“Scheduling meetings and collaboration sessions can be challenging,” Erhard agreed. The managing partner explained that his company’s teams frequently need to collaborate across “adjacent” time zones, as well as internationally with clients in the United States and elsewhere. Pinterest Coach Laura Rike works with a team of remote employees across time zones and has done so even before the pandemic started. Rike believes one benefit is that the structure in and of itself lends itself well to employees setting and keeping their own boundaries around their schedule, which improves job satisfaction. Send out meeting invites early, outline deadlines clearly, and use project management tools like Asana or Monday to keep everyone on track, regardless of time zone differences. One of the most significant challenges of working in a different time zone is the potential for communication barriers.
- David Fullerton had to overcome the communication hurdle when he was growing the Stack Exchange team.
- Research firm Global Workplace Analytics estimates that workers save between $600 and $6,000 per year by working from home at least half of the time.
- In other words, communicate, and make sure everyone knows what you’re working on.
- Planning meetings across time zones might sound so painful that you’d rather just never have meetings—but don’t do that either.
- “One danger of my job, as a columnist who works in California, is a feeling of disconnection from the mother ship in New York,” writes technology columnist Farhad Manjoo.
- Use this article as your guide to overcome these challenges and you’ll be well on your way to building strong relationships across time zones.
Know your remote team’s working hours
“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. Even still, odds are you’ll be working with someone who’s not online at the same time as you. 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.? That’s what The Year Without Pants author, Berkun, encountered when he worked at Automattic. “My team had hit the natural limits of space and time on planet earth,” Berkun says.
“There may also be questions that are sent in a private channel that could receive a faster response in a public thread,” Hoffbauer said. Rike has found the biggest challenge of team members working from different time zones is getting everyone on a company meeting at the same time. “It usually isn’t necessary, but definitely helps to build morale and keep spirits high when we can put faces to names and not feel so lonely in our remote settings,” Rike said. Working across time zones can yield benefits for both employees and employers, from improving work-life balance to widening the talent pool for new hires. The most important thing to do when working remotely is to grow comfortable communicating asynchronously whenever possible. Even though your whole team may be in different major cities or different countries, with geographic and time zone differences separating you—with effective async communication, none of that matters.
Maintaining Work-Life Balance
Jon Russell, a Bangkok-based reporter for TechCrunch, says remote work is what enables their site to run a 24-hour newsroom. “When it comes to online publishing, being in different places isn’t so strange,” says Russell. When considering candidates from different regions than where the company is based, SMB leaders must review how their taxes, payroll, compliance, recruiting, and benefits may be affected. Even if they reside in a different area, employees want to feel connected to their employer.
Con: There’s no constant collaboration
This can be especially challenging when working with a distributed team in different time zones. When working with a living and working in different time zones distributed team, you don’t have to limit yourself to hiring locally. Instead of settling for local talent, remote workers give your company access to the best people in the world no matter where they are located.
Communication Barriers
It also means that you’re not necessarily communicating at the same time. Remote working isn’t automatically a freer way to work—it can be just as stressful as any 9-to-5 job. Teach your remote team to be flexible about time, though, and everyone’s lives will be easier.
Check the connection quality before communicating in conferences or personal correspondence. To avoid these situations, it is obvious to foresee the situation in advance, it is recommended to remind understandable things, duplicate information, and provide access to the necessary data. Approximately 46% of commercials switched to full or partial telecommuting in the prior year. See the impact of fewer, shorter meetings, increased accountability, and enhanced productivity with Fellow. An inside look at the meeting ground rules used internally by Fellow.app, the top-rated meeting productivity software company.