How do we work together when our people are spread across multiple time zones? It seems like this is one of the core questions that companies ask when they're getting into remote work.
I was curious about the "best practices" that are out there right now for handling the time zone issue, and how some well-known companies are thinking about it.
It's all about meetings
I found it interesting that almost every discussion on this topic is about how to schedule meetings effectively.
- Do we have "core hours" in which everyone must be available for meetings?
- Do we limit which time zones we hire in so that no two time zones are too many hours apart?
- How do we inconvenience the fewest people when scheduling meetings?
On the GitHub blog, they talk about the importance of "overlap" for scheduling meetings:
We both have team members based all over the world, so typically we try to find times that overlap for various projects. A good rule of thumb is to create teams with four hours of time zone overlap, with the bare minimum being two hours.
The Dropbox team talks about their "non-linear" workdays:
We’re embracing what we call “non-linear workdays.” We’re setting core collaboration hours with overlap between time zones, and encouraging employees to design their own schedules beyond that.
The GitLab folks want to alternate who is most inconvenienced when scheduling meetings:
Synchronous meetings should be inclusive of those who want to attend and are in different time zones. For example, a team's recurring weekly meetings, alternate between a time which is ideal for EMEA and Eastern AMER (8:00AM Pacific) and a time ideal for APAC and Western AMER (3:00PM Pacific).
Why so many meetings?
In the post I wrote on this blog in 2014 about how I work remotely, the very first section was about the importance I placed on effective asynchronous communication.
Remote work requires a paradigm shift. Instead of thinking how can we go on working the same way we always worked without these pesky distances and time zones in between us, the best companies are starting at first principles. A true time zone-agnostic organization is one that, on a basic level, does not rely on meetings for collaboration.
GitLab deserves a lot of credit here, because they have written extensively on the topic of asynchronous communication, and it's a competency at the core of their organization. As the quote I included from them above indicates, they recognize some meetings as prudent, but they operate on an asynchronous-first model, with each meeting requiring a rigorous justification as to why it necessitates an exception to their default asynchronous mode of collaboration.
The easiest way to enter into an asynchronous mindset is to ask this question: "How would I deliver this message, present this work, or move this project forward right now if no one else on my team (or in my company) were awake?"
Instead of thinking about how to schedule meetings effectively when people are in different time zones, it's way more interesting to think about how do we…kinda…not need meetings?
