Once everyone\u2019s set and communicated their working hours, make sure you\u2019re respecting them! This respect is so key to maintaining work-life balance across time zones, and making sure that everyone is communicating in a productive way. Maybe you\u2019re headquartered in Sydney but work with contractors around the globe. Or maybe you\u2019re fully distributed, with teammates on every continent around the world. Building an asynchronous culture can seem intimidating but you’ll need to if you plan to work across time zones.<\/p>\n
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Being conscious of inclusion could go a long way to maintaining your team members happy and invested at work. Whether you are meeting after hours or during work time, it\u2019s crucial to be careful about scheduling such events. 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. Also, you can set definite deadlines for every task so everybody knows the timeframe within which they must finish their part. Such tools let you work on the same documents, share tasks, communicate more efficiently, and help resolve concerns easily.<\/p>\n
GitLab might be the world’s largest fully distributed company with 1,400+ remote workers in 65+ countries. More than 30 million users and 100,000 organizations from startups to global enterprise organizations use GitLab to deliver great software at new speeds. The Head of Remote position sits on the organization’s leadership team and is responsible for building and maintaining remote company culture and employee experience. It was first suggested by Andreas Klinger, CTO at On Deck, and pioneered by GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij and Darren Murph. When it comes to working remotely with teams across different time zones, the most important thing is to be mindful, empathetic, and respectful.<\/p>\n
This is not surprising, given that the flexibility of asynchronous collaboration represents the ideal response to the challenges of working across time zones. As much as it\u2019s important to keep a strong bond between remote coworkers through continual communication and real-time collaboration, there\u2019s also a strong case for the asynchronous, no-distraction work. We\u2019re familiar with the premise that it takes around 25 minutes to resume your workflow flow after an interruption. Therefore, any amount of time difference can be used as an advantage for distributed teams, considering it gives employees time to work undistracted. Let\u2019s get a closer look at what working across time zones entails and how you can adopt better strategies to accommodate the demands of a globally distributed team.<\/p>\n
You can use an online tool like TimeAndDate.com to determine the time zone your colleague is in. 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. They were created in the nineteenth century because the world needed a unified system to keep track of time. There’s no need to wait for a conference call or meeting to start talking when you work together from the same office. To avoid team blockers related to timezones, one thing Susanne Ronnqvist Ahmadi, HubSpot’s Vice President of International Marketing, says you should aim to have a flexible schedule at certain points of the day.<\/p>\n
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