Working Across Time Zones Can Be Tough Here’s How To Do It Right.

In order to create a cohesive team, it is important to demonstrate an understanding of cultural differences. Async communication, on the other hand, refers to sending information at different times and delaying the delivery. Examples would be sending an email or leaving a voice message for them to respond to whenever it’s convenient for them. Sync and async communication are important to understand when working with a distributed team.

• Make sure you don’t let your dispersed team members hop on a call at 7 am just because it’s convenient for you.
• Our management does a good job with altering their schedule to give them the same attention as the daytime staff.
• Thankfully, tools like Google Calendar and Calendar solve this problem.
• Time zones are geographical locations where people experience similar daylight hours at any given time throughout the year.
• It shows the current time in your own city, along with others in popular time zones around the world.
• Thankfully, there are multiple tools and best practices that can help you to get around this challenge with ease.

For one, collaboration and communication become a struggle if your teams are dispersed throughout different time zones. That’s why working remotely in a different time zone can be inconvenient for both the workforce and the employees. It’s important to understand the cultural norms and traditions of the countries in which your company has remote workers. They may work different hours, celebrate different holidays, or communicate differently due to these cultural differences. Meetings can be set up according to each manager’s personal time zone, leaving everyone scrambling to come up with their own time zone. Having an official time zone means everyone will set and communicate deadlines and meetings using the same time zone, regardless of their location.

Remote work challenge: Working and traveling but having no time to enjoy new places

Working during one chunk of the day caters to your timezone, followed by another shift that caters to another team’s timezone, is often called a split shift. When interviewing for a job at a creative agency based on the West Coast, Jane was assured she could work East Coast hours. But almost immediately after she started the job, the expectations shifted.

Every week, we share actionable digital nomad tips, inspiring stories, practical travel advice, and curated high-quality resources sent directly to your inbox. All these async communications tactics reduce pressure and help create a more relaxed work environment, making it easier for everyone to balance their professional and personal lives. Remote workers can come from anywhere in the world, which means they have unique perspectives to share with their colleagues. This is great for increasing creativity and innovation within your company. While traveling, forgoing sleep in favor of sightseeing and participating in group activities is tempting — but you shouldn’t do it.

Common challenges of managing remote team members across different time zones

For employers, the ability to offer potential employees even limited remote work options can be a big boon for hiring managers looking to cast a broader recruiting net. Considering that 81% of respondents in a recent survey said they would be more loyal to their employer if they had flexible work options, this shouldn’t be overlooked. In a hybrid-remote work environment, some team members work in one or more office locations, while others work remotely, either full-time or part-time. We make sure everyone coming on board understands the different time zones.

The time zones of people working in a company has a big impact on different aspects such as project collaboration and communication between the team members. But the shift in which companies are now offering remote work options provides a clue to why time-zone bias is becoming worse. Previously, most of the businesses that hired international and across states were bigger companies with bigger infrastructure. They are more likely to have software that can handle scheduling, videoconferencing, and accommodating larger groups of people in different time zones. Smaller companies may not be able to afford scheduling software or dedicated staff members to manage scheduling, leaving the onus of navigating time zones to managers and employees.

How does your team address different time zone challenges?

If a work activity doesn’t require you to sit still in front of your computer (as is the case with client calls), get up, stretch, and move around. Or, alternatively, try a standing desk — yoga mats and a comfortable, ergonomic chair will further improve your potential back issues. While working at home, you’ll have everything you need nearby, and won’t have to endure a commute — which means you’ll be totally stationary. Moreover, there is another solution to this problem — as an independent freelancer, you can always choose to work in your client’s zone to avoid time wastage while communicating.

• These are also useful when your teammates don’t all speak the same language.
• Another big plus to this remote work arrangement is chances are greater that there’s always going to be someone online at a given hour.
• This can be overwhelming when working remotely and trying to coordinate with clients, colleagues or services.
• The ideal way to tackle this problem is to hire workers in similar or overlapping time zones.
• There are also ways of combining work with other activities such as sport or socializing with friends and family members.
• If you plan to work late, save some of the hours during the day for yourself.
• In some instances, companies offer “remote-allowed” options as a perk rather than as a broadly accepted work option.

Here, you can visualize all the prominent time zones of the world at a glance. Fully remote jobs and companies offer greater flexibility for employees to choose work locations and hours that suit their lifestyles. Jobs that are 100% remote can also be more family-friendly for working parents and caregivers, as well.

More Tiny Tips You Should Know

If you do creative work, this time difference leaves a lot of quiet time between the US and Europe. You can make great progress in working on the business, as opposed to being involved in it. If you need to sync with them 100%, the ideal working hours would have your shift end in the evenings.

“What’s more, I have a feeling of intimacy with co-workers on the other side of the country that is almost fun,” Manjoo says. Staying up a bit late or getting up an hour working remotely in a different time zone earlier isn’t a bad tradeoff for a job you love, but how about 2 a.m.? That’s what The Year Without Pants author, Berkun, encountered when he worked at Automattic.

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With remote working being a customary pattern, you will often come across employees with time zone differences. Moreover, it is only worthwhile for the company to acquire talent, irrespective of the location. Depending on your requirements, you can either have a detailed user view or a grouped user view.

Remotely or not, one of the vital etiquettes of working is setting and respecting each employee’s boundaries. You must be transparent about your work hours and availability, along with encouraging employees to do the same. Whether it is about starting a new project or communicating on an ongoing one, time difference creates a host of blockages. Your colleague from the other corner of the world may be snoozing while you are waiting for a reply.

Be Flexible and Compromise

If you need to know when is the best time to chat in real-time with someone, add the city names and get started. Most calendar apps/services allow you to have a secondary time zone, so you can set it up as such to make your life even simpler. Most business meetings were conducted in the same time zone, so most people perceived time as a static thing. In a remote-first work environment, supporting geography-independence is a default position in the natural flow of the organization. Remote-first companies put several factors at the forefront when supporting their remote employees.

• Staying up a bit late or getting up an hour earlier isn’t a bad tradeoff for a job you love, but how about 2 a.m.?
• However, if there is an important meeting scheduled at a normal time in EST, but very early for our Pacific coasters, our Pacific coast employees will typically wake up early and be on the call.
• Employees can work 100% remotely, independent of location and in many cases independent of a specific time zone.
• Using its Eventlink feature, you can schedule a meeting and add it to the calendar.
• Our entire company is online from 3pm-7pm GMT which means we have a 4-hour window for all hands meetings, daily standups, and the off-hand meeting or video call that will help overall productivity.
• If we lived in a perfect world, all communications would be face-to-face and voice, like meetings and phone calls.