You can avoid misunderstandings by making your office hours visible in your email signature, work chat profile, LinkedIn account, and Google profile. You can, however, overcome these challenges with the right tools and approaches. And that gives a visual overview of all the time zones in the world at the same time.
- Using them is also an effective way to share meeting notes, create consensus and gather feedback.
- Use the Show a second time zone in Day and Week view and, if desired, Show a third time zone in Day and Week view controls to add additional time zones to your calendar display.
- Managing a global team is more complicated than managing one that works from the same office.
- That’s what The Year Without Pants author, Berkun, encountered when he worked at Automattic.
- Research shows that organizations spend around 15% of their time on meetings.
Remote companies that embrace multiple time zones must rely on asynchronous communication. For background, async communication happens when information is exchanged without the expectation of an immediate response. Teams are expanding not only in size and demand, but also across geographic areas. Depending on how far apart team members are located, there could be several different time zones to consider when scheduling, planning, and meeting together. Successfully working across time zones requires leaning into async practices and remote collaboration tools, as well as building and nurturing relationships across different time zones.
Know your remote team’s working hours
Having management or points of communication in those opposite time zones can help address any issues that may arise while the rest of the company is asleep. It can also help to have monitoring software that will let people create schedules, log the work they are performing, or create help tickets that can be addressed when the plans shift. Of course, if you can’t afford to fly your entire team to a location very often, you can turn to virtual team-building events to keep up the team spirit in the meantime. You can invite your team members to join a private group or a public channel in the team chat app you use — for example, you can name the channel #group-activities, #team_fun_times, or simply, #team-building. There, you can suggest interesting team activities and play fun team-building games designed for virtual team settings. Just make sure that the timing for these activities works for the schedules of everyone involved.
Even though I double-check and I’m constantly aware of it and I’m supposedly a pro, even I get time zones wrong every once in a while. That’s a very simple time zone check that you can do with yourself in just one other time. The next one is worldtimebuddy.com, and that is for scheduling meetings with people in different time zones.
Still Looking For The Perfect Team-Building Activity?
Other moments, like grabbing lunch with colleagues, are a great way to break up the day. A remote worker must be a self-starter who can continue working without someone watching them. They must manage their time and energy wisely, which can be challenging when working from home.
For asynchronous collaboration to work, teams need clear processes and guidelines on hand at all times to get a clear direction and understanding of priorities, boundaries, and goals. With the limited opportunities for verbal communication and even virtual meetings across time zones, distributed teams need to rely on written and video records to obtain all the information. Additionally, team members can create a shared document with their work schedules highlighting no-contact hours to ensure clear boundaries are being set and respected.
Con: It takes more effort to stay in sync
Start by culling synchronous communication like daily stand-ups and instead move toward written status updates. You’ll be amazed by how much can be replaced by a written memo or message. Async communication allows people to process the information on their own time and respond at their own convenience, reducing the number of interruptions people receive. However, it’s becoming increasingly hard to argue against the benefits of remote work. Yes, there are challenges but the benefits ultimately outweigh the hassle.
- As the saying goes in the United States, “Spring forward. Fall back.”
- Speaking of connection among teammates, working across time zones makes it almost impossible to keep the team spirit and social engagement up.
- It is common to waste a lot of time waiting for confirmation when booking appointments or meetings with remote team members..A time zone difference makes it even more difficult to get a real-time response.
- As a result of creating a wiki, you’ll be able to create transparency and stimulate a continuous flow of ideas and feedback.
- For background, async communication happens when information is exchanged without the expectation of an immediate response.
If you want to learn more about team agreements, then go back to episode number 42. One of the items in the team agreement https://remotemode.net/ is to always talk in one time zone. So pick one time zone and then just have the entire team talk in that time zone.
Facilitating Effective Online Meetings
During onboarding, make sure your communication policies and collaboration tools are properly defined and communicated. These rules can be reviewed and referred to by employees, so they know what to do and what is expected of them. When working with teams in different working remotely in a different time zone time zones, the most important thing to remember is to be mindful, empathic, and courteous. Explore our database of team building activities in 3,000+ cities in 27 countries! Some of the most well-known apps are Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, Trello, Zoho, and Teamwork.