The urge to zero out your ever-increasing number of unreads might keep you awake til midnight more than just occasionally. The hesitance to say no to an out-of-timezone meeting could eventually lead you to say yes. Employees get as close as they can to being collaborative, but they also have to deal with costs. We’re Himalayas, a remote job board, that is focused on providing the best experience for remote job seekers and employers. Many Heads of Remote will spend time in both worlds, improving the internal experience while advocating for remote-first beyond the organization. This issue can be compounded when you employ a diverse team who come from different locations and cultural backgrounds, many of whom may be communicating in their second (or third) language.
- 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.
- Zapier are on a mission to make automation easy and accessible to everyone at work.
- However, shifting assumptions and processes is essential for global teams to thrive and deliver outstanding results.
- Once you and your team establish timezones boundaries and preferred work hours, respect them.
- The difficulties of managing different time zones, language barriers, and cultural differences can be frustrating.
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. Although team members may thrive working asynchronously, it’s important to foster a culture of collaboration and participation. When employees are engaged, their passion and commitment reflect productivity, innovation, and positive company culture. On-the-fly collaboration tends to occur less frequently when working across time zones, but the right tools can change that.
Challenges of working across time zones
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 even still, if you want to make a distributed team work, you need to accept a time shift. “I’ll take phone calls late in the evening from folks that don’t realize I’m on the east coast and consider that part of the job for someone working remotely in a different time zone,” Furbish says. “That means that the remote person has a lot of autonomy and any problems that arise can be solved by either leaving messages on Slack/email or syncing up for a couple of hours one 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.
- In fact, my teammates seemed excited for my trip and eager to make our schedule differences work—a testament to a culture that prizes flexibility and full lives outside of work.
- Be sure that those team members who aren’t physically present get time to talk and contribute to the meeting as much as those that are in the room.
- You might be able to keep it up for a while, but eventually, you’re likely to burn out.
- It’s possible to hire people around the globe and still have your whole team working 9-to-5 at your office’s time zone—after all, plenty of people work night shifts—but it’s not optimal.
- These meetings not only improve the relationships between specific colleagues, but also contribute to maintaining team cohesion.
This way, colleagues can act immediately and don’t need to wait another day just to get the full context. Instead of texting “hi” and then waiting 24 hours, employees can organize information and assignments into short paragraphs and send them together. I know personally, I sometimes like to get stuck in at various points in my day for focused work without too many distractions. Scheduled synchronous communication like planned video calls/syncups allow me to better mentally prepare.
How to succeed working across time zones
Moreover, scheduling meetings can be difficult, inconveniencing those who have to attend, especially early in the morning or late in the evening. Technology is your best friend when working https://remotemode.net/ remotely across time zones. Use tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Monday.com, or Notion to keep everyone connected, organized, and updated on the latest project developments.
- If you hover over them, you will see their name, current local time, and more; click on them to find more information.
- Undoubtedly, one of the trickiest parts of working across time zones is scheduling meetings.
- To overcome these challenges, many leaders resort to traditional management techniques that may be well-established when managing in-office employees but don’t always work remotely.
- Then, you won’t have to worry about time off and how many hours people are working.
The following best practices will help SMB employers navigate these challenges and reap all the benefits of remote work. A lot of people work from home – 59% of U.S. workers who say their jobs can be performed from home do so all or most of the time – and that comes with many benefits for employers and employees alike. Expressing your appreciation, recognition, and reaction to each other’s work and partnership helps mitigate the lack of social cues. It can be as simple as a ❤ emoji to a message to as formal as a shoutout to your counterpart’s line managers. Being welcomed and recognized makes employees feel more included, especially when they’re not physically together and sometimes alone in a country. That’s why the last important strategy that works for us as a remote team is to get together in person often.
Prioritize overlap time
Be very sensitive to cultural differences around work, time off, and holidays. I was going to put together a fabulous list of all the great tools that are out there for working across time zones, and then they did it for me. Be aware and sensitive to the fact that you might be starting your day when someone else is ending theirs. As a freelancer and part-time digital nomad, this happens to me year-round, even when I may be in the same time zone as a client.
The Couchsurfing team has a similar schedule to make sure everyone’s connected. “We have a bi-monthly full company meeting to make sure we all know we still exist,” writes designer Ben Hanna. working remotely in a different time zone It’s possible to hire people around the globe and still have your whole team working 9-to-5 at your office’s time zone—after all, plenty of people work night shifts—but it’s not optimal.