These savings are primarily due to reduced costs for gas, parking, car maintenance, and food. Being able to select the best talent regardless of the location is one of the main factors that impacted the entire movement in the first place. Provide these tools to your employees so they can use them effectively. As a result, you’ll be able to close any cultural communication gaps, which will lead to a more respectful and productive work environment.

And that’s nice—we all need human interaction, and it’s great that you can still get that without being in the same room. And if you’re the one working while most of your team is sleeping, odds are you get longer bouts of uninterrupted focus time to get your stuff done. I’ll bet most of you cannot remember learning to tie your shoelaces or brushing your teeth. And for a majority of us, these actions have become unremarkable parts of our daily routines. I’m sure most of us kept at it (or at least, your parents made you keep at it) until it developed into something we could do without thinking twice.

Fun (Not Cheesy) Ice Breaker Games & Activities Your Team Will Enjoy in 2023

They were created in the nineteenth century because the world needed a unified system to keep track of time. When you are looking for employees or business partners, it can be tough to find the right person in an industry where ‘who you know’ is just as important as what you know. By hiring remote workers, you’ll never have to worry about geographical limitations again. There’s no need to wait for a conference call or meeting to start talking when you work together from the same office.

It can be very helpful when trying to schedule a meeting in a different time zone. Time Zone Converter can also be used to find out what time it is in multiple time zones at once. Scheduling meetings across different time zones can be a challenge, but it’s important to make sure your meetings are scheduled correctly.

Know your remote team’s working hours

Flexible workers hours have been proven to reduce burnout, stress levels, and psychological distress while increasing job satisfaction. They can also unlock more productivity by allowing team members to work when they’re most productive whether that be in the morning, afternoon, night, or a mix. The Head of Remote position sits on the organization’s leadership team and is responsible for building and maintaining remote company culture and employee experience.

Compare hours and time zones to see if you can find one hour in common each week. Slack, for instance, lists each team member’s time zone, how many hours that is from your local time, and that person’s current local time whenever you click their name. That’s an easy way to double-check before expecting an immediate reply. Or, if you attempt to message everyone in a group, Slack can let you know it’s late for some people before you hit send.

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And there is a great app that one of the buffer developers developed called timezone.io. And that actually visually shows on one screen where all of your teammates are in the world and their time zone, very, very good-looking tool. So when you do have meetings or things that the team needs to know about, that everybody inputs that time into a shared calendar, then the time zone conversions are automatically done.

• Slack, for instance, lists each team member’s time zone, how many hours that is from your local time, and that person’s current local time whenever you click their name.
• It’s a simple, text-based world clock provides an at-a-glance update.
• Whether it’s just a team check-in or something more collaborative, meetings will always be a thing.
• You can work at opposite times from the rest of your team, and still join in on all the office banter.
• So every once in a while, whenever possible, get the team together face-to-face and rebuild that human connection that we can easily lose when we go remote.

Teams in traditional office settings sometimes measure productivity by how long each team member spends at their desk. But remote teams can fall into the “I’m online, so I’m being productive” trap, too. A time shift, though, forces you to show what you’ve actually accomplished, since few others were there to see if you were logged in all day. Join us as we go through common challenges of managing remote team members across time zones and five practical tips to overcome them.

And that just helps minimize some of the mistakes that we can make when we’re scheduling time. If you’re in the US and your team is in Europe, try to schedule all your meetings for 9am EST. This will help prevent any confusion about what time it is for each person. You can also set your own personal preferences for how you want to see time zones displayed. From here, you can choose to have all time zones displayed in 24-hour format, or to have the time zones displayed relative to your own time zone. This will open a new window where you can select the time zone for each person invited to the meeting.

Asynchronous collaboration is the default workflow globally distributed teams turn to to optimize their processes and overall culture. This is not surprising, given that the flexibility of asynchronous collaboration represents the ideal response to the challenges of working across time zones. Meeting scheduler apps are another increasingly common tool — working remotely in a different time zone think Calendly, CalendarHero, ScheduleOnce, and Rallly. Communication across different time zones in software projects is not only about sharing information, but also about building relationships, collaboration, and trust among your team members. You can foster a positive team culture by encouraging informal communication, socializing, and feedback.