6 Tips to Ace Working Remotely in Different Time Zones
Adjusting your work hours or finding a compromise that works for everyone involved may be necessary to navigate scheduling conflicts. This might mean starting work earlier or later in the day or being flexible with deadlines and project timelines. It’s also important to keep an open mind and be willing to adapt to ensure a successful team collaboration.
The first step to successfully working through various time zones is planning ahead. When you’re working with a global team or a client, it’s important to familiarize yourself with their local time and time zone differences. Use online tools like World Time Buddy or Every Time Zone to help you visualize and plan your day accordingly. Over the years, though, I’ve developed a few tips and tricks that have helped me navigate the complexities of working across different time zones. And today, I’m excited to share these tips with you, and I hope this will help you succeed in facing this popular concern among aspiring remote workers and digital nomads. But even still, if you want to make a distributed team work, you need to accept a time shift.
My 9 Lessons Learned for Remote Success from Across Time Zones
Some of us do our best work late at night, while others prefer to get up early and spend the late afternoons away from the desk. And while some metropolitan areas offer certain lifestyle perks, other big-city issues—like high costs-of-living—will drive potential employees away. Fried and Heinemeier Hansson offer another upside to remote work in their book on the topic.
- This can be through phone calls, video chats or even using an instant messaging platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
- You can use the tools and practices that are the best fit for your organization and make working across time zones a pleasurable experience for everybody.
- That’s what The Year Without Pants author, Berkun, encountered when he worked at Automattic.
- If you are receiving information, always assume the person has good intent.
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 working remotely in a different time zone can self-direct their work. The best job for you might not be in your hometown, and you might work better when you aren’t shackled to a 9-to-5 workday. And that’s ok on a distributed team, as long as you can manage the time shift. Your team will likely get more done, and you’ll be able to provide better support for your customers—but you’ll also need to figure out how to make the world feel a bit smaller.
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“This is probably a result of the learning curve that organizations go through in the early stages.” Remote jobs are still a new concept, and companies need to adapt. We find a consultative process is most effective for companies with 50 or more employees and a rapid process is more impactful for companies with fewer than 50 employees. Ultimately, most important things to embrace and keep in mind when working with team members in different timezones are respect, empathy, and inclusion. With all of the technology at our fingertips, many teams are no longer required to work in the same location or at the same time. Similarly, if a hiring manager in California gives a Dublin-based job candidate an interview time without noting EST or PST, the job candidate might log on for a video interview at the wrong time.
Go in with a documented agenda, questions, and especially with an understanding of the purpose and ideal outcome of the meeting. I joined ProductPlan in the summer of 2019, excited to sink my teeth into creating product https://remotemode.net/ management content. Sometimes you need someone to hold you accountable or just to work alongside you. Jeff Atwood found that when he started Stack Overflow programming on his own turned into a lonely job.
The Best Way to Work with a Global Team
Some companies, however, may not have any jobs that can be conducted remotely. Companies without remote-compliant positions should state that from the beginning, eliminating any future requests or inquiries about remote work. “Unspoken or informal policies are more common,” said Castanon-Martinez.
- These benefits allow your team to work better together and can lead your international teammates to feel more included in your team’s day-to-day work.
- Expecting your teammates to be «always-on» doesn’t create the best culture and might make them feel disrespected.
- Ideally, you’ll write a memo before each meeting to help attendees know what to expect and how to prepare.
- That’s an easy way to double-check before expecting an immediate reply.
Speaking of productivity, remote work policies should specify how an employee’s productivity will be measured. To set employees up for success, they need to understand what their expectations are–whether they are working in or out of the office. Without remote work policies, a disconnect can form between employees and their supervisors, which is unproductive and unhelpful.