Working across opposite time zones — thinking out loud
Delib has an office in Bristol UK with the majority of the team working there. James and Catherine are in Brisbane, Australia and Hamish is in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Currently we have a catch-up call using join.me once a week on Tuesday at 8am BST, 17:00 AEST and 19:00 NZT (depending on daylight saving). Even writing that shows how the time variations due to daylight saving can have an impact at times of day which are already heading outside of people’s normal working hours.
Tuesday morning calls are not whole of company, they are usually just Andy, James, Hamish when he’s available, and me — sometimes Ben F and Ben W have other calls, too. We have to get as much as possible covered in that call and make it so we can take clear actions.
My wondering out loud is how we open that communication up so that we build relationships across the whole of Delib and get much, much better at communicating.
The other tools we currently use to work across the oceans, as well as within each territory are:
Plan.io our workflow ticketing system for getting tasks done, Googledocs, email, IRC (our messaging tool), Zendesk via tickets and articles. Some of us text one another every so often, and James and I Facetime occasionally.
There are some things we’ve already started, like putting together a company-facing article about each of our preferred contact hours, methods and routines so that we all know when and how we can contact one another. Especially out of hours.
James also sent us a giant panda who lives in the office as a visual reminder to think about people not in the room, which I thought was a genius idea.

I’ve done a bit more thinking this week and I have a braindump of ideas. These may be good, may be rubbish:
- To help people get to know one another, begin a quarterly whole team chat, timeboxed, and ideally with video rather than all dialled into the conference line
- Share photos/videos and other less-worky stuff — perhaps via a once-a-week company round up. James texts me pictures of how the sweetcorn is growing in his garden and his new son. I’d like that kind of good connection to be established between more people
- Get a more appropriate messaging tool for cross-continent working than IRC — like Slack — which allows us to add proper emojis, video/voice messages etc. We’re nearly there with getting Slack up and running
- Find and share useful online training courses that most people in Delib can do, so we’re providing opportunities for everyone and can focus around shared goals
- Build the company network via better communication (but what ‘better’ communication?), to make sure anyone feels they can talk to anyone else when they need to
That’s everything so far. Any practical advice from others who have made it work would be very welcome.
