Working Across Time Zones: Pros, Cons, and Best Practices

His solution was to have a coding partner, someone he’d bounce ideas off of and check in with about project progress. Work together, even if there is a time gap, and you’ll find that the old adage “two are better than one” is still true. Sometimes you need someone to hold you accountable or just to work alongside you.

Finally, a successful asynchronous collaboration calls for a set of functional tools to seamlessly tie all autonomous teams and operations together. Using a single, multifunctional tool such as Pumble, to streamline diverse conversations and collaborative projects across time zones can increase overall productivity by 30%. Teams operating working remotely in a different time zone across time zones require a unique set of functionalities specifically customized to meet the needs of the asynchronous workforce. When assessing team chat and collaboration apps for your distributed team, look for features that allow flexibility, autonomy, seamless collaboration, and transparent availability status options.

How to tackle the challenges of working across time zones

This is not surprising, given that the flexibility of asynchronous collaboration represents the ideal response to the challenges of working across time zones. Similarly, working across time zones is beneficial to companies on a larger, operational level. Having distributed teams working across time zones essentially implies round-the-clock workflow. Companies employing https://remotemode.net/ diverse teams spanning multiple time zones enjoy complete time zone coverage. Having all shifts and time zones covered is especially convenient for support and customer service as people don’t need to work past the conventional work hours in their countries, in the case of an emergency. However, other departments and industries can benefit from the approach as well.

Typically, we try to be mindful of what time it is for others when we use synchronous communication like video or Slack. This keeps us from asking a teammate to dive into a brand-new project if they’re just about to jump off for their evening, for example. And as our team grows and changes, we sometimes have to change and renegotiate the way we work through time zones. Meeting planning is made easier with tools like World Time Buddy and Time and Date. Simply enter your team’s current locations, and these calculators will calculate the best times to meet (and even show local holidays being observed). Do you want to improve your message writing skills when your team is working remotely?

Build Remote Company Culture Around Trust

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. 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 working across time zones. Remote companies that embrace multiple time zones must rely on asynchronous communication. For background, async communication happens when information is exchanged without the expectation of an immediate response.

• 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.
• Aside from the few weeks every year when we’re all together at our company retreats, there’s always someone at Zapier awake and working.
• “We have a bi-monthly full company meeting to make sure we all know we still exist,” writes designer Ben Hanna.
• If you have to be “on” at all, then it should be during those calls with your team.
• Teams are expanding not only in size and demand, but also across geographic areas.