Building Relationships For Teams Working Across Time Zones Workplaceless July 7, 2023

From setting boundaries to keeping the information accessible, these recommendations will help you build a successful, collaborative international team. If your team is stretched across different time zones, they may have some great ideas about scheduling meetings or gatherings in the future. Use a feedback form to collect ideas, suggestions, and positive feedback to guide your future plans. Remember that if you’re using a team meeting or staff meeting template, you may need to manually include a section for feedback in your agenda. Google Calendar looks basic at first glance, but it’s packed with features that make it great for remote teams—or really any team.

If left unattended, this malpractice can take root and degenerate further into team silos. If each of your international teams keeps a 9-to-5 schedule in their own time zone, it could be impossible to communicate directly with some of them. Instead, experiment with different shifts to keep the conversation flowing between teams. Options could include one or more days per week on which employees work a half-day in the office, then remotely at night or early in the morning. This means their time is equally distributed between their own office’s time zone and another team’s time zone.

Collaborating Across Different Time Zones? Easy Peasy.

In today’s workplace, diversity is more often than not the normal modus operandi. Modern leaders understand that diversity breeds creativity, provides different perspectives to a global customer landscape, and allows us to ultimately build better product for a global audience. The best way to work remotely is by trying to replicate most of the things you’d https://remotemode.net/blog/10-tips-on-working-in-different-time-zones/ do in an office job. For example, you should always reserve a place separate from your bedroom, try to maintain a routine, take breaks, etc. Conducting meetings for a group of 10 or more busy individuals may be difficult; doing so for a globally scattered team in… These moments will strengthen your team’s bond, making working remotely more productive.

The logistics of working out the perfect meeting schedule that aligns with your team’s work hours can often be outright impossible. It will also ensure that you’re available to your international department without needing to stay up all hours of the day. The lack of physical presence makes it easier for remote workers to lose connection with their team. This can be especially challenging when working with a distributed team in different time zones. 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.

Tips for Working With Teams in Different Timezones

The weekly goals meeting is a good chance to give your colleagues time and room to think about the work beforehand and come up with solutions or alternatives. As questions arise, figure out a mutually agreeable time to meet and discuss specific issues. Without holding real-time meetings, you may send fast messages, explain new methods, and clarify complex topics with your team. Everyone can look through these at their leisure, take notes, and return to your instructions or ask questions afterward. Trello, Basecamp, and Asana are project management tools that keep track of what everyone is working on as it progresses through the pipeline.

Consider working a half-day at the office and then working remotely one or more days a week at night or early in the morning. Often called split shifts, this involves working part of the day during your time zone, then working part of the day during the time zone of another team. A shared team calendar might be helpful as everyone can see each other’s availability. However, from a business standpoint, it is hard to argue against operating across multiple time zones.

How to Manage a Team across Multiple Time Zones

Cloud-based technology allowed a number of industries to adopt some form of remote work model. Naturally, organizations jumped at the opportunity to select from a global pool of talent which is, essentially, the key factor that led to the formation of teams that span across different time zones. Still, as much as it might be pretty seamless for a tech company to adjust their operations to working across time zones, for some industries and teams, this practice is simply not viable.

Now if you want to make yourself aware, of one of the tips that I recommend for doing that is visualize time zones. And there is a great app that one of the buffer developers developed called timezone.io. And that actually visually shows on one screen where all of your teammates are in the world and their time zone, very, very good-looking tool. When we work with people from across the globe, we often have to work at unusual times.