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Daily, weekly, monthly, take some time to check how you are feeling 🔎. It’s OK to not be OK, reach out and share with someone close to you 🤗. Alternatively, you may be flourishing and may benefit from taking a moment to be thankful for this time. This might mean taking breaks throughout the day to stretch, meditate, or exercise, and setting aside time for hobbies and other non-work related activities. Finally, another important aspect is establishing a dedicated workspace and avoiding working from your bed or couch. By creating a physical separation between work and home life, you can help to maintain a healthy balance and avoid burnout.
- Staying up a bit late or getting up an hour earlier isn’t a bad tradeoff for a job you love, but how about 2 a.m.?
- Let’s outline all the key steps companies can take to better manage working across time zones within the asynchronous collaboration framework.
Remote engagement may take extra time and effort but is central to effectively managing all employees — and it can be as simple as an email of thanks or sharing success with a broader global team. I noticed a massive difference in team morale when I paid extra attention to this. April Hoffbauer, Vice President of People at Maze, a global and fully distributed tech startup, also flags missed messages or crossed wires as a potential problem with working across time zones. “There may also be questions that are sent in a private channel that could receive a faster response in a public thread,” Hoffbauer said. “Scheduling meetings and collaboration sessions can be challenging,” Erhard agreed. The managing partner explained that his company’s teams frequently need to collaborate across “adjacent” time zones, as well as internationally with clients in the United States and elsewhere.
How teams can best manage working across time zones
Remote working isn’t automatically a freer way to work—it can be just as stressful as any 9-to-5 job. Teach your remote team to be flexible about time, though, and everyone’s lives will be easier. Plus, you’ll be able to hire the best people from anywhere around the globe. David Fullerton had to overcome the communication hurdle when he was growing the Stack Exchange team.
Find ways to relax and recharge your mind and body, such as meditation, yoga, reading, or hobbies. Don’t neglect your social and emotional needs, and stay connected with your family, friends, and support network. Communication in particular is hard when one team is arriving at the office just as another is leaving, or when one teammate is sleeping peacefully just as another is hitting their midday stride. But there are ways to tackle differences between time zones that preserve collaboration and keep communication effective.
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Let your clients or colleagues know how soon they can expect to hear back from you, and if there will be any delays due to time zone differences. When we meet someone new, we frequently think they are in the same time zone as ourselves. When scheduling a conference or call with remote team members, ask them what time zone they are in so that you can account for any time difference with their local time.
Burnout also causes workers to be less creative, be less able to solve problems, and become sick more often. Think of all the ways you take care of your children, an elder, or a beloved pet. You make sure they get enough sleep, eat nutritious food, are clean, and get medical attention when they need it.
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Having people based across different countries can be extremely valuable for accessing new markets — I’ve seen firsthand that this helps to spur on the future growth of the business. However, if not handled correctly, it can also bring about a variety of challenges that require you to adopt alternative management strategies. “Setting the stage with all stakeholders at the beginning of a project and setting expectations on response times can keep everyone on track,” Hoffbauer working remotely in a different time zone said. “When you only work in a single time zone, that limits your potential employees to people who also live in that region (or are willing to work during those hours, if they live elsewhere),” Erhard said. It’s easy to think of only the problems that can come about from coworkers trying to collaborate from different locales without having the same start and stop to their workday. But this asynchronous setup confers some advantages alongside the drawbacks.