15 Tips for Scheduling Across Time Zones

You might even find time to visit some of the incredible cities on Nomad List while still contributing your all to your team. His solution was to have a coding partner, someone he’d https://remotemode.net/ bounce ideas off of and check in with about project progress. Work together, even if there is a time gap, and you’ll find that the old adage “two are better than one” is still true.

• The challenge is finding compromises and overlaps that facilitate the necessary interaction.
• Plus, many of these calculators can be integrated into calendars or other programs to help you stay on top of your time zone scheduling.
• Abi is one of the co-founders of Himalayas where he focuses on product and growth.
• Waking up to a silent team chat, phone, or online communication tool, or conversely, in the middle of a hectic workday schedule for employees in other countries, can feel unsettling or overwhelming.
• The tool shown above is one that our awesome developer Dan made just for Buffer, and it helps us all a ton to know what’s going on with any teammate at a glance.
• Most of my projects are managed through a combination of Trello and Google Docs.

Async communication allows people to process the information on their own time and respond at their own convenience, reducing the number of interruptions people receive. And then another one that I got from the buffer blog, actually, was an app called everytimezone.com. Nurture and grow your business with customer relationship management software.

How teams can best manage working across time zones

By organizing ahead of time, you’ll be able to maximize the time of all of the attendees no matter where they are located and it will help keep the engagement levels up during the meeting. Benefits and perks are important to millennials and Generation Z. Flexibility ranks at the top of the list of wants when job searching. It can come in a few ways, like a flexible schedule or the option to work from any location. Like I mentioned above, you want to avoid sending someone a meeting invite and having it pop up for them on a Saturday, or on a national holiday in the country where they live. When aiming to plan a productive meeting, make sure to get everyone’s input before moving forward with a meeting time. I had transitioned from working full-time to freelancing when Dan and I set off for our remote work trip around the world to explore how we could use travel to build this website together.

• At the same time, whenever you’re in a meeting you’re technically not getting any focused work done.
• This wouldn’t need to be a daily task, but maybe just pick one day and everyone enter it so there is a visual the whole team can use until they get the hang of it.
• Whenever possible, it’s important to develop the ability to communicate asynchronously when working remotely.
• Even if your company hosts yearly conferences, that’s still a lot of missed opportunities and time apart on a daily basis.
• Staying up a bit late or getting up an hour earlier isn’t a bad tradeoff for a job you love, but how about 2 a.m.?
• Additionally, you might also find it hard to say no to meetings — or suggest other times — for meetings scheduled outside of your regular working hours.

Ultimately, most important things to embrace and keep in mind when working with team members in different timezones are respect, empathy, and inclusion. To do this on Gmail, create the email as you would draft any other message. Then, when you’re ready to schedule the email, click the arrow on the send icon for the “Schedule message” option. “The hardest thing to do is to make sure you don’t end up working 12-hour days routinely,” Kelly notes.

Get specific when discussing dates and times with peers.

Therefore, it’s crucial to encourage good, consistent documentation in asynchronous workplace tools, such as Notion, Google Drive, Slack, and project management options like Asana or Trello. There are widely accepted benefits to distributed work, and anyone who manages remote team members is well aware of them. Expanding the talent pool, running operations 24/7, and valuing deliverables over seat-warming are just a few. When you work from a different country, or a different timezone, you need to sit down with your team and communicate what your acceptable working hours are.

Having a global team will give you the opportunity to gain a wealth of knowledge and cultural experiences. By working with people from all over the world, you can gain a broader perspective and insight that spark innovation in your workplace. That’s not all; the possibility to transcend boundaries also means that you have people working around the clock without the need for late-night shifts. As a freelancer, especially if you’re working as an individual contributor, other members of the team or group may forget where you’re located. This is especially hard if you tend to move around from city to city or country to country, or if you just moved, and crossed time zones, like from Florida to Texas, for example.

Free team chat app

Traditionally companies have relegated themselves to hiring people who live within commuting distance of their offices or at most, the same time zone. And if you want to learn more about how you can work from anywhere, visit collaborationsuperpowers.com, a website full of tips and best practices for the practical remote worker. And that gives a visual overview of all the time zones in the world at the same time.

Waking up to a silent team chat, phone, or online communication tool, or conversely, in the middle of a hectic workday schedule for employees in other countries, can feel unsettling or overwhelming. Beyond that, remote employees can also experience isolation as there’s no in-person interaction https://remotemode.net/blog/10-tips-on-working-in-different-time-zones/ or activities like team lunches and happy hours. This is especially true if you’re the lone team member in a completely different time zone. Hiring globally means you can get the best engineers, designers, marketers, etc. in the world and not just in your city, time zone, or even country.

Challenges

The actual time difference poses one of the biggest barriers to effective communication across distributed teams. Although it can get challenging at times to manage a geographically dispersed team, there are still many more benefits to the approach. And this is particularly why we’re seeing a consistent increase in the number of companies employing globally.

You can’t just be aware of time zones, you need to construct a company where time zones are at the core of every internal operation. While it can be challenging to manage a distributed team, fully remote companies have many benefits. This is why we’re seeing a consistent increase in the number of distributed teams hiring globally. Now speaking of meetings, if we work with global teams, not everybody can make every single meeting. But actually, recording your meetings for the people that can be there can be very useful in a number of ways. And for the person that’s listening, you feel like you’re part of the team, even though you weren’t at the meeting.