7 Best Practices for Working Across Time Zones

Typically, we try to be mindful of what time it is for others when we use synchronous communication like video or Slack. This keeps us from asking a teammate to dive into a brand-new project if they’re just about to jump off for their evening, for example. When you’re working remotely or in a different location from other team members, you can’t easily turn to them, ask a question, or make conversation. This can make it hard to communicate and develop a relationship with your colleagues. When it comes to quick communication some tools, like Slack, will even give you a notification before or after you send a message stating which timezone your recipient is in.

Collaboration tools are powerful resources for real-time updates and seamless communication within teams or across organizations, such as Slack, Trello, Asana, Monday, Google Workspaces, etc. They enable efficient collaboration, document sharing, task management, and progress tracking. Embracing flexibility in working hours and acknowledging the challenges posed by different time zones can cultivate a thriving remote team.

How to Work From Home: 24 Tips From People Who Do It Successfully

Of course, if you can’t afford to fly your entire team to a location very often, you can turn to virtual team-building events to keep up the team spirit in the meantime. You can invite your team members to join a private group or a public channel in the team chat app you use — for example, you can name the channel #group-activities, #team_fun_times, or simply, #team-building. There, you can suggest interesting team activities and play fun team-building games designed for virtual team settings. Just make sure that the timing for these activities works for the schedules of everyone involved. As the world is moving toward a fully distributed work model, there’s still plenty of value in in-person team meetups.

Version control systems are software tools that help developers track changes to their codebase and collaborate on software development projects. These systems provide a centralized repository where developers can manage different versions of files, track changes, and work on code collaboratively. You can break down the distance barriers with video conferencing tools that bring face-to-face interactions to the virtual world. Coordinating meetings and maintaining efficient communication can be arduous, as individuals must navigate conflicting work hours and accommodate varying personal commitments. It’s completely free to use this service for all users and it’s incredibly easy to navigate.

Benefits of working across time zones

In this article, you’ll learn about the benefits and challenges of working across time zones, as well as the best practices you need to follow. It’s easy enough to understand time zones where you live, but if you’re working in a remote team spread across the world, it gets harder to remember what time it is for your team members. Your employees need to understand what you expect of them on a day-to-day basis.

Give particular consideration to your progress tracker software, which will enable you to build strategies in real time and monitor the progress of colleagues across the globe. This will allow global workers to keep on the same page with each project, leaving one another notes for seamless handover. Team building might be easily overlooked or pushed to the side when working across time zones. Building relationships working remotely in a different time zone is vital for any thriving business, even for teams in multiple different time zones. Utilizing these tools, you can foster a culture of flexibility and empathy, embracing personalized working hours and showing understanding of time zone challenges. With cloud storage, you can bid farewell to the limitations of physical storage devices and embrace the flexibility of accessing documents from anywhere at any time.