In most fields, workforce management has traditionally entailed managing a team of in-office employees who report to one central location. As remote work becomes increasingly popular, a new wrinkle has been introduced: time zone management.
We’re a bit biased, but the perks of remote work are seemingly endless. One of the most notable advantages is expanding to a global talent pool. Remote’s 2024 Global Workforce Report found that 71% of teams are recruiting globally.
While going global certainly has advantages, managing teams across various time zones is the main challenge. This post will help you overcome time zone challenges to utilize global talent and maintain a competitive advantage.
Let’s get started.
The importance of time zone management in remote work
Establishing a global team is a great way to attract the best candidates, but what good does that do if you’re unable to manage them effectively? That’s the importance of time zone management.
Without the right tools and strategies for managing teams across various time zones, a distributed workforce becomes a liability instead of an advantage. To avoid this issue, let’s look at some common challenges with working across time zones.
Common issues faced by teams working across time zones
At Hubstaff, we’re veterans of global, remote work. With over a decade of experience under our belts, we’ve seen both the positive and negatives to this progressive way of working — and we’d be lying if we claimed those negatives didn’t present serious challenges when it comes to:
- Scheduling meetings. Finding common working hours for meetings can be challenging for teams spanning multiple time zones or continents.
- Maintaining effective communication. Finding any semblance of punctuality can be difficult when communicating with colleagues whose working hours vary drastically.
- Meeting deadlines. Teams will need to become masters of their teammates’ time zone differences. Failure to do so could result in missed deadlines.
- Handling work-related emergencies. Outages, customer inquiries, and various other issues can be challenging to handle if key contributors are off the clock.
These are some pretty glaring challenges — but don’t be intimidated! With a better understanding of time zone management, you can make these weaknesses your strengths and even provide 24/7 coverage in several key business areas.
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Try it free for 14 daysStrategies for managing time zones effectively
Like with overcoming any challenge, developing the right strategy is key. Here are a few tips and strategies to effectively manage time zones.
Using time zone management tools
As a tech company ourselves, it’s hard not to lead off by stressing the importance of adopting the right technology. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
- World Time Buddy
World Time Buddy is a free site that helps you visualize every time zone in the world quickly. It can eliminate the headache of manual time conversions when collaborating with teammates abroad.
First, enter a time zone or a place anywhere in the world. Then, use the slider to select a time (or range of times) to calculate the conversion.
World Time Buddy is an excellent hack for planning one-on-ones, sprint meetings, or even sending your international colleagues a Slack message or email.
2. Google Calendar
Once again, a tool from the Google Suite delivers. Google Calendar is a great all-around scheduling tool for meetings, personal appointments, and focused work. It also has a time zone feature.
Go to Settings > Time Zone > Display secondary time zone to access additional time zones.
While it’s helpful for scheduling one-on-ones with employees working outside of your time zone, you can only see two time zones at once. This makes the feature less useful for scheduling meetings that span more than a couple of time zones.
3. Slack
At Hubstaff, Slack is easily one of our most popular tools company-wide. Its intuitive interface, which feels like it specifically caters to global teams operating in different time zones, is a big reason for that.
Did you know that you can find out the time zone of any Slack user by clicking on their profile and heading over to the “About” section?
I often use this little hack when planning meetings or deciding when to ask coworkers like our Front-End Developer Anatolie for help.
Establishing clear communication protocols
Communicating across time zones can still be challenging, even with the right tools. Establishing proper communication etiquette is crucial for ensuring a cohesive remote work environment.
At Hubstaff, we’ve established a communication manifesto template that we swear by. It delves into things like:
- Appropriate response times. How long does it take to reply to a Slack message or an email? Establishing clear communication guidelines here helps everyone set realistic expectations.
- Which tools to use. Should meetings be done in Slack huddles, Zoom, or Google Meet? Shouldn’t new work be assigned using a project management tool instead of Slack or email? Your tech stack only works efficiently if you clearly articulate how to use each tool.
- Who should be involved. Your communication manifesto could also outline who needs to be involved in specific projects, discussions, and meetings. This way, you make good use of your limited time with colleagues in different time zones.
Scheduling meetings across time zones
The most irritating facet of working across time zones is scheduling meetings.
With the proper project management tools, you can easily plan handoffs in various project phases. But when it comes time to meet face to face in the form of a meeting, things get a little trickier. Here are a few tips that can help:
- Use Time Zone tools. Use World Time Buddy or another tool to help you see where each invitee’s work time overlaps. Then, switch to your team’s preferred calendar tool to spot potential openings.
- Be mindful of local holidays. With global teams, working hours, meetings, and other scheduling conflicts are only part of the equation. Ensure you stay abreast of the holidays your remote team celebrates, too.
- Record meetings. Depending on the number of attendees and time zones involved, you won’t always be able to find a time that works for everyone. Meeting recording tools like Fireflies can help anyone who missed a meeting with a full video recap and AI-generated minutes.
- Be flexible. Last but not least, try your best to be flexible. Be understanding of emergencies that may arise and leave extra openings in your schedule. You can also lean on asynchronous meeting tools to help.
Time management strategies for remote teams
Great tools and etiquette are helpful, but you’ll need to be intentional about your time to effectively collaborate with teams in other time zones. One of the best ways to do this is to maximize your focus time with time management methods like:
- Time blocking involves breaking your day into blocks of time and assigning specific tasks to each block. It’s great for staying organized and gives your teammates some insight into periods when you’re working on focused work and aren’t available to meet.
