How to Effectively Manage Time Zone Differences While Working with Remote Teams

Many businesses and organizations have embraced the remote work culture in the midst of the global epidemic. Understanding how to properly handle the time zone differences when collaborating with remote teams is a critical and pervasive difficulty.

Preserving good communication while maintaining the quality of work can be difficult when team members are located in multiple and significantly different time zones. Whether you’re an industry captain or a promising start-up, you’ll learn the finest strategies and practices for managing time zone variations when interacting with your distributed team in this article.

Staffing Right Employees

Competency is a must-have for remote employees. You must have faith in your team members’ ability to work independently and properly manage their time.

While many employees seem to prefer the concept of working from home, you can’t rely on everyone to work without supervision. If you want someone to perform at their best, they need to be checked in on a regular basis. As a result, while building a remote team, you must need to make sure that your new workers are capable of working remotely.

It takes some effort on your part to hire the appropriate people. You’ll need to create a recruitment strategy that looks for employees that are self-directed and motivated. They should also be willing to work flexible hours in order to collaborate with team members from various locations & time zones.

Utilizing Time Management & Collaboration Tools

Time zones can easily turn into a mathematical problem. Consider the following scenario: You want to contact a Tokyo team member, but you’re not sure if their time zone is ahead of yours.

By utilizing a multi time zone application, you may avoid the hassle of time conversion. These tools are fantastic for determining when an employee will be available to work & when they will be sleeping or celebrating.

Collaborating Remotely

All members of the team don’t have to be at the same place or work at the same time to coordinate on day-to-day tasks. There are various collaboration options from which to choose depending on your requirements. Some of them are Instant messaging apps, Task management software, and Progress trackers.

These methods can be used to connect with your teams, assign tasks, and keep track of their progress across time zones. These technologies can also be used by team members to interact and keep on the same page when carrying out a task together.

Using Agile Practices for Employee Management

For many remote teams, agile principles have become the key tool for increasing productivity. Although agile methodologies were first used by software development teams but other remote teams can benefit from them to increase productivity, generate better products, improve customer satisfaction, and accomplish goals.

So, how can you include agile methods into your daily routine? Here are some suggestions:

· Project tasks should be broken down into sprints.

· Create a list of priority activities and projects

· Have regular sprint meetings (planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and reflection meetings); and

· Use an agile project management tool to achieve best results such as Nifty, Jira, and Gravity.

Incorporating both Synchronous & Asynchronous Communication

You can interact with your team members no matter where they are in the world thanks to technological advancements. Teams can use Asana, Google Meet, Zoom & Skype communication channels to make online presentations, do daily stand-ups, & interact with one another.

These tools allow for both synchronous and asynchronous communication, and both of these can be utilized.

Both asynchronous & synchronous communication work well with Slack. It can be used to collaborate on projects, hold online meetings, report bugs, and commemorate achievements.

As an asynchronous tool, Asana performs well. It assists you in keeping track of your objectives, thoughts, & tasks. It’s the go-to tool for keeping track of projects and assuring timely diversification.

Zoom emerges as a tool for synchronous real-time interaction. It enables members to set up face-to-face virtual meetings in a couple of moments. The best aspect is that you can readily share a recording with team members who couldn’t attend the meeting.

Aligning the Right Balance Between Asynchronous & Synchronous Communications

The balance of synchronous and asynchronous communications among remote teams must be managed. There are instances when asynchronous communications can work sufficiently for a group. They do, however, require synchronous contact in order to address difficulties in real time and share information.

Periodic Virtual Events and Socializing

Project planning, execution, and evaluation are frequently the driving forces behind workplace communication. However, there should be times set aside for social gatherings. The majority of businesses hold annual events. Those yearly gatherings, on the other hand, aren’t going to cut it.

You’ll need to schedule regular face-to-face sessions if you want your group members to get to know & support one another. Thankfully, technological advancements have made this possible.

Conclusion

Remote workers are an essential element of a company’s resources, and they need to be managed appropriately for maximum productivity. If you want to get the most out of your remote employees that work across multiple time zones, you’ll need to put up processes and tools that make it easy for them to communicate and share information.

This will entail some financial commitment on your behalf. To help teams socialize with one another, you’ll need to streamline your hiring process, implement productivity tools and practices, and plan events.

Get in touch with our talent experts at BorderlessMind, if you’re also looking to hire remote developers and hire timezone friendly development teams today!

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