How to Work Across Time Zones as a Remote Team: Best Practices

As the rewards largely outweigh the drawbacks, it’s worth exploring the best team practices provided above to make working across time zones work. They will help you craft your perfect blend of flexibility, asynchronous work, and inclusive mindset to push your distributed team towards perpetual success. As the world is moving toward a fully distributed work model, there’s still plenty of value in in-person team meetups.

There’s a major difference between work habits in Europe, the U.S., Scandinavia, and Southeast Asia. Some regions take lunch at different working across time zones times, take longer breaks, or don’t work traditional hours. But, communicate with your clients if you’ll be changing time zones.

More diverse and inclusive workplace

Internal customer service can help improve the employee experience at a time when workers are increasingly dissatisfied at work. HR teams have a pivotal role to play as companies navigate profound changes to their workplaces and workforces.

With this global team, you create morediversity of thought, which can result inmore innovation and revenue. Here’s how to mindfully do it with tips and best practices for distributed engineering teams. Sometimes, scheduling a meeting at a time that works for all timezones is easier said than done. For example, if you’re based in the U.S. and have teams in Asia and California, finding a time that fits into everyone’s schedules and usual work hours can be tricky.

Mastering Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Communication

When she is not researching the most productive collaboration techniques, she can usually be found trying out the latest team chat and collaboration tools and apps. The actual time difference poses one of the biggest barriers to effective communication across distributed teams. Another thing that can help is having a shared calendar. So when you do have meetings or things that the team needs to know about, that everybody inputs that time into a shared calendar, then the time zone conversions are automatically done. And that just helps minimize some of the mistakes that we can make when we’re scheduling time. PRIORITIZE YOUR OVERLAP TIME.On most teams there will be one or two hours of overlap and that’s when the meeting should be scheduled. This is also a good time to spend on video together, really helping to form that unique bond between co workers.

• An asynchronous-first team communication style can be very beneficial for remote teams working on projects across different time zones.
• Ultimately, most important things to embrace and keep in mind when working with team members in different timezones are respect, empathy, and inclusion.
• Transparency in your goals has the added benefit of providing management with visibility into the work, without having to jump on those “checking up on you” calls.
• Consider your workplace strategy first Make the best decision for you and your team.
• Without the right tools, trying to manage remote team members across time zones is a chore, especially if calendars don’t sync properly.

I’m eating dinner and getting ready to wind my day down. These are the kinds of things that it’s just good to keep in mind with your teammates. Okay, my next tip is to get in the habit of double-checking your times. If you’re going to work with global teams, it just happens even to the best of us. Even though I double-check and I’m constantly aware of it and I’m supposedly a pro, even I get time zones wrong every once in a while. That’s a very simple time zone check that you can do with yourself in just one other time. The next one is worldtimebuddy.com, and that is for scheduling meetings with people in different time zones.

Collaborating Across Different Time Zones? Easy Peasy.

Managing remote teams in different time zones can be challenging. The key is ensuring that your employees are aligned with your company’s values and understand what’s expected of them. It’s essential to clearly outline processes and workflows and have proper communication channels that allow all team members to stay connected. Finally, a successful asynchronous collaboration calls for a set of functional tools to seamlessly tie all autonomous teams and operations together. Using a single, multifunctional tool such as Pumble, to streamline diverse conversations and collaborative projects across time zones can increase overall productivity by 30%. Teams operating across time zones require a unique set of functionalities specifically customized to meet the needs of the asynchronous workforce. When assessing team chat and collaboration apps for your distributed team, look for features that allow flexibility, autonomy, seamless collaboration, and transparent availability status options.

It takes really getting to know your team members and tapping into their shared interests to get the casual conversation going. IT – A no-brainer, really, especially if we consider that information technology is what made remote work possible in the first place. IT companies pioneered distributed work, long before the world got shut down by the pandemic. https://remotemode.net/ At first, the remote workforce offered the perfect way for companies to reduce costs until they realized additional benefits such as global talent and diversity-led innovation. 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.

Collaboration and communication difficulties

To build a successful team that operates autonomously, companies should consider setting clear employee expectations regarding personality traits and soft skills best suited for this work model. These can be used as a reference point throughout the hiring process and as additional coaching with established teams. Similarly, the rest of the team should be comfortable working autonomously with minimum instruction and interference to ensure maximum productivity. 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. Managers and decision-makers are the ones facing the harshest challenges when working with teams who operate across time zones. Along with aligning operations, other risks could seriously disrupt major processes, if left unchecked.