How international technology teams work in different time zones

What time zone is it?

Anywhere-from-anywhere policies are life-changing for employees, and can make hiring easier. But true collaboration can be difficult unless everyone is in the same time zone.

Here’s how the pros tackle the thorniest time zone challenges.

Embrace asynchronous work, but do it right. Asynchronous work can solve many of the headaches that come with working across time zones, and there’s no shortage of tools to help you embrace this style of collaboration.

• “The traditional 9-to-5 workday, where we’re all working in the same place at the same time, is a thing of the past,” Ali Reil, SVP of product management at Slack, told Protocol.

• This requires training for leaders, says Megan Williams, HubSpot’s hybrid culture enablement manager. “We’ve developed an ongoing series to provide managers with the tools and resources they need to lead a distributed team at scale. We’ll focus on topics like proximity discrimination, inclusive hiring, and psychological well-being.”
• “And some of our leaders include canned messages in their email signatures, believing they’ll email when it’s convenient for them, but don’t expect a response outside of the recipient’s business hours,” Williams added.

Document everything. Remote workforce management company Oyster helps startups recruit and onboard talent in 180 countries. Co-founder Jack Mardock told Protocol that the company is so proud of its hybrid-working best practices that it recently unveiled an Oyster employee handbook.

• “In sync – whether in the office or remotely – it’s much easier to walk around and ask other people for information,” Mardak said. “In a globally distributed team, this is not always possible. So we need to make sure other people get the information they need if you don’t have it. We found the solution to be excessive documentation.
• HubSpot takes a similar approach. “Our teams create ‘operating systems’ that include best practices for working together, including where to find shared internal documents, video meeting recordings to watch later, written agendas, and more,” said Williams of HubSpot’s Protocol.

If total synchronization is not possible, find a few hours where employees can overlap. Avoiding the culture of expecting everyone to be in each other’s time zones is critical. Rail stressed that organizations must be flexible.

• “One thing we’ve done on Slack is encourage our teams to set their own ‘prime collaboration hours.’ Team members agree on a few hours each day (10am to 5pm PT) when everyone on the team is online and available for live chats.” Rail said.
• Williams said he encourages everyone at HubSpot to make their business hours transparent. She suggests that employees add hours to their Google calendar and turn off Slack notifications when they’re done for the day. “Our team uses schedule-shipping features to respect those boundaries and accommodate time differences,” says Williams.
• Christine Lee, senior communications manager at communications platform Intercom, calls this overlap period the “golden hours.” Intercom executives live on the US West Coast and Dublin, which makes the golden hours 8 am to 10:30 am and 4 to 6:30 pm GMT. “We encourage employees to talk to their managers and their teams about their preferred working hours and ask them to find better times (or have them filmed),” Lees says.

Be intentional about decision making. Mardak warns that group decisions can take longer if people from Oyster work in different time zones.

• “Treat decisions as reversible by default,” says Mardak. “Most decisions can easily be reversed, and the negative consequences of delaying a decision are often worse than the negative consequences of making the wrong decision.”
• Choose someone to make the decision. “If a decision is difficult to make, try to identify the decision maker – it’s their responsibility to make the call. “We can save a lot of back and forth by being open about this early,” says Mardak.
• Mardak says decisions don’t always come from the top. “Make decisions at the lowest level possible. Most decisions should be made by people closest to the problem. This is rarely the CEO.”

— Meg Morrone, Senior Editor (email | Twitter)