How To Address Different Time Zone Challenges in Remote Work Setting?

As a freelancer, especially if you’re working as an individual contributor, other members of the team or group may forget where you’re located. This is especially hard if you tend to move around from city to city or country to country, or if you just moved, and crossed time zones, like from Florida to Texas, for example. Aside from specifically discussing timezone-related needs and boundaries as needed, you can also mark your standard work hours on a team calendar — while encouraging colleagues to do the same. While creating processes that allow employees to work in different timezones is logistically beneficial, on a deeper level, it also makes it easier for diverse global talent to join your team. When you have a successful game plan, you’re regularly able to video chat with colleagues, hear their thoughts, and gain insight into what the workplace is like on the other side of the world.

Furthermore, you will be able to stay in touch with your international department without staying up all night. Suppose you work in one country but half your team is located in another. 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. When you have a colleague in Portugal and another in India, it’s harder to keep track of time. Additionally, team members can find it harder to collaborate in an asynchronous environment, and it can take a while for them to adjust.

Use an online calendar.

Engineering teams, in particular, require different types of meetings along various stages. At the same time, whenever you’re in a meeting you’re technically not getting any focused work done. If you want to work remotely in sync with the North American economy, and you want to avoid time zone obstacles, we recommend Latin America.

You’ll likely work shifts that you didn’t as an office employee, so prepare a few tricks to stay awake at work. Since you work with remote teams worldwide, you should familiarize yourself with the holidays observed in other countries. It’s disrespectful to downplay another country’s major holiday just because you don’t follow it. Make a habit of using military time and specifying time zones when scheduling meetings.

Where it gets really tricky – personal factors

Before COVID, members would fly over to the location considered home base. We formed project teams flexibly across locations, and the flexibility afforded us designers the opportunity to get immersed in projects and get to know the culture of the other locations. That’s why corporations constantly look for ways to work successfully across different time zones. Tools like the World Clock Meeting Planner help you plug in all the locations of your distributed team to see where you have overlap (areas in green across all locations). Once you have signed up with Turing, you will get access to the best and the most talented remote developers from the globe who have been sourced and pre-vetted for a Silicon Valley bar. So go ahead and create the dream developer team by leveraging the power and technology Turing provides.

These suggestions will help you to effectively manage remote workers’ time zones to optimize your team’s productivity. Working with a distributed team can be challenging at first because it’s difficult to build the kind of rapport that comes naturally when working in an office setting. It takes extra effort for remote teams to stay on task without face-to-face communication. As a remote worker, you surely realized by now how clear communication is quintessential.

Remote work classification on the basis of time zones

In his spare time, he runs a YouTube channel, podcast, and blog focused on strategy and management. Many Heads of Remote will spend time in both worlds, improving the internal experience while advocating for remote-first beyond the organization. But the biggest benefit might be how much it cuts off onboarding new employees who can simply read the archives and get up to speed on key decisions, culture, and work styles. I work for a big tech company that https://remotemode.net/ has an office in NYC, but it’s mainly sales so I wouldn’t be able to meet others that are related to any of my 9-5 work or likely into tech. This worked out well, except if I wanted to do touristy things that were only open in the morning, because I couldn’t always get up quite that early going to bed at 2am or later. It wasn’t realistic to try to sleep right at 10pm either, as I was too wound up from work and needed the time to relax before crashing.

• One of the best things about Help Scout is that they publish how they work and their post on how to build a globally remote team that really works is a great example.
• Companies can have multiple benefits or face challenges when team members work remotely in different time zones.
• Abi is one of the co-founders of Himalayas where he focuses on product and growth.
• Other moments, like grabbing lunch with colleagues, are a great way to break up the day.
• When scheduling meetings, tools like Doodle or Calendly can help you find a time that works for everyone.
• These moments didn’t require planning, and were crucial to helping us agree and get on the same page about what needed to be done.

It’s crucial that you adopt a remote-first mindset, document decisions clearly and concisely for people who are unable to attend, and record the meeting. Ideally, you’ll write a memo before each meeting to help attendees know what to expect and how to prepare. You’ll be surprised how many meetings aren’t needed if you do this. Working in an office (or with the same work hours) is filled with impromptu moments that break up your day, many of which are unwanted distractions. Other moments, like grabbing lunch with colleagues, are a great way to break up the day. A lot will depend how sensitive the work is time-wise but there are numerous ways you can feel things in one potential solution is a virtual personal assistant.

A time difference gives you the freedom to code or write without distraction. Then, when the rest of the team is online, you’ll be more focused at what you need to discuss with them before it’s time to get offline. Sometimes design terminology to describe our process differed between our own studio locations, making it hard to communicate ideas precisely. Daylight specializes in end-to-end projects that require research and strategy up-front and buildable solutions towards the end. We adopt the human-centered design process, which invites us to start with open-ended questions and be inspired by the people we are designing for.

Love the traveling experience, hostels, seeing new places, new cocktails etc etc. I am planning to travel to Mexico City next weekend and stay for 7-10 days there. And if cafes work, do they work as usual or only for take away&delivery? Sit down with clients/the boss and define https://remotemode.net/blog/10-tips-on-working-in-different-time-zones/ a realistic availability timeframe. If they aren’t willing to be flexible, you need to re-think your travel plans. Here are some popular ways to use Slack with app automation tool Zapier to automatically share activity in your channels so everyone knows what’s going on.

Working Remotely in Different Time Zones: 6 Tips for Remote Work Success

You’ll need to account for different time zones, work styles, and cultural norms in your management style. Therefore, it’s reasonable to switch meeting schedules every month or quarter. This ensures that no single team is forced to make constant sacrifices to stay linked.

• Time zones can really keep us apart and it can keep us from connecting with each other as much as we need to or want to.
• If you work across time zones, this can result in having more people working throughout the day on different tasks.
• The app provides a timeline view of the employee working hours so you can check out how their times overlap.
• On that note, as a warning, guesswork can be a huge time-suck with remote work.
• If you’re in a different time zone, don’t expect people to be available during your working hours.
• On many HubSpot marketing teams, if we schedule a meeting that requires people in other timezones to wake up early or stay up late, we try to be empathetic to those colleagues in some way.

M work is more projects/results based and my clients know to allow 24 hours for me to respond. I was worried about it at first too, but as long as you stay in communication, no one knows or cares where you are (at least for me), they care about their tasks being done in general. In fact, being 9 hours ahead of CA has worked out better than I expected. I also am not available via phone, it is really disruptive for me to be interrupted, so I don’t accept random phone calls. But even still, if you want to make a distributed team work, you need to accept a time shift.