How To Empower Your Team When You’re Working across Time Zones

It provides the flexibility needed to accommodate different schedules and time zones. However, it can lead to communication gaps and misunderstandings, especially when urgent issues arise. Along with this dramatic change, the need for communication between people also increased exponentially.

• However, sometimes it’ll just be impossible to schedule a face-to-face to suit everybody.
• Organizations employing culturally diverse staff, especially in the higher management positions, tend to escape the echo-chamber effect and conformity since they are exposed to multiple perspectives and viewpoints.
• Finding the right communication and collaboration tools is essential for all distributed teams, but is especially important for those working across time zones.
• Celebrating your team’s achievements can boost your team’s morale, motivation, and loyalty, and reinforce your team’s identity and culture.
• “Create accountability for DEIB practices by making that part of performance reviews at all levels — what gets measured gets changed,” advised Beckham.

A complete remote organisation cannot rely on many of these shared experiences and physical venues to help create our culture as a totally distributed organisation. It is necessary to create a culture that prioritises your values and requires every team member to understand and uphold them. A remote team’s culture is conveyed in what you think (your values) and demonstrated in how you behave every day (your actions). This ensures that no single team is forced to make constant sacrifices to stay linked. It may also cause everyone to plan a meeting across time zones when they’re the ones working unusual hours. Building an asynchronous culture can seem intimidating but you’ll need to if you plan to work across time zones.

Follow this meeting protocol when working remotely

But the biggest benefit might be how much it cuts off onboarding new employees who can simply read the archives and get up to speed on key decisions, culture, and work styles. Async communication allows people to process the information on their own time and respond at their own convenience, reducing the number working remotely in a different time zone of interruptions people receive. However, it’s becoming increasingly hard to argue against the benefits of remote work. However, we can’t deny the fact that it also comes with its own set of challenges too. Deliver remote and hybrid skills training at scale with our Workplaceless Unlimited program.

When your colleagues or clients are asleep while you’re awake, it can be difficult to get the information you need or to convey your own ideas effectively. With teams expanding to numerous locations, there is a greater need to understand how to build relationships specific to a dispersed team structure. Workplaceless is committed to helping multi-time zone teams through learning and facilitation through our remote work training programs. Along with trust, the compass for guiding remote work culture will be the mutual goals of the teams and company.

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Pauleen and Yoong (2001) report that a member of a VT must first establish personal relationships with the rest of the team members. In order to do this, they suggest using the telephone because it helps to make “groundbreaking types of conversations” (p. 210), and people can get paralinguistic clues from the others. To create a successful collaboration environment; team structure, communication patterns and modalities have to be effective and compatible with each other (Sarker & Sahay, 2003). Something that motivates someone within their culture is not necessarily the same with what motivates another person from another culture. For example, some cultures have a tendency to study and learn in groups rather than working alone (Wilson, 2001).

This is probably the most obvious challenge of working across multiple time zones, and rightfully so. We saw how working remotely across various time zones can be both rewarding and challenging. It’s important to take care of yourself and establish a healthy work-life balance.

Supplement your verbal communication

It’s also important to be proactive in your communication, asking questions and seeking clarification when necessary. Leverage opportunities to strengthen team culture by using the connection rituals in our Hybrid Team Toolkit today. Setting up processes is crucial to the success of your delocalized team, but so is the use of proper business tools. According to a Gallup Study, the number of remote workers has been steadily increasing for the last twenty years, especially so in the last five. Working remotely requires discipline, but remote workers report a host of benefits. It’s easy to think of only the problems that can come about from coworkers trying to collaborate from different locales without having the same start and stop to their workday.

• You may suggest engaging team activities and play entertaining team-building games intended for virtual teams there.
• It’s also important to be proactive in your communication, asking questions and seeking clarification when necessary.
• Moreover, one McKinsey study found that the more ethnically and racially diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% when it comes to financial targets.
• It’s easy to think of only the problems that can come about from coworkers trying to collaborate from different locales without having the same start and stop to their workday.
• After your team has discussed each person’s document, store those manuals somewhere safe and accessible so everybody has a helpful resource to refer back to and improve their work together.

It can also be helpful to allow your team members to set certain times as ‘off-limits’ for meetings. For example, you could set a rule that no-one will be forced to attend meetings between 11 pm and 7 am. If meeting during these hours really is unavoidable, rotate meeting times to avoid prioritising one time zone over another. For teams working across time zones, it can be tempting to respond to notifications that come in after your normal working day has finished. That’s particularly true when your input is essential to the progress of a project.

Let’s get a better insight into the challenges of globally distributed teams to get a clearer idea of what to look out for and how to prevent any larger issues. Teams are expanding not only in size and demand, but also across geographic areas. Depending on how far apart team members are located, there could be several different time zones to consider when scheduling, planning, and meeting together. Successfully working across time zones requires leaning into async practices and remote collaboration tools, as well as building and nurturing relationships across different time zones. Remote employees are shown to communicate with their supervisors at a rate comparable to office employees. Since everyone’s not stopping to chat at everyone’s desk, each instance of communication is more targeted and more worthwhile.