Also, you may find it challenging to decline meetings scheduled outside your normal working hours—or to provide other dates for meetings planned outside your working hours. Creating a virtual team spanning borders will working remotely in a different time zone help if you want to teach every team member about cultural communication difficulties. Keep in mind that conflict and misinterpretation can be prevented in the future with a careful understanding of cultural norms.
- While creating processes that allow employees to work in different timezones is logistically beneficial, on a deeper level, it also makes it easier for diverse global talent to join your team.
- A remote worker must be a self-starter who can continue working without someone watching them.
- I’m learning that the implication of that many tabs is that the current task at hand isn’t getting my 100%.
Developers, perhaps, have it the easiest with code comments and pull requests, but everyone should share what’s happening in their own “manager of one” domain. Even still, odds are you’ll be working with someone who’s not online at the same time as you. Every employee is also assigned a random “pair partner” each week— that means we’ll jump on a call with one of our colleagues just see how things are going, and perhaps work together on a cross-team project.
Companies successfully working across time zones
In fact, remote workers are generally more productive than their in-office counterparts. If you are headed towards the popular remote work destination of Southeast Asia, digital nomad hub cities there, like Bangkok, are six hours ahead of GMT (London). Let’s say you’re starting your day at 8am, which is 6pm US Pacific time… This is a time slot where you can sync up with clients over there quite easily despite the drastic difference in the time of day. Find a comprehensive job description template and best practices in this post. You’ll learn about the key responsibilities, qualifications, and skills required for an AWS developer role, including hard skills and soft skills.
Most importantly, using task management and progress trackers make it simple for employees in different time zones to login and see what an employee in another country has already completed during their workday. Splitting your hourly schedule around your team’s timezones allows you to be more available for meetings or quick communication with your international colleagues without ignoring the colleagues in your office. It will also ensure that you’re available to your international department without needing to stay up all hours of the day. Working remotely opens so many possibilities, you truly get to work where you can be the most productive.
Scheduling Conflicts
Here are 7 tips that we recommend to help you navigate time zones for your global team. To avoid team blockers related to timezones, one thing Susanne Ronnqvist Ahmadi, HubSpot’s Vice President of International Marketing, says you should aim to have a flexible schedule at certain points of the day. Timezone messages like the one above can help you be mindful of what to send when to send it, and if your message is urgent enough to send as soon as possible. For example, if you have a few messages you want to send, but notice it’s 9 p.m. In another employee’s timezone, you might either want to avoid sending til the morning or schedule an email. Aside from specifically discussing timezone-related needs and boundaries as needed, you can also mark your standard work hours on a team calendar — while encouraging colleagues to do the same.
- If you want to interact and work with the whole world, there is pretty much no better time zone than those of Central European Time and Central African Time.
- Whether you are meeting after hours or during work time, it’s crucial to be careful about scheduling such events.
- This isn’t how high-performing remote teams working across time zones collaborate.
Whether you’re working on a large freelance project, collaborating with colleagues, or managing a team remotely, implementing these 6 tips will optimize your productivity and help you master time zone management. 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. Confused about how best to handle time zone differences while working remotely?