What About Hiring In Different Time Zones?

Maneesh Sharma, the General Manager for GitHub in India, has a 20-year career in conceptualizing, building, marketing, selling, and supporting products. He loves working in strategic and operational roles across functions—all while raising two teenagers. Successfully managing a global team requires rockstar leadership and strong communication skills, coupled with cultural awareness and empathy. It’s important to collaborate with your teams in ways that engage employees to work together as one team across multiple departments, languages, time zones, and cultures. However, with this opportunity comes a management headache. Bosses have a new set of challenges as they coordinate the work of their teams across multiple time zones.

• There’s a major difference between work habits in Europe, the U.S., Scandinavia, and Southeast Asia.
• “They worked the night shift while my team in Redmond worked days,” Berkun says.
• When you’re working remotely or in a different location from other team members, you can’t easily turn to them, ask a question, or make conversation.
• Team members should keep one another informed of their schedules through auto-responders, online statuses , and the team’s shared calendar , as well as daily/weekly/monthly check-ins.
• We found that Same bed, different dreams is what could happen when people in a team design in isolation and forego sufficient alignment with one another.

“When there were 4 people, everyone knew everything. When there are 75 people, that no longer scales,” he says. No matter how independently you can work, and how hard you try to stay connected, you won’t be in the flow of what everyone’s doing unless you have a team chat tool. “At TechCrunch and The Next Web, having a central point of contact is critical,” says Russell. “Tools like Slack, Convo and HipChat make that possible in a way that it never really was a few years ago.”

Another key feature of such team chat apps is the pin option as it helps keep the important documents top of mind and easily accessible. Of course, not everything is best when it comes tocollaborating across multiple time zones. With such a big gap between certain time zones, remote teams will inevitably experience delayed responses and difficulty scheduling meetings. Now this leads me into my next tip, which is really start thinking in multiple time zones. If you’re working with a global team, it’s good to heighten your awareness of what time it is for people in different parts of the world that you’re working with. For instance, I work with Gretchen every single day and I start the work with her at 6 p.m.

Collaboration Superpowers Podcast

In any work environment building relationships fosters trust, increases collaboration, and raises productivity—but it’s especially important for remote teams. Social relationships with colleagues not only combats isolation, but it decreases barriers to asking questions, getting help, and taking risks that are crucial to growth. Teams that thrive working across time zones have clearly defined roles that fit the model of asynchronous work. To build a https://remotemode.net/ 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.

• I was the only team member working from Vietnam, Taiwan, Ireland, Portugal and Estonia, so a few months in, I offered to use my time zone location to the company’s benefit.
• There are a lot of different scenarios that we could play out here, but the thing to keep in mind is try organizing your team so that it’s less painful.
• Of course, not everything is best when it comes tocollaborating across multiple time zones.
• Set up guidelines, tech, and communication expectations with your team.

Some of us do our best work late at night, while others prefer to get up early and spend the late afternoons away from the desk. And while some metropolitan areas offer certain lifestyle perks, other big-city issues—like high costs-of-living—will drive potential employees away.

Get Specific When Discussing Dates And Times With Peers

Group video calls wandered and dragged on for 3 or more hours. If you’re in Denver and the person you’re asking is in Perth, waiting for approval or 100% certainty will slow every decision down by essentially a full day. In addition to working asynchronously at Zapier, I’m also taking some classes outside of work that require asynchronous communications with my classmates. When you regularly need to act without the luxury of a real-time discussion, you learn to adapt.

As mentioned earlier, this can cause misunderstandings that can seriously affect operational processes and cause unnecessary delays. Moreover, a lack of communication across teams carries another set of risks. For one, it threatens to Tips on Working in Different Time Zones disrupt the trust between team members, as there’s not sufficient information and knowledge sharing going around. Of course, differences in locations and backgrounds can also add another layer to the misunderstanding and distrust.

Need More Tips To Keep Yourself Happy On Your Travels?

