In industries like IT, marketing, sales, and customer service, working across time zones is more common. The benefits include access to a global talent pool, increased innovation and profitability, and uninterrupted workflow. However, challenges such as inconsistent collaboration, narrow meeting windows, and limited social connection need to be addressed.
- To maintain a sense of connection and camaraderie among team members, encourage informal virtual chats.
- There is a false perception that remote workers are lazy, taking every opportunity to slack off because nobody is watching.
- Everyone can look through these at their leisure, take notes, and return to your instructions or ask questions afterward.
- For background, async communication happens when information is exchanged without the expectation of an immediate response.
- Asynchronous communication allows team members to work at their own pace and respond to messages when it is most convenient for them.
- “If I planned well, we’d find magic in going to bed frustrated by a missing puzzle piece, and waking to find it in our inbox. It was like having a friend in the future.”
- 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.
After years of working remotely—for companies in India, Canada, Australia, and the U.S.—I’ve learned a lot. Here’s a sneak peek, but keep reading for tips on how to make the most of the pros and overcome the working remotely in a different time zone cons that crop up when the world is your office. “Setting the stage with all stakeholders at the beginning of a project and setting expectations on response times can keep everyone on track,” Hoffbauer said.
Mastering Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Communication
Or in overlapping time zones, and copy and paste it onto a truly distributed team. Working in a global team spread across time zones means embracing a remote-first, not a remote-friendly, culture. You can’t just be aware of time zones, you need to construct a company where time zones are at the core of every internal operation.
There is no reason why you can’t make distributed teams work, especially in the current age where we can work from almost anywhere as long as we have a link to the Internet. However, it’s important to know where your bottlenecks are in a project and to ensure that work is distributed accordingly. For example, we have a resource in India and if they have a problem that causes them to stop work, it can take 2 or 3 days out of their schedule if we don’t respond quickly enough, all due to the time difference. Therefore, it is imperitive that we not only schedule diverse work to fill these delays but that we also respond to their queries in a timely manner. We often assign testing tasks to resources in this particular timezone as that is often an asynchronous task without an end. Take time to grab virtual coffees with your teammates one-on-one or in small groups, and schedule online game nights for the entire team.
A Comprehensive Guide to Time Series Analysis in Python
If you’re having trouble attending numerous meetings in various timezones, you should still raise the issue after having the initial talk. TimeandDate.com’s World Clock Meeting Planner won’t win any design awards, but it makes time shift scheduling straightforward. You pick the cities where everyone lives, and the date for your meeting, and it’ll show in green, yellow, and red the times that are best, not too bad, and terrible for everyone. Then, if you want another easy way to know what time it is everywhere your team’s located, you can turn on the World clock in the Calendar Labs settings. No matter how independently you can work, and how hard you try to stay connected, you won’t be in the flow of what everyone’s doing unless you have a team chat tool. “At TechCrunch and The Next Web, having a central point of contact is critical,” says Russell.
