5 Etiquette Rules For Working Across Time Zones

This gives everyone an idea of what’s on the itinerary and keeps meetings on track. Test out split shifts or workdays that cater to different timezones. Learn why the GitHub Design Infrastructure team built a dedicated color tool and how they use it to create new color palettes for GitHub. The remote-by-force transition to remote-by-choice is here to stay. Whether it’s preferable to keep your camera on or off during a meeting. It also helps cement the learning they’ve already acquired, as studies show that teaching material is one of the best ways to master it. Of course, there are also share points like Box and Dropbox that can help, too.

• Meetings, and other forms of synchronous communication, have their place.
• Acknowledging the challenges faced with managing remote team members across time zones is the first step to overcoming them.
• When working within different time zones, it is very important to be mindful of your teammates’ time zone.

I spent a week in Florida in February collecting seashells, eating the best doughnuts in existence, and reading at least a book a day. I also put in a few hours each afternoon writing and scheduling client appointments .

Use Time Zones To Your Teams Or Clients Benefit

They help teams working across time zones collaborate effectively, providing easy tracking for projects. Teams should maintain an open dialogue about respecting time zone boundaries.

Plus, each department has a weekly video call to map out that week’s work, and every Thursday we’ll have an all-hands call in order to get everyone together. Planning meetings across time zones might sound so painful that you’d rather just never have meetings—but don’t do that either. That, perhaps, is the greatest reason that it’s tough to add remote work—and especially a time shift—to teams with years of experience working together in an office. It’s absolutely possible to do great work with a dispersed team, but you must plan work accordingly. Break things up into chunks that can be worked on individually, find time to sync back up on what’s been done, and make sure each person on the team can self-direct their work.

Ready To Work Across Time Zones?

If a meeting or event calls for certain colleagues to wake up early or stay up late, try to make up for the inconvenience in some way. You could give colleagues who have to stay up late an hour off the following morning or expense coffee and donuts for those coming into the office early. With74% of professionalsexpecting remote work to become the new standard for business, technology providers are working hard to provide viable solutions. International teams can benefit from the variety of virtual tools available, from messaging apps to cloud storage solutions. Explore the available options and consider which tools will work best for your team.

• If your event happens to fall out of office hours for any guests, you’ll get a notification letting you know so you can modify it accordingly.
• Moreover, a lack of communication across teams carries another set of risks.
• Maybe your sales team is in Chicago and your dev team is in Dublin.
• In 2006 Sam took a lead role in management of the company as CEO.
• Hiring globally means you can get the best engineers, designers, marketers, etc. in the world and not just in your city, time zone, or even country.

Check out our remote jobs, leverage our remote company database, or sign up and create your free company profile. GitLab might be the world’s largest fully distributed company with 1,400+ remote workers in 65+ countries. More than 30 million users and 100,000 organizations from startups to global enterprise organizations use GitLab to deliver great software at new speeds. Flexible workers hours have been proven to reduce burnout, stress levels, and psychological distress while increasing job satisfaction. They can also unlock more productivity by allowing team members to work when they’re most productive whether that be in the morning, afternoon, night, or a mix. Remind remote team members that social interaction doesn’t have to come from co-workers or consider offering a co-working space stipend as a remote employee benefit.

Hire A Head Of Remote

Only users with admin level access can change the workplace time zone. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams to execute and optimize marketing efforts for both company and client campaigns. Before sending a resource to your international teammates, read through it from their perspective and ask yourself what questions they might have. Remember, too little information could result in a day of wasted work as they wait working across time zones for an answer. Before you schedule another virtual meeting, consider whether you can make the same information accessible in another way. Having a strong resource library of documents and directives can answer a lot of colleagues’ questions without relying on simultaneous communication. Google Calendar settings will also ask if you want to “Ask to update my primary time zone to current location,” and you can choose to check this box, or not.

Employees no longer need to be in the same location to collaborate on projects. With these new changes come new challenges to face when you have a global team. The most important rule for successful https://remotemode.net/ communication across time zones is to maintain a flexible approach to your work. With remote team members, you won’t have the benefit of everyone working on the same thing simultaneously.

Always Ask: Is This Meeting Necessary?

Remote workers can benefit from collaborating more effectively and efficiently while fostering strong relationships with dispersed peers. Talk with your supervisor if you have collaboration concerns or suggestions. Trying to get multiple people across various time zones on the same page for a meeting can be tricky, but World Time Buddy can help. Add up to four locations , and you’ll be able to see how meeting times fall across each place.

