How To Work Across Time Zones

I try to be sensitive to clients who work a traditional 9-5 day, but I don’t always work those hours. Sometimes Tips on Working in Different Time Zones I’m up early and working, sometimes I’m overseas, and sometimes I work late into the evening.

It has a weird effect when you were seeing your colleagues and you’re listening to them as you’re watching the meeting. As the above python example from Help Scout’s design team demonstrates, working across time zones doesn’t mean you have to work 100% asynchronously.

Poland Is The Best Option For Working With Teams In Different Time Zones

I’ve done this before in Europe with colleagues that work Central time (+0600). I ended up working 2pm to 10pm, where my dinner break mostly lined up with their lunch, and European culture dictated staying out much later in the summer (e.g. dinner at 11pm – midnight). I have my own business that deals mostly with clients in the States and I am in SE Asia.

Internal coordination is one thing; you can afford to miss each other every now and then. With ScheduleOnce, you can deliver white-glove treatment, ensuring you only display meeting options that are in their time zones and https://remotemode.net/ within their working hours. It also allows you to turn the entire time zone detection feature off if customers are local. M work is more projects/results based and my clients know to allow 24 hours for me to respond.

This is a good rule of thumb for all large team meetings, as time zones and vacation time will invariably lead to at least a few absences. Adequate space for informal communication is also an important aspect of successful team communication, in spite of time differences. The Groove team uses Slack as a “virtual water cooler” for real-time communication, specifically not related to work. This helps employees foster personal relationships and creates a friendly, informal atmosphere within the team.

Set Up A Communication Strategy

With everyone attending the meeting separately on video calls, regardless of their location, everyone is on a level playing field. It makes it easier to track who is speaking Career and avoids prioritising communication between select groups. That’s why the last important strategy that works for us as a remote team is to get together in person often.

• It’s truly amazing to be part of a remote, distributed team.
• How to make collaboration easier to improve team-level productivity when working across various time zones, plus the benefits of having a distributed team.
• You can start by setting how notifications work inside individual apps, or even turn on the Do Not Disturb mode on your phone altogether.
• Todoist is a work time tracking software which makes it possible to systematize your work.
• There are a lot of benefits to be gained from such diverse teams and here are just a few of those advantages.

Many remote teams schedule their annual get together around a conference. Each year I spend a few months overseas, traveling and living the backpack lifestyle. Working while traveling can be the ultimate dream, but there’s also the potential for a lot of problems. When your clients are located in a different time zone, like a really different time zone, you quickly learn how to make adjustments to your life, in order to make the relationship work. Because if you don’t, it’s too easy to get stuck in time zone hell. Sometimes, scheduling a meeting at a time that works for all timezones is easier said than done.

Top 5 Tips For Managing Teams Across Different Time Zones

Setting up processes is crucial to the success of your delocalized team, but so is the use of proper business tools. If you’re in Denver and the person you’re asking is in Perth, waiting for approval or 100% certainty will slow every decision down by essentially a full day. At Zapier, if there’s a Slack thread about something that results in a GitHub issue or a Quip doc, we share a link in that thread. The same goes for including links to other Slack threads if an issue ended up being resolved elsewhere. That way, anyone who’s jumping in at a different time knows where the most up-to-date info lives.

• So now your calendar will show the time of day along with the corresponding times for a second time zone.
• A time zone converter that simply requires right-clicking and highlighting to make the change.
• For example, if a Boston-based marketing manager gives a California-based blogger a deadline for “9 a.m. Monday,” it might be hard to determine whether the deadline was for 9 a.m.
• Running a remote team calls for particular people skills.

The work day is finishing up for some of us just as it’s getting started for others, which is why asynchronous communication is so important. There’s only a short window of time for us to communicate in real time, and that window is critical to our productivity.

Set An Agenda And Ask For Questions In Advance

Therefore you mustn’t only focus on asynchronous tasks. You can use the daily meeting for creating synchronization. It promotes constant communication in the team, creates a common understanding of the current state of affairs and allows everyone to plan their working day based on them. The daily meeting is best done in the morning or when it is morning for the majority of team members. Teams located in the same office space have to handle a lot of distractions especially when it comes to interacting with people from the same project or other projects.

Focus on the meetings that are really necessary to keep track of a project. These might include sprint planning, demos, and bi-weekly general meetings. Make the use of project management tool for distributed teams. First of all, get to know the times when both your main office and your offshore development team are available. Here is a brief overview of the time zones of the US, Europe, and the most popular outsourcing location across the world.

Empower Employees

If you need to organize all important events in one place, Google Calendar is great for that. It serves as a reminder and your team can never miss the event, conference call, or a group chat. Use Google Sheets to share files and Google Tasks to assign your employees task. With a small investment of your time, you can not only help your own business, you can help a person or people around the world by providing a job and steady income. 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. Alaska has its own time zone and Hawaii is one hour behind Alaska in the Hawaii-Aleutian time zone. The tool shown above is one that our awesome developer Dan made just for Buffer, and it helps us all a ton to know what’s going on with any teammate at a glance.

I find these meetings to be the least disruptive and the most efficient. Little did I know at the time, I booked every appointment for eastern time when I live in the central time zone . What would normally cause late nights and a lot of unwanted stress, worked beautifully because I was overseas and eight hours ahead of the rest of the team. When you’re working remotely or in a different location from other team members, you can’t easily turn to them, ask a question, or make conversation. This can make it hard to communicate and develop a relationship with your colleagues. Be mindful of international employees when scheduling meetings.

How To Be Productive When Everyone You Work With Is In A Different Time Zone

Alternatively, you can meet “on neutral ground” – Zapier, a company that runs a highly successful distributed team, organizes regular company retreats. There is always a chance that someone might not make it to the office on time, or will need to leave earlier. Perfect hours for meetings are from 10 am to 4 pm local time . If there is no other option, allow team members to join meetings from home. This refreshed post was originally written in August 2015 but has been updated to include even more tools for staying productive across time zones. Some teams have avoided the time zone drama altogether by simply getting everyone on 24 hour UTC/GMT time. It’s an admirable endeavor but will definitely take some getting used to.

For an even simpler way to see what time it is around the world, check out Every Time Zone. It shows the current time in your own city, along with others in popular time zones around the world. Drag the second indicator to the time you want to have a meeting, and you’ll see what time it’ll be in cities around the globe. It’s not a perfect way to schedule meetings but is a good way to get a feel for international time differences.

If you’ve got all the time zones covered, that means someone in the world will always be working and serving customers without the need for late-night shifts. But if you’re working on a remote team that’s scattered across the world, it gets trickier to remember what time it is for your colleague in Germany and another in India. The world is a changin’ and working across time zones is becoming more and more common for different industries. 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.