Best Practices and Tools for Working Across Different Time Zones

When you’re not in the same place with your teammates and you don’t have set work hours, one thing that becomes really important is frequent, clear communication. We also have a lot of tools for asynchronous, everyone-at-their-own-pace communication, including Threads, Trello and Paper. In these tools, we can log what we’ve done, what we’re doing or questions and comments we have and know that other team members can read and comment later on their own schedule.

Embracing virtual processes and utilizing project management tools can enhance productivity and streamline communication across different time zones. These tools allow teams to track progress, assign tasks, and collaborate seamlessly, regardless of geographical location. Virtual processes and project management tools are essential for streamlining communication and workflow across different time zones. These tools enable teams to collaborate effectively, organize tasks, and track progress, ensuring that everyone stays on the same page. When scheduling meetings, it’s important to consider the availability of team members across different time zones. Strive to find a time that works for everyone, or rotate meeting times to ensure that all team members have an opportunity to participate.

Project Management Apps

Elon Musk said that entrepreneurs spend too much time in meetings and too little time on making their service or product exponentially better. The Southeast Asian time zone is perfect for getting in that quiet, creative time in the morning. Culture, weather, internet speed and safety are important as well when determining https://remotemode.net/ where to live, and subsequently the time zone you’ll work from. Before a meeting, make sure you have an agenda, and ANY supporting material is send along with the agenda. Typically we liked to send a reminder email a few hours before a meeting to ask people if they had any questions on the material.

The weekly goals meeting is a good chance to give your colleagues time and room to think about the work beforehand and come up with solutions or alternatives. As questions arise, figure out a mutually agreeable time to meet and discuss specific issues. Since you will not always be able to collaborate with your teams in real-time, it is ideal that you clarify your expectations from the beginning. At the beginning of the week, sit down with your team and establish the goals for that week. This will make sure every member of the team, including yourself, understand what has and will be done, regardless of the timezone they are in.

Follow this meeting protocol when working remotely

Setting expectations for communication is one of the biggest and most impactful things you can do to reduce frustration for asynchronous communication at every stage of the process. Teams can help enable distributed employees by providing a discretionary budget for tech like noise-canceling headphones, microphones, high-quality laptops with cameras, and high-speed Internet access. Having the right kind of gear empowers remote employees to actively participate in the conversation—to literally be seen and heard.

With the coronavirus pandemic shutting down many office spaces and sending people into a brand new remote work position practically overnight, it’s safe to say that the idea of the workplace has made a giant shift. The six hour time difference between the US and Canada’s Eastern Standard Time (EST) can be overwhelming at first, but once you get used to it, it becomes a great advantage. If you are working with someone in the US, you will have working remotely in a different time zone the benefit of getting a head start on your day. By the time your clients wake up, you will have finished most of your work and still have three hours left to sync up with them. If you want to interact and work with the whole world, there is pretty much no better time zone than those of Central European Time and Central African Time. Neighbors to Asia on one side, and the Americas on the other, these time zones are in a prime position.

Collaboration and communication difficulties

Also, verify that everyone engaged has the necessary administrative access to avoid late-night calls, hold-ups, and rescheduling. Companies who need time zone management must reconsider traditional communication channels, such as email, and embrace more flexible solutions and approaches to create more space for productive conversation. Asynchronous communication has been established as the ideal technique for enterprises that operate across time zones. The asynchronous technique, in addition to removing the time limitation of the previous synchronous approach, ideally assures communication records stay available. A key to communicating with colleagues is knowing precisely what time it is—for everyone involved. Even for remote employees who have worked remotely for years, knowing the time difference between CEST, PDT, and other time zones may still be challenging.

Cloud computing enabled various businesses to embrace some type of remote work paradigm. Naturally, corporations leaped at the chance to choose from a worldwide pool of talent, which is essentially the driving cause behind the establishment of teams that span many time zones. It’s important to understand the cultural norms and traditions of the countries in which your company has remote workers.

Instead of communicating, send an email

Working and collaborating with a team with different locations and time zones can pose its own challenges compared to the traditional way that we all know. Remember that to make this way of working successful, you will need a healthy mix of flexibility, understanding, and an agile approach. 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. These negatives aren’t helpful for retaining employees or building a positive company culture.