I could edit all day and send the edits back to the client in my afternoon, just as they got back up and were starting to write again. One thing that I tried out in order to help with the time zone conundrum of a time zone converter was the Google Calendar second time zone option. Like I mentioned above, you want to avoid sending someone a meeting invite and having it pop up for them on a Saturday, or on a national holiday in the country where they live. I had transitioned from working full-time to freelancing when Dan and I set off for our remote work trip around the world to explore how we could use travel to build this website together. Open up Every Time Zone in your web browser for an at-a-glance guide to your time zone as compared to multiple cities, including Tokyo, Berlin, and Dubai. It’s laid out so that each time zone appears relative to one another, and if you register for a free account you’ll be able to customize the cities that show up and the order they’re in.

This way everyone on that calendar will know when you are available for them. Our next tip on how to work across different time zones is adopting or at least trying out what is known as a split shift. It is the simple act of a confused time zone that can lead to major issues such as missed interviews, overdue projects, and more. However, nothing is without its disadvantages or drawbacks. Collaboration can be difficult, as can creating a team bond and thus getting work done. Since the team is distributed across different locations, there is likely no one to see how long you have been active or online.

Meanwhile, if you’re not working in the same country as your broader team, “don’t be afraid to ask for meetings that are outside of others’ timezones.” 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. Make your online meetings more productive and fun with virtual meeting cards. And if you want to learn more about how you can work from anywhere, visit collaborationsuperpowers.com, a website full of tips and best practices for the practical remote worker. “Our team has complete freedom to develop a feature or product they think would benefit our community,” she said.

The biggest challenge of working as an international team is deviating from everything that is considered normal for locally homogeneous businesses. Concepts like constant availability or whole-team meetings are impossible to maintain when colleagues you are supposed to hop on a call with are scattered around the world. Daily standups are the panacea for a lot of things that could otherwise get broken during a product journey. Have a daily standup with your team where they can share updates, share plans for the next day and clarify doubts. It’s a short, crisp meeting where a team can touch base and get a pulse on the overall progress of the project. Unless desired, you should encourage people to work in their choice of time to get the best of them. Unnecessary push to make people work in certain hours may not be in the interest of the project.

Have One Time Where Everybody Meets

And that shows, again, where people are on more of a graph scale. Check out some of our all-time favorite resources for hybrid collaboration.

To work effectively with a time shift, you’ll also need to work in public. In other words, communicate, and make sure everyone knows what you’re working on. The ability to see what others are saying not only gives you insight to how others are working—something you might glean by working together—but it also enables the more fun aspects of working in a team. “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. The ability to hand off work is a productivity benefit, but it’s also motivator since you know you must accomplish tasks so you can hand them off to co-workers at day’s end.

• If your coworker or team worked past their country’s regular workday the last time you spoke, assign this duty to someone else for the next conference call while working remotely in a different time zone.
• Likewise, you should also encourage colleagues to communicate when they’re running into timezone blockers.
• Make sure to always assess each document, guide, or message for clarity.
• Another way to be mindful of different time zones — and disregard the clock — is to default toasynchronous communication.
• MyClientSpot is for freelancers, virtual professionals, and small businesses with remote teams.

How you share will depend on the size and culture of your company, but be sure you have a system for it, so there’s a high signal-to-noise ratio when people post important updates. If you have a video call, record it and share it for folks that weren’t able to make it. That way anyone who missed the meeting due to time zone issues can still stay in the loop and contribute. If you use a group chat tool, communicate in public channels unless it’s a sensitive or personal issue. You might not know everyone who needs to be aware of something or whose help you’ll need, but if you work in public, you increase the odds that they’ll see it. Plus, a massive public database of chats allows teammates to find the answers to their own questions by searching.

Use A Time Zone Converter Website Among Your Online Freelancer Tools

And it may get everyone to start thinking twice about holding meetings when they’re the one clocking in odd hours. Research shows that organizations spend around 15% of their time on meetings. We can only imagine what these numbers mean for distributed teams that need to put extra effort into planning a perfect schedule that won’t disturb the regular work and sleep schedules of the people involved. 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.

