If a meeting is necessary, make attendance optional so you’re not asking teammates to stay up late to get up early. If it’s recurring and unavoidable (and it often will be), try to schedule meeting times so that the burden is shared across the team rather than by the same people each week. The actual time difference between co-workers is a significant barrier to effective real-time communication. If remote employees don’t have overlap in work hours, there can be a lag between a question being asked and answered. And companies can leverage the benefits of having workers across the nation—and the world.
It’s not only employees who can potentially benefit from working across time zones—this arrangement also allows distributed groups to be more responsive and available when customers need help. Working across time zones can yield benefits for both employees and employers, from improving work-life balance to widening the talent pool for new hires. 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. But this asynchronous setup confers some advantages alongside the drawbacks.
Find A Team Building Event
We use a variety of tools at Buffer, many of which we’ve blogged about before. For synchronous, everyone-at-the-same-time communication, we use Slack for written chats and Zoom for video chats. Possibly the simplest tip of all is also the one that can be the hardest to keep top of mind.
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 https://remotemode.net/ this way can allow more flexibility to structure your day. So, in today’s blog, let me walk you through the best practices and working remotely tips and tools for companies having employees from different work time zones.
Pros and Cons of Working With Teams In Different Time Zones
Workplaceless is committed to helping multi-time zone teams through learning and facilitation through our remote work training programs. Team building might be easily overlooked or pushed to the side when working across time zones. Building relationships is vital for any thriving business, even for teams in multiple different time zones.