How to manage different employee time zones in a remote environment

If you travel the world frequently, knowing which a time zone you’re in relative to GMT is crucial—and it’s also important if you’re working with a distributed team. Knowing the difference between Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time alone isn’t enough anymore. You’ll need to know which times of the day your colleague in London will be awake, and the times working remotely in a different time zone you’re most likely to get support tickets from your Australian customers. If you have a large distributed team, you might not need to try so hard to stay connected. “Since there are people working from nearly every time zone in the world, there was always someone online to help with a problem or joke around with when you’re working,” he wrote in his book.

Even between the east and west coast of the United States, there is a three-hour time difference. Hosting an 8 AM meeting in New York City, which seems completely appropriate to start your day, would mean someone in Los Angeles needing to be up and ready to go by 5 AM. Even with a smaller difference, the morning and late afternoon meetings can be really challenging for some, especially if they are managing a family and multiple schedules. Consider meeting times that fall in the middle of the day so they fall within everyone’s normal work hours. If your company doesn’t currently offer any flexibility, you may find that it’s hard to attract talent as a larger portion of the workforce is made up of these younger generations. This will only get more difficult over time if you aren’t willing to make some changes to attract and retain millennial employees.

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It’s easy for changes in your diet to impact your mental health, though. You can practice good self care while traveling by tossing aside everything you think you SHOULD do on vacation. The https://remotemode.net/ ideal trip looks different for everyone, and the best way to take care of yourself while you’re traveling is to meet your own needs in terms of what you want to get out of your trip.

But today, for many fully distributed teams and companies that have employees based in a hodgepodge of places worldwide, working across multiple time zones has become a daily reality. Businesses likely have even more schedules to juggle, with some workers awake and logging in for the day while others are just signing off. Furthermore, some of the best practices for holding productive virtual team meetings include having a shared goal and describing what you expect to accomplish.

Check of overlaps

Leaders may worry about telling their employees they have to relax. Given the way work can take over the lives of team members, however, it’s vital to fight burnout by modeling good self-care, discussing self-care, and building in practices of self care during the workday. Hybrid employees and on-premise workers are just as susceptible to burnout and stress. They may also be working too many hours, and they may also be putting off PTO. The difference is, it may be easier for managers to see when someone has been at their desk for hours.

“My team had hit the natural limits of space and time on planet earth,” Berkun says. “For us to speak at the same time, someone would have to be miserable.” Whether it’s just a team check-in or something more collaborative, meetings will always be a thing. That’s good—after all, you’ll still want some team interaction. Freaking Nomads is an online publication and a community for all things digital nomads.