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. These can be used as a reference point throughout the hiring process and as additional coaching with established teams. Similarly, the rest of the team should be comfortable working autonomously with minimum instruction and interference to ensure maximum productivity. Speaking of connection among teammates, working across time zones makes it almost impossible to keep the team spirit and social engagement up. Almost by definition, remote work tends to facilitate isolation among team members, and the matter only gets worse once we add the time zone dimension to the equation.

It will help if you consider splitting the workdays as part-time in the office in the morning hours, and the rest of the hours could be remotely done in the evening. Determine which meetings are work-related and mandatory and which are more cultural or social. That enables colleagues across different time zones to deal with their schedules, knowing they won’t be wasting time on a casual talk that could have been used working productively or catching up some sleep.

Best Team Practices When Working Across Time Zones

The threat of a diminished company culture is real, and many remote workers fear they’ll be left out or overlooked for professional opportunities. But there are ways SMB leaders can strengthen their remote working remotely in a different time zone culture and keep everyone happy. Remote work can feel isolating – according to Buffer’s State of Remote Work 2021 report, 16% of remote workers say loneliness is their biggest workplace struggle.

• Fortunately, that flexibility can be easily accomplished through collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Slack, Dropbox, etc.
• Moreover, you can add a touch of creativity by incorporating visual elements such as flags, landmarks, or unique symbols representing each location.
• Additionally, remote workers need to master the art of time management to balance productivity and work-life integration.
• From setting boundaries to keeping the information accessible, these recommendations will help you build a successful, collaborative international team.
• Once you have collected the information from each team member, you can create a centralized document or spreadsheet to store and reference the data.

As a successful team manager, you must overcome communication challenges and ensure smooth and timely collaboration. By setting realistic expectations, you promote a culture of accountability and foster trust among team members, regardless of their time zone differences. Recognizing and addressing the challenges of remote work across time zones is essential for fostering effective teamwork, maintaining productivity, and ensuring a harmonious work environment. 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. Visuals can help a lot when people are trying to understand the time differences.

Hybrid Work Schedule: Balance Remote and Office Work

To prevent this common hurdle of working across time zones, organizations can set an official time zone for all team members to reference when scheduling meetings or setting deadlines. With a uniform time zone in place, employees can easily figure out the time difference for their location and plan accordingly. Teams that thrive working across time zones have clearly defined roles that fit the model of asynchronous work.

• These agreed-upon goals remind team members they are contributing with others for an outcome and group purpose that benefits everyone together, even when separated.
• When it comes to the challenges of working in different time zones, team task management promotes collaboration between teams without expecting either of them to work solely antisocial hours.
• In today’s workplace, diversity breeds new and unique ideas, allows us to look at our campaigns from different points of view, and benefits companies financially.
• Using a single, multifunctional tool such as Pumble, to streamline diverse conversations and collaborative projects across time zones can increase overall productivity by 30%.
• 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.
• Whether it’s a cloud storage system, a project management platform, or an intranet, this centralized database is a valuable tool for making information easily available to everyone.
• Utilizing these tools, you can foster a culture of flexibility and empathy, embracing personalized working hours and showing understanding of time zone challenges.

This is why it’s paramount to keep detailed written records of all the processes and projects. Also, ensure every person involved has the right admin access to avoid late-night calls, hold-ups, and rescheduling. Finally, a successful asynchronous collaboration calls for a set of functional tools to seamlessly tie all autonomous teams and operations together.

Embrace asynchronous collaboration

For employees, remote work can result in boosted productivity, a healthier work-life balance, and significant cost savings. Research firm Global Workplace Analytics estimates that workers save between $600 and $6,000 per year by working from home at least half of the time. These savings are primarily due to reduced costs for gas, parking, car maintenance, and food.

While the digital workspace can perfectly support all the work processes, the social component takes the biggest hit in organizations promoting a remote-first work culture. To help your distributed workforce connect, consider facilitating live meetups when possible. 🎓 To learn more about the pros and cons of asynchronous communication for remote teams, be sure to check out our in-depth guide on the blog. To allow more space for effective communication to happen, companies working across time zones need to rethink traditional channels of communication, such as email, and adopt more flexible solutions and methods. Asynchronous communication has emerged as a preferred method for organizations operating across time zones. In addition to removing the time constraint of the traditional synchronous approach, the asynchronous method, ideally, ensures communication records remain at hand.