How Our Remote Team Manages Collaboration Across 9 Time Zones

The moment I want to wrap up communication and get back to work, I just slowly start to lift my headphones, smile, nod, and turn my head back to my screen. Don’t tell my co-workers, but I’m not usually even listening to music when I wear my over-the-ear headphones. best practices for working across time zones It’s more of a subliminal focus mechanism, like putting on armor or gearing up to get my head in the game. “Comfort is the journey to enlightenment and outcomes.” – Said me after 2-weeks of sitting on the worst chairs for extended lengths of time.

• On the web , click the cog icon , then Settings and Show world clock to configure one or more world clocks that will be visible on the left-hand side of the calendar interface.
• Even though there’s a great distance between each other, the time zones are generally closer.
• Your employees need to understand what you expect of them on a day-to-day basis.
• Set your current time zone, and save the time zones you work with most to easily switch between them.

Give particular consideration to your progress tracker software, which will enable you to build strategies in real time and monitor the progress of colleagues across the globe. This will allow global workers to keep on the same page with each project, leaving one another notes for seamless handover. For freelancers and anyone working remotely, there are many challenges for working with clients or coworkers in different time zones.

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Diversity and inclusion drive innovation and positively impact overall business targets within remote companies that span across time zones. Understandably, this approach largely supports innovation and ultimately leads to more profit in the long run. In fact, one prediction by Gartner shows that 75% of companies employing diverse decision-making teams can expect to outperform their business objectives in 2022. Moreover, one McKinsey study found that the more ethnically and racially diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% when it comes to financial targets.

• Moreover, a lack of communication across teams carries another set of risks.
• Everyone will have what they need to hit the ground running as soon as they clock in for the day, no matter when that happens to be.
• Lucidchart is the intelligent diagramming application that empowers teams to clarify complexity, align their insights, and build the future—faster.
• When it comes to working remotely with teams across different time zones, the most important thing is to be mindful, empathetic, and respectful.
• With20% of remote workersreporting feelings of loneliness, being mindful of inclusion can go a long way to keeping your colleagues invested and happy at work.

If you only need an internet connection, you can move to so many places. Crowded city centers emptied out as people opted for communities where people had a little more space. For those living in tiny apartments, working https://remotemode.net/ from bed couldn’t be a long-term option, so many people found themselves looking for a new place. People even tested out the possibility of working from a foreign country or becoming more of a digital nomad.

Meeting Management

Likewise, you should also encourage colleagues to communicate when they’re running into timezone blockers. These discussions will better help your team learn how to strategize and identify respectful or empathetic solutions to timezone-related challenges.

GitHub Desktop 3.0 brings better integration with your GitHub Pull Requests. You can now receive real time notifications and review the status of your check runs for your pull request. Especially if you’re new to management or have a new team member, a “norming session” is a great way to make sure your team is functioning on the same wavelength.

Benefits Of Working Across Time Zones

A time difference gives you the option to work without distraction that can lead to improved productivity. This allows you to work on projects and products continuously, passing them off to other team members when your workday is over. There are a lot of benefits to be gained from such diverse teams and here are just a few of those advantages. Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support. And if you’re not remote, I hope that you’ve come away with some tips that you can use to work with your international partners, vendors and customers.

Sometimes, that time might be in the early morning or late evening due to time zone differences. Working remotely in a different time zone across countries and cultures is another aspect of internationally distributed teams. This may be a very important asset in terms of views and ideas, but it can also be a difficulty if it isn’t acknowledged. Scheduling a meeting at a time that works for all time zones might be more difficult than it appears. Finding a time that works with everyone’s schedules and normal work hours might be difficult if you’re located in the United States and have teams in Asia and California, for example. To ensure smooth sailing for everyone, IT and customer service teams must be able to collaborate seamlessly across shifts and time zones. Teams distributed across the globe are scheduled so that there is always someone on the clock to provide support.

Tip #5: Use The Right Tools And Software To Ease Processes

It is therefore important to note that communication is the backbone of every organization, even more important to companies that have employees that work across time zones. It saves time, money, and resources are allocated effectively and put into efficient use. In order for the company to be effective and at the same time productive, adaptation will be the key to unlocking that potential.

• However, with tact, mindfulness, and flexibility, you canbuild a teamthat’s diverse, dedicated, and ready to take on global business together.
• This will only get more difficult over time if you aren’t willing to make some changes to attract and retain millennial employees.
• Although it can get challenging at times to manage a geographically dispersed team, there are still many more benefits to the approach.
• By being aware of times and locations, along with good communication, companies can become global workforces, working together no matter where they are.
• Each company will have its own guidelines on where employees can be.

See how Lucidchart can be a powerful solution for collaborating and staying aligned while working remotely or from different offices. Check out our list of essential tools for improving remote collaboration. If you’re looking for a virtual water-cooler, Slack can be used to chat about non-work-related topics like favorite TV shows and sharing pictures of your pets. You have the option to chat one-on-one with people and attach pictures, files, and more. It’s a great way to get a conversation going and have a single spot for Q&A and feedback on different ideas.

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One thing to keep in mind about how to overcome time zone differences is to be transparent about where you’re located , but moreover, your working hours. 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. Synchronous communication (“sync”) is when discussions are conducted in real-time, allowing for immediate responses and feedback between colleagues.

You want to be sure you and your direct report are on the same page about who is doing what, when, and why. Consider asking them to draft monthly, quarterly, and annual goals, along with any other useful performance metrics and milestones. Maintain consistent check-ins to see how these goals are progressing and to answer any questions. A huge chunk of our onboarding training at 360Learning, for instance, is 100 percent asynchronous —and of course, remote-friendly.

Fortunately, Slack also allows you to see the time zone of the person you’re messaging, which is helpful since a lot of our team travels in addition to working in different locations. Successfully resolve time zone challenges as a distributed virtual team with these tips and best practices and keep your team collaborating productively. One main issue of distributed teams is that it can be difficult to communicate in real-time, and certain things just don’t make sense on email. One thing you could do is have a flexible schedule at certain points during the day. If you’re a remote team, I hope that this post has given you some ideas to help you do better work across time zones. Ultimately, the most effective way we’ve found to keep asynchronous communication flowing is to keep it simple, and use a single project management tool.

While remote, you may be noticing meetings have piled onto your calendar. Go in with a documented agenda, questions, and especially with an understanding of the purpose and ideal outcome of the meeting. 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.

These benefits aren’t going away with the pandemic for teams operating in international virtual offices. While you still want to be cognizant of others’ time zones, setting one official time zone for your company can help alleviate confusion.

When working with individuals in different locations and different time zones you need to know when to be flexible. You may think acknowledging time zones goes without saying but often times it is overlooked and this can lead to miscommunication and confusion. Let’s look at some tips and tricks you can adopt for your distributed team to get the most out of the benefits such teams offer and thus bypass a lot of the disadvantages.