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

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

This is a free and simple tool for macOS (other platforms “coming soon”) where you can see a list of people, their locations and current time where they are. You can import your team’s contact list directly from Slack to There, or you can add people and locations individually. Open up Every Time Zone in your web browser for an at-a-glance guide to your time zone as compared to multiple cities, including Tokyo, Berlin, and Dubai. It’s laid out so that each time zone appears relative to one another, and if you register for a free account you’ll be able to customize the cities that show up and the order they’re in. Another benefit of hiring employees from Peru is the country’s high English proficiency. Statista reports that Peru has a score of 505 in terms of English proficiency, which is much higher than other Latin American countries like Colombia and Ecuador. TimeandDate.com’s World Clock Meeting Planner won’t win any design awards, but it makes time shift scheduling straightforward.

  • Even when there’s a slight time difference due to daylight savings, you’ll still have sufficient overlapping time for holding meetings or collaborating with your remote employees.
  • Tools like World Time Buddy and Time and Date make planning meetings easier.
  • Plus, you’ll be able to hire the best people from anywhere around the globe.
  • Some of the year, I was 12 hours ahead of my family in New Jersey, and the other half of the year, when the US changed clocks, I was 13 hours ahead!

Most teams experience delays in communication hindering the progress or deployment of a product. And a lot of people will try to have teams that really overlap a lot, even though they are in other time zones. Have them working on separate things with just a small amount of overlap when the times are convenient. There are a lot of different scenarios that we could play out here, but the thing to keep in mind is try organizing your team so that it’s less painful.

Be mindful when scheduling meetings across time zones

Making adjustments on your end will make you look professional and gracious, leaving your partners with a positive impression of you. We also encourage team members to meet via our Camper Coffee Lottery. The slack bot, Donut, connects Campers across offices for casual chats every few weeks.

How do you communicate in different time zones?

  1. Tip 1: Be aware of time zones.
  2. Tip 2: Use chat and email together.
  3. Tip 3: Find a good video conferencing system.
  4. Tip 4: Encourage and support in-person visits.
  5. Find the right communication tools for you.

This is a big advantage for companies that provide global products as they have 24-hour support readily available for their consumers. Although having a global team can boost productivity in a company, there are quite a few challenges especially when it comes to management as everyone works across different time zones. Although remote teams have the working across time zones distinct advantage of not being able to walk up to a coworker’s desk to ask for a quick chat, meetings can still suck up a lot of time. Sometimes, that time might be in the early morning or late evening due to time zone differences. As therise of remote jobscontinues, businesses of all sizes are feeling the draw of a global virtual workplace.

Schedule less urgent emails to send at a time where international teammates are active.

Try moving this hourly block around over the course of the week so that on some days, it’s in the morning and other days just before you clock off. This way, colleagues in different time zones can contact you at the time closest to their working hours. Pay particular attention to whether any options are unavailable in certain countries — you want all of your employees to be using a cohesive suite of products, regardless of where they’re based. Give particular consideration to your progress tracker software, which will enable you to build strategies in real time and monitor the progress of colleagues across the globe. This will allow global workers to keep on the same page with each project, leaving one another notes for seamless handover. On Slack, for example, if you set your time zone, other users will be able to see your local time when they interact with you. They’ll also get notified if they’re reaching out to you outside of office hours, which can be helpful if you don’t care for your phone buzzing in the middle of the night.

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Fried and Heinemeier Hansson offer another upside to remote work in their book on the topic. “The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration,” they write.

Pro: Time and place freedom boosts productivity

When your clients are located in a different time zone, like a really different time zone, you quickly learn how to make adjustments to your life, in order to make the relationship work. Because if you don’t, it’s too easy to get stuck in time zone hell. With such a gap between certain time zones, it can be difficult to host meetings at a time that works for everyone. Nevertheless, there are two sides to the same coin, and working with distributed teams also brings with it its challenges—one of which being how to manage them across time zones. Trying to get multiple people across various time zones on the same page for a meeting can be tricky, but World Time Buddy can help. Add up to four locations , and you’ll be able to see how meeting times fall across each place.

  • This leads to a better run company, less stress, and higher quality work.
  • If each manager is setting meetings according to their own personal time zone, that leaves everyone else scrambling to translate it to their own.
  • Time is precious, especially when the lines from work and home are blurred.
  • “We have a bi-monthly full company meeting to make sure we all know we still exist,” writes designer Ben Hanna.
  • As remote work is becoming more mainstream, companies realize the slight discomforts that come with working from different geographical locations.
  • Improve your employee experience with expert resources for people leaders.

For example, if you have a few messages you want to send, but notice it’s 9 p.m. In another employee’s timezone, you might either want to avoid sending til the morning or schedule an email. When it comes to quick communication some tools, like Slack, will even give you a notification before or after you send a message stating which timezone your recipient is in. “If you’re working two timezones that don’t overlap much, why not split your shift into two instead of doing the same number of hours consecutively?” asks Kelly.

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