WebEx is able to have hundreds of participants join compared to its competitors. If you have an extremely large team or you host calls with lots of external participants, it’s important working remotely in a different time zone to make sure everyone can join. Benefits and perks are important to millennials and Generation Z. Flexibility ranks at the top of the list of wants when job searching.
To work more efficiently with distributed teams, you need to treat your team like they are all working together in one office building. While this may not be possible, it is the mindset you need to adopt to organize your time and responsibilities. This is easy for teams that work with people across two or three time zones that are all next to each other.
Embrace asynchronous collaboration
The most popular activities usually involve a mix of problem solving, competition, and laughter. Let’s Roam has many options, like the popular Scavenger Hunts, that get teams out running around and doing a mix of exploring and completing challenges. Escape Rooms and Murder Mystery experiences are fun options that include all of those things. People are challenged to work together to solve puzzles, find clues, and do something that is not work-related but still builds stronger relationships and bonds overall.
It’s a good idea to limit meetings to exchanging information that can’t be transmitted using a team chat app, a paper, an email, or a note. While a video conference is ideal for team brainstorming sessions, a basic weekly report does not necessitate a 5 a.m. Working out the technicalities of creating the ideal meeting schedule that coincides with your team’s work hours is sometimes impossible. Sure, there are lots of tools that may assist you to gain a clear understanding of international time variations between your team’s locations. Still, there is often a lack of a fair overlap to organize your meetings around. Cloud computing enabled various businesses to embrace some type of remote work paradigm.
How to Work Across Multiple Time Zones Efficiently as a Remote Team
At Turing, we use corporate channels in team chat applications that are generally public, #random, or some more particular channels that attract individuals who have similar hobbies (e.g., #books, #games, #memes). These virtual places encourages our teams to contribute to the casual conversation thread in an ideal world regardless of when they signed in. Teams that operate remotely and across time zones miss out on the spontaneous conversations that co-workers in the office are accustomed to. The social separation can result in various productivity and personal challenges that can wreak havoc on your business over time. When we consider the general meeting overload phenomena that today’s workplace culture is facing, we may begin to reconsider the entire idea, particularly the unique aspects of time zone management. Distributed teams must prioritize efficient, textual communication to successfully use fundamental concepts of asynchronous communication.
- To build a successful team that operates autonomously, companies should consider setting clear employee expectations regarding personality traits and soft skills best suited for this work model.
- As the world is moving toward a fully distributed work model, there’s still plenty of value in in-person team meetups.
- Hence, you should try to separate the place where you work from a relatively quiet place in your home.
- It’s the one app that comes up in nearly every discussion of how to make remote teams work.
Whether you are meeting after hours or during work time, it’s crucial to be careful about scheduling such events. Creating a virtual team spanning borders will help if you want to teach every team member about cultural communication difficulties. Keep in mind that conflict and misinterpretation can be prevented in the future with a careful understanding of cultural norms. Moreover, you can utilize task management software like Asana and Trello to monitor progress and hold one another responsible for tasks that should be done.
The Benefits of Working Across Time Zones
Developers, perhaps, have it the easiest with code comments and pull requests, but everyone should share what’s happening in their own “manager of one” domain. A time difference gives you the freedom to code or write without distraction. Then, when the rest of the team is online, you’ll be more focused at what you need to discuss with them before it’s time to get offline. Use this guide to make you convey your message clearly with remote communication. Using a meeting productivity tool like Fellow to share and collaborate on meeting agendas, notes and action items. Remote workers can come from anywhere in the world, which means they have unique perspectives to share with their colleagues.
This is probably the most obvious challenge of working across multiple time zones, and rightfully so. It can get overwhelming trying to set up a time that works for the entire team. Asynchronous communication might be the most suitable type of communication for people working in different time zones. This is very obvious because people can’t get optimal solutions on projects that they are working on while they’re asleep or distracted. The pin function is another vital feature of such team chat applications since it helps keep critical papers top of mind and quickly accessible. When attempting to develop functioning global teams, firms must first prioritize communication.