How to deal with different time zones
At Get on Board we've been a remote team since the beginning. At first, it wasn’t a big deal. We were spread between Santiago, Lima and Miami and the timezones were not so different. But then, a few months ago, part of our team started working from the Bay Area in California and had to face 5 hours of difference. We made mistakes but we also learned a few important things.
What is the real problem with such different time zones?
The most obvious answer is “the lack of overlap”. It’s easy to complain about how few hours you have available to work in sync with the rest of the team. If something is blocking our work, we all want to be able to ask on Slack and get a quick response. But is this a real problem? Indeed it is not. We started seeing this as a coordination challenge instead. We forced ourselves to be much more efficient in how we coordinate our team and in how we spread important information.
Does coordination require a lot of time?
Maybe sometimes, maybe at the beginning. But for most situations, overspending time coordinating stuff ends up with less time to get things done. I don’t want to be “the optimistic guy”, but this is also a huge management opportunity to improve the way your team is working.
Some ideas that can optimize your team coordination
So, here’s a list with a few things that are already working for us to deal with coordination among different timezones.
1. Enable people to self-coordinate
We strongly believe this is the most relevant item and this doesn’t work with people that need micromanagement. More than seniority, this is about how autonomous your team members can be.
A lot of “management-gurus” talk about the importance of hiring professionals who are “problem-solvers” and this is a good example of why it is so relevant. People who solve problems by themselves don’t need too much time coordinating stuff. Just explain the problem and give them the freedom to solve it, you can trust them. Thus, you will be able to manage your team by the outcomes instead of the outputs, as Teresa Torres explains in this article.
In our case, we have adopted OKRs to measure outcomes and it is working. Our coordination time is limited to explain the desired outcomes and why they are important for the company. Then, we just check if the outcomes have been achieved or if they need to be reviewed, which means just a couple of short meetings a month — and it also means less stress due to the lack of overlapping time.
2. Strong documentation (public by default)
Well, you can hire people that solve everything by themselves, but MacGyver and John Wick are fictional characters. Real people, no matter how experts they are, often need help.
The best way to provide information for self-sufficient people is having good documentation. Document your processes, your failures, and your learnings. At Get on Board we started following this rule, providing public knowledge to the entire company. With this, things have started to get better for people with doubts, because they can just read the documents before asking anything to their folks.
3. Meetings: Say “no”, set agenda and use your video camera for calls
Meetings are one of the toughest problems with different time zones because you need to fit them in a reduced schedule and you have to be efficient. These three things are helping us a lot so far:
Say “no”: You don’t have to be in every meeting, this is expensive for your company. Also, if you are documenting, you can keep yourself updated asynchronously. We use Zoom so we can record every call, so if anyone misses a meeting, they can watch the recording later.
Set agenda: If you want to keep your meeting short and focused, please set goals and expectations upfront: “today we are going to talk about X, Y and Z and we expect to leave this meeting with a solution for X and Y”. So simple, so useful.
Encourage the use of the video camera: It might sound silly, but it’s super important. Seeing everyone actually raising their thumbs up is much faster than waiting for a “yes". Also, I have seen people turning their cameras off to eat, drink or leave the meeting to go to the bathroom, which could end up with this person missing key information. Cameras turned on is an incentive to get focused on the discussion, and it’s also helpful to create rapport in a remote environment.
4. Tweak your work hours
If you can wake up 1–2 hours earlier to get a bigger overlap, just do it! It could mean to get you off-work earlier to enjoy the day with your people. Same if you can start your work 1–2 hours later. Maybe now you can have a longer breakfast with your kids! The point is, provide your team with space to tweak their work hours if they want to do so, and make sure they take it as an opportunity to improve their personal lives.
5. Focus on the last point and don’t hurt your personal life.
“Tweak” doesn’t equal “work more hours”. You shouldn’t compensate this with notifications turned on all night long or during weekends (unless it’s an emergency). ‘Move and reorganize work hours’ doesn’t mean to be martyrs who burn themselves out. Your team needs the best of you.
Conclusion
It’s hard to tweak your team’s mindset to face different timezones, but it is not that hard if you have built a transparent culture where it’s more important to get things done, instead of spending the whole day in coordination meetings.
I’m pretty sure that all the things that we have made to minimize our issues with different timezones at Get on Board, would be equally useful for a context where the whole team is gathered in the same place.
A lot of managers are not fully convinced to lead remote teams because of the timezone differences or the lack of control, but if you are already hiring the right people and you are building a transparent culture, in which context is more relevant than control, then you are not that far from being able to lead a team spread in several countries.
