Having all shifts and time zones covered is especially convenient for support and customer service as people don’t need to work past the conventional work hours in their countries, in the case of an emergency. However, other departments and industries can benefit from the approach as well. Consider everyone’s time zone when setting meeting times and try rotating times if needed. If it’s not possible to make meeting times fair for everyone, your best bet could be to rotate the start time so that the same people aren’t inconvenienced every time.
- If a meeting is necessary, make attendance optional so you’re not asking teammates to stay up late to get up early.
- Freelancing is lonely without any contact, and, as we mentioned in this post on writing freelance resumes, clients often hire based on sensing a personal connection with the freelancer.
- When referring to a specific time, everyone reading your message needs to be aware of it.
- Luckily, our step-by-step guide is here to help you navigate these challenges.
- When teams are working across timezones, real-time communication via IM (instant messaging) and meetings can be challenging.
- Often called split shifts, this involves working part of the day during your time zone, then working part of the day during the time zone of another team.
While it may be the middle of the day for one worker, it may be midnight for another, and frequently sending work messages at an inconvenient hour can result in burnout and stress. Likewise, employees should inform their manager and teammates about the best way to reach them outside of working hours if an emergency arises. Remote companies that embrace multiple time zones must rely on asynchronous communication. For background, async communication happens when information is exchanged without the expectation of an immediate response. When working within different time zones, it is very important to be mindful of your teammates’ time zone.
Remote Work Loneliness: How to Protect Your Mental Health When Working Remotely
To learn more about tools and software that can help global and remote teams, check out this helpful list. As a hardworking employee located farther away from your company’s office, you might find feel pressure to say yes to every meeting you’re invited to. Additionally, you might also find it hard to say no to meetings — or suggest other times — for working remotely in a different time zone meetings scheduled outside of your regular working hours. As remote work and satellite offices become more common, marketers are discovering that global teams can be incredibly beneficial to a company’s culture and ability to hire diverse talent. Asynchronous communication («async») is when information is sent at separate times with a delay in between.
But it doesn’t have to be that way if you organize your team and schedule your projects around the time zones of everyone on it. Time zones are geographical locations where people experience similar daylight hours at any given time throughout the year. Managing different time zones, language barriers, and cultural differences can be frustrating. Overall, being in different time zones leads to misalignment and challenges in communication, collaboration, and teamwork.
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If you really do need to have everyone there, try to pick a time that works for most people and then ask the remaining few if they can attend. Then the next time you organize a meeting, share the burden and make it easy for them and harder for everyone else. This leads to a better run company, less stress, and higher quality work.