• A split shift is when you work one shift that caters to your timezone and then another shift that caters to the timezone of another team.
• These benefits allow your team to work better together and can lead your international teammates to feel more included in your team’s day-to-day work.
• The pressure to be consistently productive each day on one’s own tired out members of our team.
• Well, you have to implement systems which help to systemize every aspect of the virtual office.
• If this half-day concept doesn’t suit you why not use this concept and apply it to your week instead?

With one simple emoji, messages are clear and easy to understand at a glance. These also help when your teammates don’t all speak the same language. As we discussed in our guide on asynchronous communication in remote working environments, asynchronous communication happens “out of sync,” or not at the same time. Does your team like sharing resources via Slack or email? Get everyone using the same channels to keep conversations centralized, organized, and accessible. Keep a dialog open about work-life boundaries and communication windows. Employees should feel comfortable and safe discussing what’s helping or getting in the way of productivity.

More Tiny Tips You Should Know

One time, when we were working remotely and traveling as freelancers in Hanoi, Vietnam, Dan had a cross-time-zone meeting with clients in the US, Australia and somewhere else as well. We’ve noted time zone converters like World Time Buddy in our list of the best apps for travelers and remote workers because it is so crucial. Use a time zone converter website among your online freelancer tools. If Slack seems awfully quiet, it might be because your colleagues in another country are celebrating a holiday. One of the ways you can keep tabs on these is by subscribing to the relevant calendars in Google Calendar. From the web interface, click the plus button next to Other calendars, then Browse calendars of interest, followed by Regional holidays. Now every time you suspect the other side of the world is busy celebrating, you can open your calendar and check if that’s the case, or if there’s some people you need to nag.

In a group chat for a presentation we were working on for class, someone asked a clarifying question about a Gantt chart. I asked them to send me the chart, expecting they’d just drop a link to it in our chat. Instead, they emailed it to me, without cc’ing the rest of the team.

Some regions take lunch at different times, take longer breaks, or don’t work traditional hours. When you can’t just have a quick chat over the coffee pot, it’s important that communication is clear and concise and empathetic. And seriously, with so many choices in how to communicate, there’s really no excuse. With these tips in my back pocket, I hope there will be many, many more time zone adventures. But there was a really bright light with me being in Berlin and the client being stateside.

Strike The Right Balance Between Asynchronous And Synchronous Communications

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. To successfully utilize key principles of asynchronous communication to their advantage, distributed teams need to prioritize efficient, written communication. When working on a report, for example, globally distributed teammates won’t necessarily have the opportunity to ping a coworker and get the missing info right away. This is why it’s paramount to keep detailed written records of all the processes and projects. Make sure to always assess each document, guide, or message for clarity.

There are a lot of benefits to be gained from such diverse teams and here are just a few of those advantages. Global teams are incredibly beneficial, in fact, studies predict that by 2022, 75% of businesses that employ diverse front-line decision-makers will be able to exceed the financial targets they set. Being able to select the best talent regardless of the location is one of the main factors that impacted the entire movement in the first place. There’s a major difference between work habits in Europe, the U.S., Scandinavia, and Southeast Asia.

As someone who’s managed marketing initiatives at companies with remote employees and offices around the world, I’ve seen what successful and unsuccessful international collaboration looks like first hand. 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. Sometimes remote leaders need to do something to foster collaboration between employees in different locations. For situations like this, Bubna schedules a monthly hackathon to work on a shared problem.

Case Studies: How To Work Autonomously And Asynchronously Across Time Zones

CREATE A TEAM AGREEMENT.One of the major points in the team agreement is to always talk in one time zone. So pick one and then have the entire team talk in that time zone.

If it’s absolutely necessary to work during twilight hours, try to feed your body’s need for sleep during the day. Focus on improving your productivity during your working hours. This will help you keep your work from overflowing into your downtime. Most importantly – it will help give your workday a sense of rhythm. A daily routine does wonders for work-life balance because, from the time you wake up, you know what project each part of the day is dedicated to. Constantly reviewing whether the solutions we use are effective streamlines processes and facilitates international collaboration.