- Eisenhower Matrix. Also known as a Time Management Matrix, the Eisenhower Matrix is named after former U.S. President Eisenhower. It involves creating a four-quadrant grid to sort tasks based on urgency and importance: Do, Schedule, Delegate, Delete.
- MoSCoW Prioritization Method. The MoSCoW Prioritization Method is similar to the Eisenhower Matrix as it sorts work into four core categories: “Must-haves,” “Should-haves,” “Could-haves,” and “Won’t-haves.”
Best practices for leading teams across time zones
Working across time zones is hard enough, but it’s even more challenging from a leadership perspective. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to ensure success for a team without a central time zone.
Building a time zone-aware culture
It sounds like a no-brainer, but working well across time zones starts with creating a culture of time zone awareness. Many employees have never worked outside of their time zone, so it’s crucial to get everyone thinking on a broader scale.
When you create a culture that respects and accommodates different time zones, your team will respond with:
- Better work-life balance
- Healthier communication guidelines
- An emphasis on overlap time
- Patience and flexibility for scheduling changes
Utilizing asynchronous work
We’re big proponents of asynchronous work at Hubstaff. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, asynchronous work occurs when employees aren’t required to be online simultaneously and can work hours that don’t align.
At Hubstaff, we even let each employee work their own preferred hours. As long as they reach 40 hours for the week, most teams can break up their schedules however they want. In fact, I’m a big fan of sleeping until 10:00 AM and pretending I’m on Mountain Time.
Asynchronous teams like Hubstaff utilize technology, strong communication skills, and well-articulated processes to ensure work gets done. On a daily basis, we demonstrate how it’s possible to pass work through various stages, orchestrate proper handoffs, and meet deadlines with limited overlap time for all parties involved.
Still not sold? Asynchronous work dramatically affects our ability to offer 24/7 live customer support. Without this work model, we’d never be able to offer this perk, and support tickets would pile up.
Setting clear expectations and deadlines
One downside of managing multiple time zones is that deadlines need to be very clear. Vague language like “End of Day” or “By Monday” means different things depending on the time zone.
It’s hard to break these communication habits, but they’re crucial for your team’s success. Set specific due dates and times. It’s also helpful to factor in some extra time to account for any issues that arise. Work-related emergencies happen, but try not to make last-minute tweaks to deadlines, as not all parties will be online in the event of a change.
Tools and resources for managing time zones
We’ve already discussed some time zone management tools, but what about full-fledged time zone software for remote and global teams? Let’s examine a few ideas.
Time zone management software
The best time zone management tools do more than convert hours or provide insight into each team member’s availability. Working across time zones is more than knowing what time it is for a teammate. It’s about streamlining productivity, cutting unnecessary costs, and creating a culture of empathy.
Here are a few examples of the best time zone management software:
Hubstaff
Hubstaff is a premier global time tracking and employee productivity tool for teams working across different time zones. It boasts a versatile array of features like:
- Time tracking and timesheets. Track time to specific projects and tasks and switch seamlessly from web, mobile, desktop, or tablet. Users can add manual time entries or submit their automated, itemized timesheet in just one click.
- Employee productivity. Gain peace of mind and ensure employees use time effectively with fully customizable employee productivity features. See screenshots, track website and URL usage, and keyboard and mouse usage rates.
- Payments and Payroll. Pay teams through Hubstaff Pay or across an array of popular payroll platforms like PayPal, Wise, and Deel with intuitive integrations.
- Hubstaff Insights. Level up your productivity tracking with utilization rates, work time classifications, and suspicious activity detection with Hubstaff Insights. You can also balance meeting and focus time to maximize overlap for cross-time zone collaboration.
Appointed
Appointed is a time zone scheduling tool that helps global businesses streamline scheduling for international teams of all sizes. It offers an array of time zone-specific features like:
- Time zone adaptive scheduling
- Multi-language booking
- External calendar synchronization
- Automatic time zone detection
Boomerang
Like Appointed, Boomerang is a time zone-specific scheduling tool, but it’s specifically catered to Gmail. It allows users to see meeting invites in multiple time zones to reduce the likelihood of missed meetings and other mistakes and offers features like:
- Dual time zone suggestion
- An up-to-date Magic Live calendar to prevent double-booking
- Customizable multi-schedule availability sets
Case studies of successful time zone management
Real-world examples
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by time zone issues, you can find solace in the fact that most Fortune 500 companies operate across multiple time zones to great success. Here are a few examples:
- IBM. Tech juggernaut IBM has been on the right side of innovation for over a century, so it is no surprise that they’ve turned to a remote workforce spanning over 170 countries. In just three years, they’ve seen a 25% increase in productivity.
- Atlassian. The minds behind Jira have a progressive view of time zone challenges. Advocates of asynchronous work, Atlassian leans on written communication and the very tools they make to make it all possible.
- Zapier. Zapier operates across 24 countries and 17 time zones with great success. They rely on Zoom, Trello, Quip, and other tools to make it all possible. Would you expect anything less from the tool that can facilitate virtually any connection?
Lessons learned
With even just a few examples, it’s clear that some of the world’s most successful businesses have turned to global, asynchronous work to reach new heights. They manage to work around time zone differences for the trade-off of a wider talent pool, broader customer service, and a greater diversity of thought.
Time zone challenges can be tricky, but they’re a minor speed bump on the highway to success for most businesses. It won’t always be pretty, even with the right tools, strategies, and companies to look to. That said, avoiding the headache of navigating these challenges is worth the opportunity to create a global, remote workforce that’s primed to bring your business prolonged success.
Do you have any experience working across different time zones? Do you have any tips we might have missed? We’d love to hear more about your experiences.
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