Remote Team Sanity: How To Work With A Team From Different Countries And Time Zones

Every Time Zone is a great tool that makes it a lot easier to see the daylight hours for different cities across the globe. It facilitates easier communication and ensures that it’s simpler to find the sweet spot when your people across the globe can talk. Like many leaders, I’ve had to grow and adapt as our business expands and our teams increase in size, while still striving to maintain engagement, efficiency and unity.

• But just because we now can use the technology efficiently for day-to-day meetings, external events or team catch-ups doesn’t mean we should stop there.
• It may often cause unwanted delays and problems with communication which then lead to project failure.
• Always be aware of the subtle differences between your teams, the individual challenges they face, and how they communicate so you can alter your management style.
• Thankfully, numerous apps and websites can help you manage the time zone difference.
• Sometimes, a travel professional might overlook essential things like booking procedures and service requirements with a busy schedule.
• In practice, however, this is a rather simplistic explanation, and things are not always as they seem.

There are 24 hours in a day, and 360 degrees of longitude encompassing the globe – dividing 360 by 24 gives you the 15 degrees of longitude that equates to a one-hour difference in each time zone. Based on this, you can then deduce that there are 24 time zones around the world. Our Multi-time Zone solution allows businesses to allocate inbound calls to specific departments or staff by setting time of day call routing. Many businesses have multiple departments including sales – Multi-time Zones ensures that every call reaches the department most likely to be available during the time of the call.

Top 5 tips for avoiding the ‘conference vortex’

This obviously caused huge issues for travelers, especially those that traveled long distances on the trains. All this chaos eventually led to the US adopting four time zones in 1883, by which time, though, Britain already had a standard system in place. It’s important to ensure that weekend calls are received and responded to appropriately. Setting a time zone over the weekend via call centres or staff working overtime is a great way to ensure every business call is captured and responded to for increased sales and customer satisfaction. Configure each of the daily time zones to route incoming calls to a dedicated target number or call group. Morning calls, midday calls, afternoon calls and calls received during the evening can take different call paths based on the staff rotation or changes to the department shift patterns.

With work from home having taken 2020 by storm, virtual project management and communication systems have greatly improved over the past year. We now have access to all of the technology we could need at our very fingertips, all to ensure smooth project hand-offs and effective collaboration. There are time management tools and progress trackers for monitoring employee’s workloads and billable client hours.

How Can A Remote Development Team Work Effectively?

We always reply as soon as possible with the information and Shopify help you need, whether it’s morning, afternoon, or night. Another top tip when it comes to managing finance teams in different time zones is to start introducing project management tools and scheduling software. These business management tools allow you to easily assign tasks, set deadlines (relative to various time zones), and track the progress of different projects and users, making it easier to manage teams remotely. I have found myself having direct reports or team members in multiple time zones several times during my career.

• However, by making use of the latest technology, trusting your teams, and staying present, the role not only becomes more manageable, but also more rewarding.
• No matter how hard people try, when business partners belong to different time zones and are also culturally different, there are chances of a communication breakdown.
• If you transparently communicate your pain points to your technology partner managing multiple time zones won’t be much of an issue.
• With an increasing number of companies transitioning into international business, and remote working becoming more and more accessible, a growing number of leaders are facing new logistical challenges.
• Creating multiple time zones for your organisation allows you to broaden the hours you’re open to receive sales calls.
• Interested in how introducing a cultural intelligence tool in your business could help to create a more borderless workforce?

However, if the project is not a complex one, robust project management software solutions are not required. Various cloud tools, including Google Disc, enable its users to work collaboratively on one file which can be easily updated. When managing a finance team across different time zones, it is important to be flexible when setting schedules. Finance team members may need to work outside of their regular hours to accommodate the needs of the team, but this should be negotiable. The first step in managing a finance team across different time zones is to make sure everyone is aware of the time differences within the team.

Using Google Boomerang to Work Across Time Zones

Remote work is the future for a vast number of fields, and the technical and social techniques you can use will keep growing with it. Now that we have analyzed the best techniques for an effective remote work environment, let’s have a look at the social techniques. It is crucial, especially for those of you who are individual contractors, to set all your rules beforehand. Our virtual socials have involved scavenger hunts and cocktail making, and at Christmas, we join forces for festive fun. We give each employee £100 to spend on food, drinks and decorations, and then the remote revelry begins. For years, bosses considered ‘water-cooler moments’ a waste of time, before realising that those random encounters with colleagues actually spark creativity, productivity and boost energy levels.

Every month, each team member now has one evening, one mid-day, and one early morning meeting, and misses one meeting that falls in the middle of their night. No team member is expected to attend a team meeting https://remotemode.net/ between 10 pm and 7 am. We are consistently looking for new ways to solve for this, yet too often our own teams experience a bias for those who are physically present over those who are joining remotely.

Tip 6: Host Virtual Team Bonding Events To Bring People Together

Apart from technical matters, we will also analyze and solve some social issues that usually occur. By the end of this article, you will be able to start working successfully as a member of a remote development team. The best way to handle time zone differences with offshore teams is to simply be okay with a flexible schedule https://remotemode.net/blog/10-tips-on-working-in-different-time-zones/ at certain points of the day. While the advantages of offshoring far outweigh the cons, one factor that is often a challenge for businesses is the time zone difference. If not managed strategically, collaboration with teams across different time zones can affect employee productivity and dampen their spirits.

• Apart from that, meetings can result in positive and energizing outcomes, including increased innovation and better decision-making.
• We’ve chosen to be an international team because we recognise that, sometimes, the best individuals in a given field aren’t in the same place as us.
• A bot, or robot, or crawler is software that visits web sites and collects data from them without a human present.