Working Across Time Zones - Introduction

I’ve been working with people across time zones for years. When I worked in Tampa, Florida I often had colleagues in Europe and Asia.

I used to spend a lot of time figuring out when to meet and how to use that time wisely.

I ended up coming up with some key insights into how to work across timezones. I will share those here in a short series.

Why does it matter?

Timezones matter because they impact our lives.

The ability to work with teams across the globe is very alluring, but I’ve seen things go very badly. When I was at one of my companies many years ago we had engineers who worked till very late to have overlapping time to have meeing with the Eastern time zone folks. They were getting burned out and quitting.  It became a top issue and I went to our office in India on an information gathering trip. 

This was a long time ago and things may have changed in the culture, but back then the hardest hit were the mothers. They needed to go home and prepare food for their family. They were put in a very difficult spot where they *felt* they needed to stay at work while their family was begging them to stay home. It was a heart breaking situation. The CIO who was with me on the trip also agreed that we needed to have some open conversations. We needed to make sure that everyone could work the hours that made sense for a balanced work and life. We worked with the local management to really change the culture to one where staying late wasn’t needed to “get ahead.” I think we did some good during that trip.

As we work across timezones it’s critical to have open conversations about how we will work together. This series has some tips to help make the working relationship productive and prevent anger and burnout.