When your distributed team is in one country or the time zone differences of people are within 1-2 hours you likely do not need to think about how you organize the work from the time zones perspective. My current engineering team is quite different though, it is fully distributed in the world. Our developers are in 8 countries across 3 different continents and are in time zones ranging from UTC+7 to UTC-8. Unsurprisingly time zone differences create additional complications for teamwork. I will talk about these problems and some of the solutions below. Interestingly there are also advantages to having people in different time zones if you know how to exploit the time zones to your benefit.
How to Communicate
Communication difficulty due to time zones differences is an important problem that needs to be solved for distributed teams to be successful. If everybody works 9am-5pm their local times and people are 12 time zones apart then they never work simultaneously and don’t have a chance to communicate online.
Offline communication via email or chat can be efficient in some cases. I worked in the past in an arrangement when we were in 2 teams located on 2 different continents. The teams had zero overlap of working hours and used almost exclusively offline communication between them. It was successful because we spent deliberate efforts to split work areas in a way that results in very few dependencies between the teams. Teams mostly worked independently and the need to interact was minimized.
However this approach with mostly offline communication is more difficult to organize efficiently with a fully distributed team of people. You will need to come up with an independent work branch for every single person, which can be hard. Also often there are topics, which are a lot more efficient when done in live discussion, like for example brainstorming or any sort of question/answer interaction when answers are likely to generate new questions.
So, what can one do?
Find Common Time.
In my current team we have certain time of the day when we require everyone to be available. We chose 8am-12pm PST for this. It is in the morning for our Californians, midday for me and others who are in EST and the end of the day for our teammates in Europe and Asia. I am lucky to be in a sweet spot which has a lot of overlap with everyone else’s time zone which helps me do my job better (as the head of engineering I need to interact a lot with different people at the company). The following time map illustrates the diversity of our time zones nicely (each column of people is one time zone):
The 8am-12pm PST time range is when the significant part of our online work happens, especially the meetings that require several people from different teams to be present. This is when our team standups happen, when we do planning and retrospective meetings, do one-to-ones or organize product demos.
Having a set time for online interactions has another nice benefit. It frees time to do focused, uninterrupted, distraction-free work during the rest of your day. I usually spend the first half of my day online on Slack, talking with coworkers on Hangouts and doing work that does not require dedication and focus. For the second half of the day I snooze Slack notifications, avoid scheduling meetings and spend my time in-the-zone.
Warp the Time to Your Advantage
Having commonly agreed working hours helps a lot. In addition to that knowing work habits and time availability of the teammates can be very useful for planning your own work.
Imagine a regular local office. When more than one person needs to be engaged on a certain piece of work and the work is sequential in nature people start blocking each other and need to wait for others to do their part of the job.
However in a distributed team careful planning allows the work to happen around the clock without delays. It is possible to actually use the time zone difference to your benefit. Imagine you write some code during your day, put it on review at the end of your day, then your coworker who is 12 time zones apart wakes up and reviews it. When you start your work the next day your code is already reviewed. You are never blocked by the review for a single minute. This is impossible to organize in a local workplace, code reviews are usually always blocking you unless someone does them after the hours. The same technique can be applied not just to code reviews but to any work which requires sequential collaboration, for example to coding and testing if they are performed by different people.
How Else to Use Time Zone Awareness
You can also prioritize your tasks in a way that makes them more compatible with the work schedule of others. If you have several tasks to do and one of them depends on the input from a coworker who is going to clocked out earlier than you it makes sense to work on this task first and get that input while they are online.
If you are new to the team spend some time learning where everyone is located. Memorize it and use it to the advantage of any work that requires collaboration.
—
Working in a team that is spread across many time zones has its challenges. I hope what I described above helps if you are part of a distributed team. I would love to hear about your team and how you solve those problems and what interesting ways you have found to use it to your advantage, please feel free to leave a comment below.