Angelo Vertti, 17 de julho de 2020

It’s a great way to get a conversation going and have a single spot for Q&A and feedback on different ideas. The most popular activities usually involve a mix of problem solving, competition, and laughter. Let’s Roam has many options, like the popular Scavenger Hunts, that get teams out running around and doing a mix of exploring and completing challenges.

• This distraction-free concentration pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit and creates new value, improves skills, and is hard to replicate in our world of instant satisfaction.
• By utilizing Dropbox, you can access the files from any computer or phone as long as you log in.
• If you’re looking for a virtual water-cooler, Slack can be used to chat about non-work-related topics like favorite TV shows and sharing pictures of your pets.
• This diversity makes it difficult for team managers to schedule meetings and collaborative sessions accommodating everyone.
• 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.
• Remind remote team members that social interaction doesn’t have to come from co-workers or consider offering a co-working space stipend as a remote employee benefit.
• 😉 Meetings are not that effective at reaching an agreement or getting actual work done.
• Handing the headache over to a professional employer organization (PEO), like ExtensisHR, can help.

It’s also an important place to bring up any obstacles to see if teammates have effective problem-solving ideas or solutions. You can use the time to update everyone on projects and timelines so everyone hears the same consistent messaging and is able to ask questions. Since your overlap time in such a situation is limited, effective communication and delegation are the key for any sort of progress to be made. Focus on being a gardener instead of a gatekeeper, and delegate more direct mentoring and oversight to others in the same location/time zone.

The Key to timezone Etiquette

When working with teams in different time zones, the most important thing to remember is to be mindful, empathic, and courteous. This philosophy is also the reason InteRoots requires its partner projects to have representation on the board of directors. This crucial step sometimes makes communication longer and more comprehensive, but the payoff is much greater when your teammate understands the reason, background, and philosophy behind the message. This is especially important in cross-cultural contexts, where norms of ‘business and communication are diverse.

• Managing teams across different time zones don’t have to be difficult, even though it may look frightening and complicated.
• It is important to use a process that finds times that actually work for all individuals when it comes to meeting.
• When working with a distributed team, you don’t have to limit yourself to hiring locally.
• This ensures that no single team is forced to make constant sacrifices to stay linked.

There is no silver bullet here — just lean more into the tools that your team already uses. Check back next week as we continue our series to help you make the most of working in a remote environment from our next interview. Both Maneesh and Bassem have built and managed very successful global teams through the years and share some great insight on how to work with dispersed teams around the world. It’s always important for managers to keep in touch with their teams, but this is especially true when workers are spread across the country or globally. For employees, remote work can result in boosted productivity, a healthier work-life balance, and significant cost savings. Research firm Global Workplace Analytics estimates that workers save between $600 and $6,000 per year by working from home at least half of the time.

Hire a Head of Remote

Simply enter your team’s current locations, and these calculators will calculate the best times to meet (and even show local holidays being observed). During onboarding, make sure your communication policies and collaboration tools are properly defined and communicated. These rules can be reviewed and referred to by employees, so they know what to do and what is expected of them. So although InteRoots https://remotemode.net/ is decentralized, it’s the local community setting a clear and cohesive vision and goals for the project, with buy-in from our organization. Even when it comes to reporting, the community sets timelines and methodologies that best fit their needs. InteRoots, in turn, mostly due to its agile structure, is able to adjust to the community and not the other way around as is often the case.

As a leader branching out into remote work, you may encounter a few new challenges when managing distributed teams. Keeping time zone differences front of mind when creating processes and systems will go a working remotely in a different time zone long way to ensure collaboration, communication, and productivity. With all the apps and tools available, the time zone difference can create plenty of confusion among employees working across time zones.

Visualize time zones

Working across time zones is tricky, but the benefits outweigh the costs if you have the right culture, processes, and follow best practices. Overall, being in different time zones leads to misalignment and challenges in communication, collaboration, and teamwork. However, there are strategies that can be implemented to make working across time zones more manageable and successful. These moments will strengthen your team’s bond, making working across time zones more productive. No one should feel compelled to be alert when working across time zones constantly. Employees who do not establish clear work boundaries risk burning out, which negatively impacts the entire team’s productivity, creativity, and collaboration.