When you can’t hop on a video meeting and need to send something to a coworker in a different timezone, your first instinct might be to use email or an instant messaging tool to share your question or request with them. If the issue is complex or there are dependencies involved, you might find yourself drafting a paragraph (or two) and editing your message for clarity and tone that can get lost in translation. Eastern Standard Time (EST) covers the states in the eastern part of North America and runs from Maine to Florida, while Central Standard Time (CST) includes Texas up to Montana. Mountain Standard Time (MST) spans Utah’s Rocky Mountains all the way over to Arizona, and Pacific Standard Time (PST) includes California and Nevada to Washington State. You’ll also want each team member working from a private space with minimal distractions (a quiet office or home office). If colleagues are close by, try asking them to work together at one desk so they can easily collaborate on projects as necessary.
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 working remotely in a different time zone time zones. And companies can leverage the benefits of having workers across the nation—and the world. Remote companies that embrace multiple time zones must rely on asynchronous communication.
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Flexible workers hours have been proven to reduce burnout, stress levels, and psychological distress while increasing job satisfaction. They can also unlock more productivity by allowing team members to work when they’re most productive whether that be in the morning, afternoon, night, or a mix. A great way to introduce a more async, documentation culture is to build an employee handbook. 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. Ideally, your company will set up Google Drive, Dropbox, or whatever file-sharing system you use so files are automatically accessible to the entire company. If they can’t access the file, they’ll have to wait for you to be online again.
- However, it’s important to know where your bottlenecks are in a project and to ensure that work is distributed accordingly.
- And that’s ok on a distributed team, as long as you can manage the time shift.
- We’re Himalayas, a remote job board, that is focused on providing the best experience for remote job seekers and employers.
- The difficulties of managing different time zones, language barriers, and cultural differences can be frustrating.
The only solution to this challenge is seeking the cooperation of a company that sits conveniently with you in the same time zone as your locality. That is, locating a country that is never far from you in terms of time difference. Our team works asynchronously and communicates largely via Slack, which keeps us organized across 17 time zones. Keeping an up-to-date shared calendar is also very important for helping team members schedule interactions. We are a 24/7 operation so we do encounter scheduling conflicts with our overnight employees when we need to meet with them. Our management does a good job with altering their schedule to give them the same attention as the daytime staff.
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One of the reasons a remote company like Turing’s culture is robust and our team members are so united is due to the clear nature of our principles. Furthermore, some of the best practices for holding productive virtual team meetings include having a shared goal and describing what you expect to accomplish. Meeting planning is made easier with tools like World Time Buddy and Time and Date.
When companies employ remote workers, real-time synchronous communication often becomes difficult as the time zones vary, and it becomes difficult to sync together. However, the time management tools and transparent communication between different team members help resolve these conflicts and ensure everyone is on the same page. Studies have shown that companies that have shifted to remote work culture have increased productivity. Adopting asynchronous communication enables each individual to stay well informed about the projects they are working on and changes that need to be made when building products. Having teams across time zones is the greatest investment any company could venture into. Different perspectives and broad ideas can move the company’s vision forward and scale up the business by a considerable margin.
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You can also try asking them what times they are available during, and when their day starts/ends so you know how much overlap there will be with yours. Synchronous communication (“sync”) is when discussions are conducted in real-time, allowing for immediate responses and feedback between colleagues. This can be through phone calls, video chats or even using an instant messaging platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
