When you just need a quick answer on what the current time is in a different location, World Time Buddy is a great resource. You can get a quick snapshot around the world and can see the full world clock. You will working remotely in a different time zone know what the local time is if you’re trying to video chat with your coworker in Bali or Paris. If you are working with people in many regions and time zones, you can record sessions for employees to view later.

• You can avoid this by minimizing your messaging after hours and being patient if you don’t get an immediate answer.
• A popular communication tool like Slack will help you with its features like emojis and others.
• Let’s get a closer look at what working across time zones entails and how you can adopt better strategies to accommodate the demands of a globally distributed team.

Using them is also an effective way to share meeting notes, create consensus and gather feedback. As a result of creating a wiki, you’ll be able to create transparency and stimulate a continuous flow of ideas and feedback. Real-time information and context shouldn’t be limited to one-off videos and screen captures. Notion, Confluence, and even Google https://remotemode.net/ Drive can all be used to document best practices and processes on an internal wiki. For everyone to understand the different times, use a simple timezone converter tool. We find a consultative process is most effective for companies with 50 or more employees and a rapid process is more impactful for companies with fewer than 50 employees.

Time Blocking

Switch it up so each personality type has a chance to participate and have some fun. Plus you can play trivia games, host movie-watching parties, and take a virtual cooking class or cocktail mixing class together. The large productivity improvement has been made possible by a general absence of interruptions, and a shorter commuting time and the overall comfort of the home or other selected work setting. And, as the epidemic fades and firms issue return-to-work notes, it’s back to business as usual for teams operating across time zones. Encourage employees to create their own shared experiences in workplace team chat applications, according to certain best practice examples.

After all, having employees working in different time zones is the equivalent of offering your organization a 24-hour workplace — with the top talent on the planet. Without the need for overtime or late-night shifts, teams can collaborate to fulfill deadlines. Employees in the one-time zone can hand over half-finished projects to peers in another time zone to finish.

Inconsistent collaboration and communication

Take it a step further and have everyone share a local food or drink that you might not find in other places. It’s always fun to learn something new and it’s a great way to bring people a little closer together even when they are physically far apart. Even while many companies are reopening their office spaces, it may look a little different with hybrid events and more people still working from home. With about one-third of all workers working from home in May of 2020, it was clear that the work could still get done and people could be productive even when they were away from their normal desks. If you want to work remotely in sync with the North American economy, and you want to avoid time zone obstacles, we recommend Latin America.

It’s nearly hard to arrange everyone to meet at the same time without inconveniencing someone if you don’t have team members working in overlapping time zones. Employees who do not establish clear work boundaries risk burning out, which negatively impacts the entire team’s productivity, creativity, and collaboration. Try to ensure there is an overlap in working hours between people working on the same projects in different locations.

Tips and useful websites for your time zone strategy

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. An enormous amount of effort is needed to overcome this particular downside of global remote work. Tell us the skills you need and we’ll find the best developer for you in days, not weeks. One of the first mistakes you may make when working remotely from home is to allow all of your favorite (or least favorite) items in the house to distract you. Hence, you should try to separate the place where you work from a relatively quiet place in your home.

For London and the rest of GMT, Brazil is two hours ahead of Colombia most of the time. If you need to sync with them 100%, the ideal working hours would have your shift end in the evenings. Cultural diversity has the potential to unlock new ways of thinking and solving problems if you approach it with an open mind and empower people to bring their cultures to the table.