• We post thoughts and updates about team projects on Slack, regardless of who’s online.
• To prevent this common hurdle of working across time zones, organizations can set an official time zone for all team members to reference when scheduling meetings or setting deadlines.
• It was first suggested by Andreas Klinger, CTO at On Deck, and pioneered by GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij and Darren Murph.
• You pick the cities where everyone lives, and the date for your meeting, and it’ll show in green, yellow, and red the times that are best, not too bad, and terrible for everyone.
• Have a clear, common purpose and make sure everyone knows what that is.

If you are working with any offshore teams in different time zones, you may be wondering how you should schedule a meeting with someone in another time zone. If you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance you’re either looking to find a remote job, already working remotely, or looking to hire remote employees. While it may seem strange to let people work at all times of the day, you’re already going to be doing that indirectly by working across time zones. When it comes to working remotely with teams across different time zones, the most important thing is to be mindful, empathetic, and respectful.

Productivity Boost

Hours are flexible, work locations are far and wide, and meetings need to be virtual. In fact, a single meeting might consist of employees from three or four countries – all with different time zones and schedules. Encourage employees to block off the times outside of their working hours on their calendars. Establish a process for requesting meetings outside of someone’s regular working hours. Of course they’ll have to happen from time to time, but it works best if you ask them what day can work best for a late night in advance. Be flexible and understand that, as a manager, you may sometimes need to hold meetings outside your own core working hours to accommodate team members in other time zones. Once you’ve managed remote employees within the same ZIP code, managing employees in other time zones generally isn’t that different.

To learn more about tools and software that can help global and remote teams, check out this helpful list. When international collaboration is done poorly, you might run into frustration from colleagues, all sorts of misalignment, and a sense of personal and professional disconnection across teams. These negatives aren’t helpful for retaining employees or building a positive company culture. As remote work and satellite offices become more common, marketers are discovering that global teams can be incredibly beneficial to a company’s culture and ability to hire diverse talent. Especially if your headquarters is the place where most employees work, time zones can quickly be incorrectly assumed, and meetings can be derailed as a result. If you have a large distributed team, you might not need to try so hard to stay connected.

Behavioral And Technical Interview Questions Asked By Top Tech Companies

As much as there are challenges, there are numerous benefits that ultimately outweigh the hassle. Sometimes, scheduling a meeting at a time that works for all timezones is easier said than done. For example, if you’re based in the U.S. and have teams in Asia and California, finding a time that fits into everyone’s schedules and usual work hours can be tricky. Expecting your teammates to be “always-on” doesn’t create the best culture and might make them feel disrespected. So, to avoid this, minimize the messages you send after hours and be patient if you don’t immediately get a response back. Odds are, a great teammate will get back to you when they begin working the next day.

• There are more time zone tools at TimeandDate.com, too, so be sure to check it out if you want to find local times around the world for your event, convert times for any location, and more.
• Different perspectives and broad ideas can move the company’s vision forward and scale up the business by a considerable margin.
• Sure, a team brainstorming session is most effective over a video conference, however, a general weekly update doesn’t necessarily require a 5 a.m.
• This is especially true if you’re the lone team member in a completely different time zone.

It was first suggested by Andreas Klinger, CTO at On Deck, and pioneered by GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij and Darren Murph. Ideally, your company will set up Google Drive, Dropbox, or whatever file-sharing system you use so files are automatically accessible to the entire company. If they can’t access the file, they’ll have to wait for you to be online again. Meetings, and other forms of synchronous communication, have their place. The need to be online at specific hours on specific days means people don’t have control over the structure of their workdays, and never-ending meetings can force people to work longer hours to get work done. By embracing different time zones, you can build a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

In her spare time, she enjoys attending cultural events, and spending time in nature and with her pets. Kelly supports the Employee Benefits team in an Administrative Assistant role supporting clients with their health benefit and open enrollment activities. With this background, Tim brings a sincere, unique approach to understanding his client’s needs and believes that a proactively managing risk can lead to lower overall costs, not just lower premiums. She utilizes a proactive approach to assist our clients in designing, developing, and maintaining an excellent benefits program in order to attract and retain the best talent. Scheduling a meeting or planning a project is definitely easier when you actually know if your colleagues are out for lunch or just had their morning coffee.