Discussion on: How does your company deal with massive time zone differences between teammates?

[Nitya Narasimhan, Ph.D]

Subscribing to this discussion immediately 😍

As someone who works on a distributed team and is also a remote worker, the challenges are along two fronts:

• How do you make sure information is shared in an inclusive way (localization, respect working hours)
• How do you collaborate when you are not necessarily in compliant time-zones

What I've seen/learned are:

• Ensure that all meetings occur in duplicate - every region should have at least 1 friendly time option
• Record all meetings - folks can catch up if they miss out
• Shared documents - write everything and allow for async comments that everyone can see
• Compromise - take the occasional early morning or late night call so others enjoy regular hours
• Provide enough runway time for decisions - allow everyone to have a chance to watch/read and weigh in (36 hrs at least)

Curious to learn from others.

[morgana]

I can't upvote this enough!

[Nick Taylor]

We don't record our standups, but when we have other meetings, like show and tell, those get recorded.

[Nitya Narasimhan, Ph.D]

Also forgot to mention that I really love this utility
timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting...

Helps to identify the right times to have a meeting in a way that helps optimize it for all timezones involved. If you have a Slack channel pin this so folks remember to use it for meeting planning. 😁