You can explore new countries and cultures, work together with people from all around the world and broaden your vision. As long as you consider the time zones beforehand so you don’t get stressed, overworked or exhausted because of not enough sleep. A good research about the company and good preparation is key to having a worried-free digital nomadic lifestyle. If a phone call or video conference is necessary, try rotating the schedules so everyone gets a turn to take calls late-night or off-hours.
Time Zones are a subject that every business leader needs to remain highly aware of when dealing with remote working. It is something that will severely impact the productivity levels of your team and company. If you want to ensure your remote teams remain in tip-top shape, then you need to keep these tips in mind.
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At Zapier, we’ve formalized communications about what we’re working on with a Friday update post that lists our top priority for the week and what progress we made on it. Each of those live in Async—an in-house tool that gives everyone a set place to write anything they need to share with the entire team and forces us to “work in public.” No matter how working remotely in a different time zone independently you can work, and how hard you try to stay connected, you won’t be in the flow of what everyone’s doing unless you have a team chat tool. “At TechCrunch and The Next Web, having a central point of contact is critical,” says Russell. “Tools like Slack, Convo and HipChat make that possible in a way that it never really was a few years ago.”
Time zone management tools are an excellent way to know which employee has already headed off to bed and which one is available for communication. When it comes to working across varying time zones, managers need to place their trust in remote employees. Every one of these employees needs to be competent to work under minimum supervision and handle their time efficiently. However, not every person you onboard is going to be the ideal remote employee. This is why managers need to be careful when it comes to putting a remote team together.
Tips For Working Remotely From A Different Time Zone
When forming a virtual team that spans borders, teach each team member about cultural communication difficulties. Misinterpretation and conflict can be avoided in the future with a thorough grasp of cultural norms. Even if you’re working with someone in the same country, you need to make sure that the deadline for an assignment is clear.
- To hold a real asynchronous meeting, you must provide a sense of structure.
- This distraction-free concentration pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit and creates new value, improves skills, and is hard to replicate in our world of instant satisfaction.
- In fact, by 2022, Gartner predicts that 75% of businesses with diverse frontline decision-makers will exceed their financial targets.
- Synchronous communication, or real-time communication between teams, is still necessary for team development, bonding, brainstorming, and celebrating project achievements.
- This type of communication method can make everyone take some time to step back before messaging a colleague.
When compared against the benefits, the downsides of working across several time zones are minor inconveniences. This is proven by the fact that an increasing number of businesses are electing to work remotely, with Blueface research estimating that remote work would rival office labour by 2025. https://remotemode.net/ Furthermore, some of the best practices for holding productive virtual team meetings include having a shared goal and describing what you expect to accomplish. By the time they read your second message and take action, an entire day (or more!) could have passed without them doing anything.
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Ultimately, these things will help boost job retention, productivity, and your team’s overall performance. If you are working with people in many regions and time zones, you can record sessions for employees to view later. This is the perfect option if you want to do training or just share recorded messages with larger groups. Once companies open the options for flexible work locations, it’s important to set clear expectations.
As a result, any degree of time zone difference may be leveraged to the advantage of distributed teams, as it allows employees to work uninterrupted. 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.
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Jon Russell, a Bangkok-based reporter for TechCrunch, says remote work is what enables their site to run a 24-hour newsroom. “When it comes to online publishing, being in different places isn’t so strange,” says Russell. Headphones not only block out the noise, but I particularly like to use my headphones as a non-verbal social cue that I don’t want to engage or talk. With regular earbuds from behind, how will people know you’re in the zone? This tip also applies to block out chaotic family members at home or even for those moments on Friday when everyone is feeling chattier at work.
- If the meeting owner doesn’t set the meeting up to be as effective as possible, then maybe the meeting can be better executed over email.
- Asking people to attend meetings at early or late hours can be very challenging for people who are caretakers, which is one of the many reasons people choose remote work in the first place.
- Of course, for companies that work across time zones, this sort of endeavor would include devising clever ways to get everyone on board and participate in the dialogue.