend during their usual work hours.
Slack helps you to stay in touch with your team which may be located in different time zones. TimeCamp is a great solution to measure your employees’ productivity and time they spend on work. In TimeCamp you can create tasks and projects which you can monitor through the use of timesheet. Maintain an open dialogue with global colleagues to ensure that everyone’s boundaries are seen and respected and that nobody is working beyond their core work hours. Instead of giving one project deadline to suit the majority’s time zone, try to stagger deadlines to take international teams into account. When working with a distributed team, it’s important to understand the differences between sync and async communication, and the extreme importance of asynchronous communication.
Be patient if you need to send an unscheduled message.
The six hour time difference between the US and Canada’s Eastern Standard Time (EST) can be overwhelming at first, but once you get used to it, it becomes a great advantage. If you are working with someone https://remotemode.net/blog/10-tips-on-working-in-different-time-zones/ in the US, you will have the benefit of getting a head start on your day. By the time your clients wake up, you will have finished most of your work and still have three hours left to sync up with them.
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.” But, despite all the benefits of having a diverse global staff, companies are still trying to figure out how to work successfully across different timezones. 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.
Awareness of Others’ Time Zones
This distraction-free concentration pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit and creates new value, improves skills, and is hard to replicate in our world of instant satisfaction. 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. However, it’s becoming increasingly hard to argue against the benefits of remote work. Yes, there are challenges but the benefits ultimately outweigh the hassle.
- 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.
- Teams, for example, can build shared calendars that reflect their availability throughout the day to ensure no time zone borders are crossed.
- “We have a bi-monthly full company meeting to make sure we all know we still exist,” writes designer Ben Hanna.
