An inside look at the meeting ground rules used internally by Fellow.app, the top-rated meeting productivity software company. To avoid team blockers related to timezones, one thing Susanne Ronnqvist Ahmadi, HubSpot’s Vice President of International Marketing, says you should aim to have a flexible schedule at certain points of the day. Timezone messages like the one above can help you be mindful of what to send when to send it, and if your message is urgent enough to send as soon as possible. For example, if you have a few messages you want to send, but notice it’s 9 p.m. In another employee’s timezone, you might either want to avoid sending til the morning or schedule an email.

There are a lot of different scenarios that we could play out here, but the thing to keep in mind is try organizing your team so that it’s less painful. To work more efficiently with distributed teams, you need to treat your team like they are all working together in one office building. While this may not be possible, https://remotemode.net/ it is the mindset you need to adopt to organize your time and responsibilities. This is easy for teams that work with people across two or three time zones that are all next to each other. However, it becomes more complicated when working with a global workforce (people who work on opposite sides of the world).

Clearly communicate time zone boundaries.

The difficulties of managing different time zones, language barriers, and cultural differences can be frustrating. Plus, you need to understand the differences between synchronous and asynchronous communication, and when to use each. For one, organizations should consider setting and respecting their team’s working remotely in a different time zone time zone boundaries. For example, teams can create shared calendars showing their availability across different hours in a day to ensure no time zone boundaries are crossed. The logistics of working out the perfect meeting schedule that aligns with your team’s work hours can often be outright impossible.

In fact, by 2022, Gartner predicts that 75% of businesses with diverse frontline decision-makers will exceed their financial targets. If you search for the current time in most major cities around the world, you’ll get the answer right at the top of your results. More recently, Google added a time calculator to search so you can look up what time it will be in a certain place. His solution was to have a coding partner, someone he’d bounce ideas off of and check in with about project progress. Work together, even if there is a time gap, and you’ll find that the old adage “two are better than one” is still true. Here are some popular ways to use Slack with app automation tool Zapier to automatically share activity in your channels so everyone knows what’s going on.

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You can work at opposite times from the rest of your team, and still join in on all the office banter. Aside from the few weeks every year when we’re all together at our company retreats, there’s always someone at Zapier awake and working. Time zone coverage is just something that’s automatically possible with distributed teams. We also have a lot of tools for asynchronous, everyone-at-their-own-pace communication, including Threads, Trello and Paper. In these tools, we can log what we’ve done, what we’re doing or questions and comments we have and know that other team members can read and comment later on their own schedule. Using these tools to keep time zones top of mind makes sure that all team members have an equal opportunity to work smarter, not harder, and that they can engage or disengage when they want.

This diversity can work to build a strong team foundation for companies. That doesn’t mean we still don’t have a lot to learn about working collectively and supporting each other in a hybrid world, though. Take it from HubSpot Engineering Lead Jakub Derda, who has years of experience leading distributed teams. You can use an online tool like TimeAndDate.com to determine the time zone your colleague is in. You can also try asking them what times they are available during, and when their day starts/ends so you know how much overlap there will be with yours. Synchronous communication (“sync”) is when discussions are conducted in real-time, allowing for immediate responses and feedback between colleagues.