Working Across Different Time Zones: Best Practices & Tools

Even if you’re working with someone in the same country, you need to make sure that the deadline for an assignment is clear. The first step is to determine which day of the week is ideal for the team’s point person to interact with you in order to set expectations and keep the team on track. Starting with async standups via Slack or weekly progress reports from team leads through recorded video messages, you can get started. The goal is to use your valuable overlap time for the most high-value tasks and leave the rest for email or Slack. Asynchronous work must take precedence while working with a dispersed team. When forming a virtual team that spans borders, teach each team member about cultural communication difficulties.

It makes scheduling meetings difficult, but we can also hand off work to keep the wheels turning 24/7. 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. 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. Asynchronous communication («async») is when information is sent at separate times with a delay in between. For example, writing an email, sending a Loom video, or leaving a voice message for someone so they can respond to it whenever works best with their schedule (and yours).

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Clearly define goals, roles, responsibilities, and deadlines so that everyone on the team knows what needs to be done and by when. This might mean taking breaks throughout the day to stretch, meditate, or exercise and setting aside time for hobbies and other non-work-related activities. Finally, another important aspect is establishing a dedicated workspace and avoiding working from your bed or couch. By creating a physical separation between work and home life, you can help to maintain a healthy balance and avoid burnout. To overcome this substantial obstacle, it’s important to utilize technology to its fullest potential. This might mean using instant messaging platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams to stay in touch throughout the day or scheduling regular check-ins to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

«You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. Finding these people frees the rest of your team to work more and manage less,» the book explains. The rest of the year, we manage to work together across 17 time zones, using Slack, Zoom, and working remotely in a different time zone some sheer effort to all stay connected. Indonesia and Bali have a time zone that is even later than the Southeast Asian one. This is the worst time for getting on calls with people in the Americas. So unless you’re a night owl, it’s impossible to sync well for communication.

Pros and Cons of Working With Teams In Different Time Zones

By taking care of yourself, you’ll be better equipped to handle the challenges of working remotely through various time zones and enjoy traveling the world. When scheduling meetings, tools like SimplyBook.me or Calendly can help you find a time that works for everyone. Remember to also take advantage of video conferencing tools like Zoom or Google Meet for face-to-face communication, which can help build rapport and trust among team members.

• 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.
• You can make great progress in working on the business, as opposed to being involved in it.
• Teams can prevent misunderstanding, misalignment, and delays this way.
• The post outlines how to build an effective time zone agnostic team as a company leader, people manager, colleague, and as a geographically remote person.
• You can also try asking them what times they are available during, and when their day starts/ends so you know how much overlap there will be with yours.
• The main project management tools include Trello, Basecamp, and Asana, which keep track of what everyone is working on as it progresses through the pipeline.

In these tools, we can log what we’ve done, what we’re doing or questions and comments we have and know that other team members can read and comment later on their own schedule. Using these tools to keep time zones top of mind makes sure that all team members have an equal opportunity to work smarter, not harder, and that they can engage or disengage when they want. Possibly the simplest tip of all is also the one that can be the hardest to keep top of mind.

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On that note, as a warning, guesswork can be a huge time-suck with remote work. Sometimes the messages my team sent on Slack were vague or confusing and I’d find myself approaching it like trying to decipher code. Be upfront with what confused you and state how you interpreted the message in your response back. Turn your kindness and understanding knob up about 15% when you’re remote. It might feel odd, but the space for miscommunication and misunderstanding can compound. If you’re new to working remotely and are feeling unsure about it, then read on for some of the lessons I learned about achieving remote success.

• In this article, we’ll give you several New Year’s resolution templates to get you started.
• Since the pandemic, her team of 16 employees has been working fully remotely, and now travel twice a year for company-wide meetings.
• It gave me an opportunity to fire up the laptop and get to work whenever I had a minute.
• And while some metropolitan areas offer certain lifestyle perks, other big-city issues—like high costs-of-living—will drive potential employees away.
• A remote team’s culture is conveyed in what you think (your values) and demonstrated in how you behave every day (your actions).