Since it is not possible to always remain on and manage your remote team in real-time, it is necessary to clarify your expectations from your workforce at the very start. Scheduling and assigning a list of tasks during the beginning of each week gives your remote employees a chance to analyze the target work beforehand. If they encounter any issues, a suitable time can be decided on for a meeting to discuss them. Hence, setting weekly goals can help keep the workflow seamless, irrespective of varying time zones. Communications between remote teams need to balance synchronous and asynchronous communications properly. There are times when groups can get by with asynchronous communications.
- It covers all the essential elements including responsibilities, skills, qualifications, and employee benefits.
- Asynchronous communication should be the norm for remote teams, especially those with personnel in multiple time zones.
- To help your distributed workforce connect, consider facilitating live meetups when possible.
- As a remote worker, I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing clients and colleagues worldwide.
- When it comes to working across varying time zones, managers need to place their trust in remote employees.
- This level of clarity should also be used when scheduling meetings.
Be it a photo of your family 📷, a memento 🎲, an inspirational quote 📜, or simply your own “statement of purpose” ✍️. You may encounter lulls throughout your day and these small reminders can help you focus on what fuels you 🚀. For Kohler, mutual respect is paramount in creating a culture of self-care.
Productivity boost
Zapier are on a mission to make automation easy and accessible to everyone at work. With over 400 remote employees spread across 30 countries, Zapier is one of the largest fully remote companies. They know what they’re doing and write great guides on how to get the most out of remote work. They’re proudly a remote-first company and took full advantage of remote collaboration long before coronavirus.
Use online tools like World Time Buddy or Every Time Zone to help you visualize and plan your day accordingly. Asynchronous communication should be the norm for remote teams, especially those with personnel in multiple time zones. When there’s no reasonable overlap in your team’s time zones, that can make scheduling meetings rather tricky.
Collaborate to troubleshoot and maintain operations at all hours
Remote workers also lack the physical separation between work and home; they don’t have a commute to decompress between the two. Instead, remote workers may bounce back and forth between personal and work time. In a worst case scenario, that means they might not feel they’re giving their full attention to work or their personal life. Get a better understanding of mental health issues affecting remote workers in our article on the subject. If you have different offices around the world and staff that need to collaborate across different teams, then companies need to also allow for flexibility, including flexible working hours. For example, an employee may need to be able to work a few hours in their local time zone and then later on in the day work a few additional hours to coincide with international colleagues.
But there are ways SMB leaders can strengthen their remote culture and keep everyone happy. Whether there’s a global crisis or not, remote workforces are not always operating on the same schedules or environments. If you are planning a team meeting, be considerate of your co-workers’ time and unique situations.
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Abi is one of the co-founders of Himalayas where he focuses on product and growth. In his spare time, he runs a YouTube channel, podcast, and blog focused on strategy and management. We’re Himalayas, a remote job board, that is focused on providing the best experience for remote job seekers and employers. Many Heads of Remote will spend time in both worlds, improving the internal experience while advocating for remote-first beyond the organization. GitLab’s handbook is one of the most famous (and best executed) examples of how to build a fantastic employee manual and distributed workplace culture. At 2,200+ pages, it’s thorough, transparent, even allowing people who don’t work at GitLab to contribute.
Mountain Standard Time (MST) spans Utah’s Rocky Mountains all the way over to Arizona, and Pacific Standard Time (PST) includes California and Nevada to Washington State. Synchronous communication (“sync”) is when discussions are conducted in real-time, allowing for immediate responses and feedback between colleagues. This can be through phone calls, video chats or even using an instant messaging platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Of course, this isn’t easy at first, but it will be worth it.
The best job for you might not be in your hometown, and you might work better when you aren’t shackled to a 9-to-5 workday. And that’s ok on a distributed team, as long as you can manage the working remotely in a different time zone time shift. Your team will likely get more done, and you’ll be able to provide better support for your customers—but you’ll also need to figure out how to make the world feel a bit smaller.
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. And as our team grows and changes, we sometimes have to change and renegotiate the way we work through time zones. They were created in the nineteenth century because the world needed a unified system to keep track of time. Managers of dispersed teams should make a conscious effort to check in regularly and connect with individual team members as well as the group as a whole. These meetings not only improve the relationships between specific colleagues, but also contribute to maintaining team cohesion.