The following best practices will help SMB employers navigate these challenges and reap all the benefits of remote work. Many business leaders are re-calibrating and tailoring their operations to best support a dispersed workforce. Here we’ll explore several tips for SMB leaders and managers to accommodate employees working across time zones. That doesn’t mean we still don’t have a lot to learn about working collectively and supporting each other in a hybrid world, though. Take it from HubSpot Engineering Lead Jakub Derda, who has years of experience leading distributed teams. Therefore, being open to different work schedules or adjusting your workday to accommodate different timezones will help create a middle ground.
As remote work and distributed teams are becoming more common, organizations are looking into ways to optimize their structure and operations to better align with the demands of diverse teams https://remotemode.net/. So, in today’s blog, let me walk you through the best practices and working remotely tips and tools for companies having employees from different work time zones. But throughout my two weeks of asynchronous work and subsequent two weeks of PTO, I never felt any resentment or resistance from coworkers. In fact, my teammates seemed excited for my trip and eager to make our schedule differences work—a testament to a culture that prizes flexibility and full lives outside of work. Managing teams across multiple time zones seems to be one of the most common frustrations for many of the remote and hybrid employees that I’ve worked with. When push comes to shove, however, it comes down to creating guidelines for your business to help get everyone on the same page and to work together in the best way possible.
Is Daylight Saving Time taken into account?
Planning meetings across time zones might sound so painful that you’d rather just never have meetings—but don’t do that either. That, perhaps, is the greatest reason that it’s tough to add remote work—and especially a time shift—to teams with years of experience working together in an office. It’s absolutely possible to do great work with a dispersed team, but you must plan work accordingly. Break things up into chunks that can be worked on individually, find time to sync back up on what’s been done, and make sure each person on the team can self-direct their work. If you’re always waiting for someone to tell you what to do next, and that someone’s asleep while you’re working, you’ll never get anything done. That’s why the most crucial part of building a remote team is hiring self-directed workers—”managers of one,” as the Basecamp team calls them in their book Rework.
When your global teammates feel like their schedule is respected, they might feel happier at their job, less stressed, or have an easier time tuning out of work communication outside of their main work hours. Ultimately, these things will help boost job retention, productivity, and your team’s overall performance. When working with a distributed team, you don’t have to limit yourself to hiring locally. Instead of settling for local talent, remote workers give your company access to the best people in the world no matter where they are located. They’re proudly a remote-first company and took full advantage of remote collaboration long before coronavirus. They’re also huge advocates of remote and asynchronous work and recognized early that when implemented effectively, remote collaboration is the key to innovation in the competitive software development landscape.
Establish Everyone’s Time Zone and Preferred Work Hours
If so, then you know the challenges in staying on the same page that come with working remotely. Find the perfect .NET developer for your organization with our comprehensive .NET developer job description template. Outline specific responsibilities and qualifications, and learn about best practices for attracting the right candidates for the role.
Expecting your teammates to be “always-on” doesn’t create the best culture and might make them feel disrespected. So, to avoid this, minimize the messages you send working remotely in a different time zone after hours and be patient if you don’t immediately get a response back. Odds are, a great teammate will get back to you when they begin working the next day.
Find A Team Building Event
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- For example, New Zealand’s two main islands have the same local time, but the South Island geographically extends into a different “ideal” time zone.
- When international collaboration is done poorly, you might run into frustration from colleagues, all sorts of misalignment, and a sense of personal and professional disconnection across teams.
- If you have an extremely large team or you host calls with lots of external participants, it’s important to make sure everyone can join.
- An employee handbook is a written document that outlines the company’s mission, culture, core values, policies, procedures, teams, best practices, and any other information employees need to do their work.
- (If you’re a developer yourself and want something similar, he’s made the code available on Github).
- If your team works in different time zones, then you will need to communicate asynchronously most of the time.
- Fewer interruptions leads to more deep work, which can dramatically increase 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. The best way to be mindful of different time zones is to disregard time entirely and rely on asynchronous communication. By setting a clear expectation that communication won’t happen in real-time, you can take the pressure of people in different time zones to be “on-call”. Of course, if you can’t afford to fly your entire team to a location very often, you can turn to virtual team-building events to keep up the team spirit in the meantime.
Encourage virtual watercooler chats
These activities serve as a powerful mechanism for strengthening relationships among team members, fostering a sense of belonging, and nurturing a supportive work environment. Whenever possible, adopting an alternating meeting time strategy can help distribute the burden of inconvenient hours equitably among team members. This thoughtful approach not only ensures that each team member’s contributions are valued but also strengthens collaboration and fosters a sense of fairness within the remote work ecosystem. When working across multiple time zones, it’s easy for team members to feel like they are in their own world sometimes.