14 Tips for How to Work with Clients in Different Time Zones

Employee development → Grow and retain your people with the only personalized solution for effective, continuous development. Transform your organization and build a competitive advantage by putting your culture first. We hope that many of us get even more skilled at, and therefore less stressed out from collaborating remotely in 2021. The work day got longer as we tried to hand off and sync at the beginning or end of our days with the overseas team. We were creating so much design content, and yet it felt like we were not moving forward in the project.

• It may also cause everyone to plan a meeting across time zones when they’re the ones working unusual hours.
• Start removing friction points around your meetings immediately.
• If you have an iPhone, tap on World Clock, and then the plus button; if you have an Android phone, tap on the globe icon and search for the city you’re interested in.

Without the need for overtime or late-night shifts, teams can collaborate to fulfill deadlines. Employees in the one-time zone can hand over half-finished projects to peers in another time zone to finish. Join us as we go through common challenges of managing remote team members across time zones and five practical tips to overcome them. The actual time difference between co-workers is a significant barrier to effective real-time communication.

Use tools to figure out time zones.

And we simply can’t squeeze the world and bring time closer together. Whether you’ve built an asynchronous culture or not, the nature of working across time zones necessitates it to a degree. Another side effect of a multi-time zone team is increased autonomy. When a team can’t rely on synchronous communication, it increases the need to get work done without help. Waking up to a silent team chat, phone, or online communication tool, or conversely, in the middle of a hectic workday schedule for employees in other countries, can feel unsettling or overwhelming.

Aside from specifically discussing timezone-related needs and boundaries as needed, you can also mark your standard work hours on a team calendar — while encouraging colleagues to do the same. Meanwhile, if you’re not working in the same country as your broader team, “don’t be afraid to ask for meetings that are outside of others’ timezones.” In today’s workplace, diversity breeds new and unique ideas, allows us to look at our campaigns from different points of view, and benefits companies financially. In fact, by 2022, Gartner predicts that 75% of businesses with diverse frontline decision-makers will exceed their financial targets.

Flexible Schedules: The Pros, Cons, & Surprising Outcomes

Finally, a successful asynchronous collaboration calls for a set of functional tools to seamlessly tie all autonomous teams and operations together. Using a single, multifunctional tool such as Pumble, to streamline diverse conversations working across time zones and collaborative projects across time zones can increase overall productivity by 30%. Teams operating across time zones require a unique set of functionalities specifically customized to meet the needs of the asynchronous workforce.

Plus, you’ll be able to hire the best people from anywhere around the globe. Then, if you want another easy way to know what time it is everywhere your team’s located, you can turn on the World clock in the Calendar Labs settings. It’s a simple, text-based world clock provides an at-a-glance update. At Zapier, we’ve formalized communications about what we’re working on with a Friday update post that lists our top priority for the week and what progress we made on it.