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Go in with a documented agenda, questions, and especially with an understanding of the purpose and ideal outcome of the meeting. At first, it was working across time zones an opportunity that was important for me to experience personally. In the end, it was a great remote learning experience for me professionally.
Employees in one time zone can hand off semi-completed projects for coworkers to finish in the next. Make your online meetings more productive and fun with virtual meeting cards. DOUBLE CHECK TIMES.We all make mistakes, so find a way to get your time zones right. There are many tools for this, including timezoneconverter.com. Alternatively, Kelly says you could also consider picking a few days per week where you’ll work on another international team’s schedule entirely.
Allow for synchronous and asynchronous communications
It’s laid out so that each time zone appears relative to one another, and if you register for a free account you’ll be able to customize the cities that show up and the order they’re in. If you have an iPhone, tap on World Clock, and then the plus button; if you have an Android phone, tap on the globe icon and search for the city you’re interested in. You can add as many as you want, and the app will show you a list of your chosen cities, the time it is there, and how many hours ahead or behind they are relative to your location. For even easier access, add the clock widget to one of your phone’s home screens. The days of having three different clocks hanging on your wall are over. Now, you can have them displayed on Google Calendar whenever you’re planning your week.
How long does it take to fully adjust to a new time zone?
In general, it can take one day per time zone changed for circadian rhythms and sleep to get in sync.
If you don’t have team members working in overlapping time zones, it’s almost impossible to get everyone to meet at the same time without inconveniencing someone. One employee will always have to wake up too early or stay online too late. After all, having employees working in multiple time zones is like giving your company a 24-hour workday — with the best talent in the world. Of course, if you can’t afford to fly your entire team to a location very often, you can turn to virtual team-building events to keep up the team spirit in the meantime.
Productivity boost
With over 400 remote employees spread across 30 countries, Zapier is one of the largest fully remote companies. They know what they’re doing and write great guides on how to get the most out of remote https://remotemode.net/ work. Founded in 2011, Help Scout has been a fully remote company from day 1 and is powering 12,000+ teams in 140+ countries. Their 150+ distributed team is spread across 80+ cities worldwide.
If some members of your team or your clients are still asleep as you’re getting ready to wrap up your day, good communication can be your biggest asset—but only if the communication is clear. Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, hire, pay, manage, develop and take care of a thriving global workforce. It lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense. 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. Aside from calendars, it also just takes more effort to stay connected with the team in general.
Benefits of working across time zones
For asynchronous collaboration to work, teams need clear processes and guidelines on hand at all times to get a clear direction and understanding of priorities, boundaries, and goals. With the limited opportunities for verbal communication and even virtual meetings across time zones, distributed teams need to rely on written and video records to obtain all the information. Additionally, team members can create a shared document with their work schedules highlighting no-contact hours to ensure clear boundaries are being set and respected. As much as it’s important to keep a strong bond between remote coworkers through continual communication and real-time collaboration, there’s also a strong case for the asynchronous, no-distraction work.
