Working Across Time Zones: Best Practices and Tools

Block out time to read a few pages of your favorite book 📕, play ambient music and have a warm bath 🛁, go for a short jog 🏃🏽, meditate 🧘🏾‍♀️. Putting your oxygen mask on first will ultimately give you the energy to care for others. We need time to just ‘be’ and quiet the internal nagging voice to keep doing, keep producing. Avoid work if you can, paid or unpaid, and enjoy the beautiful things in your life. Get out into nature 🌲, have a dance party with the kids 🕺, get lost in a novel 📖, have a progressive meal with friends 🍽️.

For one, it threatens to disrupt the trust between team members, as there’s not sufficient information and knowledge sharing going around. Of course, differences in locations and backgrounds can also add another layer to the misunderstanding and distrust. If left unattended, this malpractice can take root and degenerate further into team silos. Coordinating across time zones might be tough, but it’s worth making the effort not just for work-related conversations but for fun. In any work environment building relationships fosters trust, increases collaboration, and raises productivity—but it’s especially important for remote teams.

Respect people’s time

Take a moment to think where in your life you’d like a little freedom and support, and make an appointment. Following the below Ziva meditation technique, take 3 minutes to stop and be in the very present. Close your eyes and detect the most and least prevalent thing in each “sensing” group (5 Senses).

Freelance Brand and Marketing Strategist Janine Maral, who is currently based in Eastern Standard Time, has experience working remotely across different U.S. time zones as well as with global clients. She too has found that working this way can allow more flexibility to structure your day. An overwhelming amount of research has been conducted over the past year to analyze the effects of the pandemic-mandated remote work.

Con: There’s no constant collaboration

Without the need for overtime or late-night shifts, teams can collaborate to fulfill deadlines. Employees in the one-time zone can hand over half-finished projects to peers in another time zone to finish. It’s something I’ve learned through growing the WeWork community both in the U.S. and now across the U.K. And Ireland — flexible management keeps me and my team engaged and united globally. At the end of the day, all employees — regardless of which time zone they are working in — need to know they are appreciated. When you don’t see someone every day it can become easy to forget to highlight their achievements.

Take some time to make sure you know the times when your remote team members are available. Even if you have a sizable time difference, you can always discover at least two-hour of overlap daily to keep everyone in concurrent. With your employees located far away from each other and the company office, it can be challenging to decide on proper meeting times. Furthermore, it could be tempting to find yourself working remotely in a different time zone saying no to specific time meets and suggest other times instead, since these meetings could be scheduled outside your usual working hours. If you hold regular meetings across time zones, try to rotate meetings times to avoid prioritising certain locations. If only part of your team works from a different time zone, it can still be useful to have every individual attend meetings via video calls.

The Best Way to Work with a Global Team

“That can be a benefit, broadening the perspectives that influence your decision-making, but it can also lead to misunderstandings and communication difficulties,” he said. There are several of them to choose from, and they all come with some fascinating features. It’s an excellent tool that comes with an easy-to-use user interface. It visualizes which cities your remote employees are in at the moment and see the local times in those cities in chronological order.

Asynchronous communication should be the norm for remote teams, especially those with personnel in multiple time zones. Adjusting your routine when working in different time zones as a digital nomad can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. With a little bit of planning and organization, you can enjoy the freedom and flexibility of being a digital nomad, no matter where in the world you are. Establishing a routine is important for any digital nomad, but it’s especially important when working across time zones. Having a routine helps you stay organized and focused, and it can also help you adjust to the time difference.