6 Tips for Overcoming Time Zone Challenges for Remote Teams

See the impact of fewer, shorter meetings, increased accountability, and enhanced productivity with Fellow. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that sending someone a quick email will save them time, when it may actually end up wasting more of their day. If you need something done urgently or want your co-worker to make a decision ASAP, pick up the phone and talk it out. When you’re working in a distributed fashion, learning to be an effective async communicator is going to be the biggest factor in your success.

These steps, among others, were critical to helping end users build trust in the tool. For teams developing gen AI solutions, squad composition will be similar to AI teams but with data engineers and data scientists with gen AI experience and more contributors from risk management, compliance, and legal functions. The general idea of staffing squads with resources that are federated from the different expertise areas will not change, but the working remotely in a different time zone skill composition of a gen-AI-intensive squad will. It’s important to bear in mind that successful gen AI skills are about more than coding proficiency. A pure coder who doesn’t intrinsically have these skills may not be as useful a team member. By now, most companies have a decent understanding of the technical gen AI skills they need, such as model fine-tuning, vector database administration, prompt engineering, and context engineering.

Con: It takes more effort to stay in sync

“It usually isn’t necessary, but definitely helps to build morale and keep spirits high when we can put faces to names and not feel so lonely in our remote settings,” Rike said. Communication in particular is hard when one team is arriving at the office just as another is leaving, or when one teammate is sleeping peacefully just as another is hitting their midday stride. But there are ways to tackle differences between time zones that preserve collaboration and keep communication effective. Different time zone implies different cultures, diverse skill sets, and more importantly a wide generation of fresh new perspectives from across the globe. If the companies that ventured into this kind of setup are able to embrace it and use it to their advantage, growth is, therefore, a possibility. However, there is a need for a clear-cut balance between the challenges and the advantages that come with having employees that work across different time zones.

  • Aside from the time zone and cultural differences, different countries also have different off days.
  • Even still, odds are you’ll be working with someone who’s not online at the same time as you.

In this detailed guide, we’ll explain why people struggle with time management, the main issues, and how to solve them. Within Google Calendar, one of my absolute favorite ways to stay productive while working at home or freelancing, you can have your time zone, and a second one. One of my favorite stories about time zones comes from a flight I booked in 2012. To make the story short, I booked a flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and, after two years of living abroad in Asia, assumed that my flight was quoted on international 24-hour time. Explain that you have a particular schedule in order to function as productively as possible, and your available hours for meetings are X, Y and Z.

Ready To Master Remote Work Across Different Time Zones?

Just 21 percent of companies reporting AI adoption say they have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies. One insurance company, for example, created a gen AI tool to help manage claims. As part of the tool, it listed all https://remotemode.net/ the guardrails that had been put in place, and for each answer provided a link to the sentence or page of the relevant policy documents. The company also used an LLM to generate many variations of the same question to ensure answer consistency.

In this day and age with working remotely while traveling, it’s less clear than ever before as to where someone is physically located and what time it is near them at a certain moment. Whether you’re a freelancer working with one client in another time zone, or with five clients, teammates and other professional contacts all over the world, World Time Buddy will be your friend. Simply look up the current time zone of the city or country with which you’re attempting to synchronise. When you require immediate responses to a question, synchronous communication is ideal. It encompasses all forms of real-time communication in which replies are instantaneous. Phone calls, instant messaging, video conferences, and face-to-face interactions are examples of synchronous communication.

Greenwich Mean Time

When you arrange regular meetings in your time zone, everyone else needs to figure out how to translate it into theirs. Everyone, regardless of where they are situated, will organise and discuss meetings or deadlines based on the same time if this is set as the ‘official’ time zone. This makes it simple for distant team members to determine and adjust their time.

  • You’ll need to know which times of the day your colleague in London will be awake, and the times you’re most likely to get support tickets from your Australian customers.
  • “That can be a benefit, broadening the perspectives that influence your decision-making, but it can also lead to misunderstandings and communication difficulties,” he said.
  • Allowing flexible working hours in remote work has been scientifically proven to reduce burnout, stress, and psychological discomfort which can also increase job satisfaction.
  • In some ways, this article is premature—so much is changing that we’ll likely have a profoundly different understanding of gen AI and its capabilities in a year’s time.
  • Set a calendar reminder to advise the team before your move, so that you look organized and responsible.

If your schedule and the balance of your week are important to you, remember to set boundaries as a freelancer and politely turn down meetings that fall outside your working hours. Getting familiar with the map can help you visualize time zones before you even get to World Time Buddy in your browser (but, we still recommend using World Time Buddy to perfect your calculations). One time, when we were working remotely and traveling as freelancers in Hanoi, Vietnam, Dan had a cross-time-zone meeting with clients in the US, Australia and somewhere else as well. For more on making meetings as productive as possible, see our guide to productive meetings when working remotely. Freaking Nomads is the online publication and community for all things digital nomad.

How does one make sure to reap all the benefits and suffer no drawbacks of working across time zones? We’re breaking down the seven tested and tried steps geographically dispersed teams can implement to strengthen formal and informal communication and build more trust and better collaboration across all teams. Of course, there’s the argument that the vast majority of meetings may not be necessary, and flexibility is pretty much a part of the remote job description. Still, some form of meetings is vital for organizations looking to keep the connection and interaction across distributed teams. Cloud-based technology allowed a number of industries to adopt some form of remote work model.



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