Working Across Time Zones

This tool allows you to coordinate with your global team and enables you to always stay on top of their locations and time zones. You get a detailed view of your team’s locations, time zones, and working hours that make the entire process of planning and scheduling your meetings. Different team members might have different preferred time zone. That’s why you must work towards working across time zones finding and adopting more flexible solutions and methods to make sure everyone is on the same page. When working with teams in different time zones, it’s also worth considering how you can automate processes to maximize employees’ productivity. Consider which time-consuming background tasks could be suitable for AI to make the most of your international team’s time.

• For a 15-minute chat that leaves you feeling like you haven’t accomplished anything.
• We host team meetings, one-on-one meetings, all hands, and more on Zoom.
• As a hardworking employee located farther away from your company’s office, you might find feel pressure to say yes to every meeting you’re invited to.
• When you can’t rely on synchronous communication, you need to be able to continue working when help could be a day or two away.

Timezone.io is completely free and offers a simple, efficient, and clean user interface. However, it lacks features like a meeting planner or Slack integration. Some of the companies that already use and trust Team TimeZone are – DigitalOcean, Gartner, McAfee, and many others. We hope that many of us get even more skilled at, and therefore less stressed out from collaborating remotely in 2021. We were creating so much design content, and yet it felt like we were not moving forward in the project.

Plan Meetings In A Smarter Way With World Time Buddy

Your employees need to understand what you expect of them on a day-to-day basis. But it’s also critical that you make time to understand what they can manage. Remote employees can feel pressure to say yes to everything they’re invited to, regardless of how busy they are.

When scheduling a meeting or call with remote team members, make sure to ask them what time zone they are in so that you can account for any time difference with their local time when you schedule. The most important thing to do when working remotely is to grow comfortable communicating asynchronously whenever possible. Even though your whole team may be in different major cities or different countries, with geographic and time zone differences separating you—with effective async communication, none of that matters. The lack of physical presence makes it easier for remote workers to lose connection with their team. This can be especially challenging when working with a distributed team in different time zones. Managing a global team is more complicated than managing one that works from the same office.

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.” This gives everyone an idea of what’s on the itinerary and keeps meetings on track. Tools like Loom and PingPong let you record video messages of yourself, your screen, or both. When someone in New York ends their workday around 6 p.m., their colleague in Sydney, Australia, is likely just waking up and getting started. In the meantime, their coworker in London is probably heading to bed. The remote-by-force transition to remote-by-choice is here to stay. Whether it’s preferable to keep your camera on or off during a meeting.

Allow For Synchronous And Asynchronous Communications

Diversity and inclusion drive innovation and positively impact overall business targets within remote companies that span across time zones. 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. But the design team at Help Scout is spread out across five time zones, making creative collaboration a challenge.

Is the meeting a working session, design review, or a status update? 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.

However, when you’re managing remote team members, not all communication happens in real-time. Being respectful of your remote team members’ office hours may equate to less synchronous communication. The most important rule for successful communication across time zones is to maintain a flexible approach to your work. With remote team members, you won’t have the benefit of everyone working on the same thing simultaneously. Is considering time zones as important as everyone says it is, when planning a call among clients, vendors, professional contacts and colleagues? Let’s check out all the tips, tricks and hacks that can make calculating time zones a breeze. Once everyone’s set and communicated their working hours, make sure you’re respecting them!

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. It’s likely that if you’re working with a client across multiple time zones, there won’t be much opportunity to meet face-to-face. Always, always, send a calendar invite to clients when working across time zones. This will guarantee that you’ve got the correct time and that you both know when you’re actually going to meet. Ultimately, the most effective way we’ve found to keep asynchronous communication flowing is to keep it simple, and use a single project management tool.

How To Facilitate Communication & Meetings Across Time Zones

Icons/design/feather/codepen Development Frontend, backend, web and app developer jobs. In lieu of a meeting, send a Loom video where you talk through information and request feedback. People can send it in a text-based form, or their own Loom video. You’ll also want each team member working from a private space with minimal distractions . If colleagues are close by, try asking them to work together at one desk so they can easily collaborate on projects as necessary. Test out split shifts or workdays that cater to different timezones. “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.

This is probably the most obvious challenge of working across multiple time zones, and rightfully so. It can get overwhelming trying to set up a time that works for the entire team. While operating with time zone differences has its benefits, it’s also challenging. Particularly if you don’t introduce new processes to manage a truly global team. Diverse teams made up of remote team members from around the world, especially in management positions, escape local echo chambers and build truly world-class products. 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.

Try Every Time Zoneto super quickly see what time it is where all your coworkers are located. Having tools in place will take the guesswork out of figuring out someone’s time zone, and can help you avoid reaching out to someone when they’re already off the clock or out for lunch. Despite the widely accepted benefits of distributed teams, managing professionals in different time zones can be quite tricky. You might be working from an office in New York, and you can have team members from different countries like India, while your client resides somewhere in Australia. Just imagine you just started your day and need some work done urgently but the team member you need for that has already signed off. Needless to say, it is next to impossible to manage people from three different time zones without a well-structured strategy leading to downtime, delays, and work planning problems. In this article, we’ll tackle the biggest struggles for those who have freelance jobs online, or any professional who has been freelancing remotely for years.

