It might work out great for you, if you like to work nontraditional hours anyway. Software engineer Kevin Furbish found this to be true about his remote team at Intuit. «Many of us tend to work crazy hours, which mitigates being in different time zones.» The best job for you might not be in your hometown, and you might work better when you aren’t shackled to a 9-to-5 workday. And that’s ok on a distributed team, as long as you can manage the time shift.
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). There is a false perception that remote workers are lazy, taking every opportunity to slack off because nobody is watching.
Challenges of Working Remotely in Different Time Zones: 6 Strategies that Work
This allows your employees to stay up-to-date with what other people are doing each day. Working across time zones brings unique challenges rarely encountered within the more traditional work models. As the rewards largely outweigh the drawbacks, it’s worth exploring the best team practices provided above to make working across time zones work. They will help you https://remotemode.net/ craft your perfect blend of flexibility, asynchronous work, and inclusive mindset to push your distributed team towards perpetual success. 🎓 To learn more about the pros and cons of asynchronous communication for remote teams, be sure to check out our in-depth guide on the blog. So, what is the difference between global teams that succeed, and those that don’t?
Your team will likely get more done, and you’ll be able to provide better support for your customers—but you’ll also need to figure out how to make the world feel a bit smaller. The rest of the year, we manage to work together across 17 time zones, using Slack, Zoom, and some sheer effort to all stay connected. It’s not all 9-5 anymore with remote teams, with some works preferring to wake up in the early morning to get a head start before the day begins, and others starting late but working in the evening. When you meet frequently with the same people, take time to understand when they work remotely. Time zones are geographical locations where people experience similar daylight hours at any given time throughout the year. This is foundational to working in a distributed team spread across time zones where quick check-ins aren’t feasible.
Limited opportunities for employee effort recognition
When aiming to plan a productive meeting, make sure to get everyone’s input before moving forward with a meeting time. A common assumption is that someone’s hours are a ‘standard’ 9-5 or 9-6 pm; however, location is not always equal to working hours. This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Then the next time you organize a meeting, share the burden and make it easy for them and harder for everyone else. This is why study after study after study has shown working remotely in a different time zone remote workers to be more productive than their in-office colleagues. By embracing different time zones, you can build a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
Check how to work in different timezones.
As part of an effort to upskill the entire enterprise to better work with data and gen AI tools, they also set up a data and AI academy, which the dispatchers and service operators enrolled in as part of their training. Working across time zones requires a certain level of flexibility and compromise. Sometimes, you may need to adjust your schedule to accommodate a meeting or deadline for a colleague in a different time zone. Be open to these adjustments, as they can help create a more harmonious and productive work environment.
- Do you want to improve your message writing skills when your team is working across time zones?
- If you plan to schedule team-wide meetings, be mindful of everyone’s schedule.
- A great way to introduce a more async, documentation culture is to build an employee handbook.
- Having teams across time zones is the greatest investment any company could venture into.
- Another unfocused effort we often see is when companies move to incorporate gen AI into their customer service capabilities.
- To help your distributed workforce connect, consider facilitating live meetups when possible.