How to Coordinate Remote Teams Across Different Time Zones

I spent a week in Florida in February collecting seashells, eating the best doughnuts in existence, and reading at least a book a day. I also put in a few hours each afternoon writing and scheduling client appointments (for after my vacation). What would normally cause late nights and a lot of unwanted stress, worked beautifully because I was overseas and eight hours ahead of the rest of the team. Now I’ll be frank, I don’t like editing on a deadline because there’s only so much editing a girl can do. I’m also a morning person, I do my best, most efficient work between 7 and 10 am. That’s a problem when editing studies because typically the researchers are still writing it mere days before submission.

Leverage opportunities to strengthen team culture by using the connection rituals in our Hybrid Team Toolkit today. It’s easy to understand the need for self-care, but it’s a fact that those who look after others—such as HR professionals—tend to overlook themselves in the process. Self-care time has traditionally been reserved for outside work hours—something like a morning jog or an evening bubble bath. Use this guide to make you convey your message clearly with remote communication. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that sending someone a quick email will save them time, when it may actually end up wasting more of their day.

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This typically only works as a solution where the team as a whole has working hours that overlap. This can then become part of your hiring and onboarding strategy – where your company selects candidates that are available to work within your core working hours. It does however limit your talent pool to people in a similar time zone and possibly the same geographic location or country.

• One of the first steps to managing your time across multiple time zones is to use a tool that can help you compare and convert the time in different locations.
• Having a shared calendar can help you plan the most suitable times, and you may also want to consider whether the entire team needs to be present at the meeting or not.
• When working across time zones, it’s likely that you’ll be on meetings at strange times of the day.
• One of the best things about Help Scout is that they publish how they work and their post on how to build a globally remote team that really works is a great example.

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. Time zone coverage is just something that’s automatically possible with distributed teams. With the advancement in technology, you can communicate with your team members regardless of whether they are in the world. Communication tools like Slack, Asana, Zoom, Google Meet, and Skype allows teams to make online presentations, conduct daily stand-ups, and chat with each other. You need to develop a recruitment process that looks out for self-managed and self-motivated people.

Establish asynchronous communication

Pick up the phone and talk it out if you need something done quickly or want your coworker to make a choice right away. Messages are clear working remotely in a different time zone and easy to grasp at a glance with just one simple emoji. These are also useful when your teammates don’t all speak the same language.

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. We use a variety of tools at Buffer, many of which we’ve blogged about before. For synchronous, everyone-at-the-same-time communication, we use Slack for written chats and Zoom for video chats. Using these tools to keep time zones top of mind makes sure that all team members have an equal opportunity to work smarter, not harder, and that they can engage or disengage when they want.