That’s why when you hire fresh talent for your team make sure to validate if they’ll be capable to work with minimal supervision and manage their time effectively. Not everyone would be able to handle working remotely, for that region you must be careful when putting together your team. Try to rotate the time when meetings are scheduled so that one person isn’t always inconvenienced. This helps to bond a remote team and create empathy between team members. When working with a remote team, it’s important to rotate the suffering. It’s likely that someone on the team will be inconvenienced by the time that a meeting is scheduled. Whether they have to get up early or stay at work late or even get up in the middle of the night, someone will suffer.

Collaboration And Communication Difficulties

I had transitioned from working full-time to freelancing when Dan and I set off for our remote work trip around the world to explore how we could use travel to build this website together. For instance, maybe you’re located in New York City, like I am! 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. Try pinning important messages make it easy for team members to sort through a mountain of messages to see what content is most important for them to catch up on. As you’re setting these expectations, anticipate needs or questions and try to answer them upfront so that the recipient doesn’t wind up waiting for your next availability to clarify.

• We use it to have virtual water cooler talks, report bugs, celebrate successes, and discuss ways to improve our work.
• While this may not be possible, it is the mindset you need to adopt to organize your time and responsibilities.
• Whether you’re putting together a remote team, working with a digital nomad, or have officers across the world, I hope these tips and my hard-learned lessons help you out.
• To do this effectively across time zones, you must be in tune with their current time and their schedules.

It surprised me when I felt shameful for asking questions in meetings. Or it was my fault for not being there when they discussed the answer to the question. It’s also important to be aware of any language barriers that clients might have. When there is a language barrier, it just takes a little extra time to make sure both parties understand what is expected. Be very sensitive to cultural differences around work, time off, and holidays. A warning to anyone who is working with a client halfway across the globe.

Make Sure No One Gets Left Out When Planning A Meeting Across Different Time Zones

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. But the biggest benefit might be how much it cuts off onboarding new employees who can simply read the archives and get up to speed on key decisions, culture, and work styles.

• And this is particularly why we’re seeing a consistent increase in the number of companies employing globally.
• We’ll also show you some of the key tips to take into account to be more aware of the experiences of remote employees.
• Logging time on alignment calls, catchup calls, end-of-day summaries, will give you a good idea of how much to factor this in in future project plans.
• Kelly supports the Employee Benefits team in an Administrative Assistant role supporting clients with their health benefit and open enrollment activities.

The post outlines how to build an effective time zone agnostic team as a company leader, people manager, colleague, and as a geographically remote person. Building an asynchronous culture can seem intimidating but you’ll need to if you plan to work across time zones. When you can’t rely on synchronous communication, you need to be able to continue working when help could be a day or two away. Teams that work across multiple time zones can’t rely on real-time communication. There’s no room to ask clarifying questions and you don’t have the luxury of reading a person’s facial expressions or tone of voice. It’s easy enough to understand time zones where you live, but if you’re working in a remote team spread across the world, it gets harder to remember what time it is for your team members.

Know What Time It Is

That’s why we have curated this article for you that can greatly aid you successfully if international collaboration looks first hand. We have also included some time zone apps or time zone meeting planners that can be highly helpful for your organization.

Research shows that organizations spend around 15% of their time on meetings. Asynchronous collaboration is the default workflow globally distributed teams turn to to optimize their processes and overall culture. This is not surprising, given that the flexibility of asynchronous collaboration represents the ideal response to the challenges of working across time zones. Speaking of connection among teammates, working across time zones makes it almost https://remotemode.net/ 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. Moreover, a lack of communication across teams carries another set of risks. For one, it threatens to disrupt the trust between team members, as there’s not sufficient information and knowledge sharing going around.

Now every time you suspect the other side of the world is busy celebrating, you can open your calendar and check if that’s the case, or if there’s some people you need to nag. Google Calendar lets you set a secondary time zone, though only through its web interface. Once you’ve set it, and checked the Display secondary time zone box, it’ll show up in the day, week, and month views alongside your current time zone. Even though it’s arguably much more challenging to train and manage global teams, with the right strategies in place, you don’t have to see engagement drop or frustrations mount. Agree on documentation practices.Clear documentation processes and information are vital to working across time zones and communicating asynchronously.

Etiquette Rules For Working Across Time Zones

As a freelancer, especially if you’re working as an individual contributor, other members of the team or group may forget where you’re located. This is especially hard if you tend to move around from city to city or country to country, or if you just moved, and crossed time zones, like from Florida to Texas, for example. Whether you’re a freelancer working with one client in another time zone, or with five clients, teammates and other professional contacts all over the world, World Time Buddy will be your friend. We’ve noted time zone converters like World Time Buddy in our list of the best apps for travelers and remote workers because it is so crucial. “Remind me” nudges make it easy for you to keep an eye on messages that are incoming during your off-hours so you make sure to reply to messages that come in the next time you’re online. The name “instant” suggest live synchronous communication, but asynchronous communication is still a big part of using instant messaging tools like Slack, MS Teams, and Flock. If the issue is complex or there are dependencies involved, you might find yourself drafting a paragraph and editing your message for clarity and tone that can get lost in translation.

Ask: How Can We Do This Asynchronously?

When you meet frequently with the same people, take time to understand when they work remotely. This is easy for teams that work with people across two or three time zones that are all next to each other. However, it becomes more complicated when working with a global workforce .

But with the rise of remote work – and the transition to hybrid workplaces – your office likely operates a bit differently these days. In any company, effective communication among team members is key to optimizing business performance and reaching organizational goals. Especially if you’re new to management or have a new team member, a “norming session” is a great way to make sure your team is functioning on the same wavelength. This can be particularly important when it comes to long-distance communication.