Remote workers are the future of the workforce. And as they say, the future is today. Office managers are finding new ways to communicate with remote workers in different countries and different time zones. These managers make such efforts because the remote workers are a vital part of the company infrastructure.
According to Backlinko, as of August 2024, 22.8% of US employees worked remotely at least partially, which accounts for 35.13 million people. That’s around 1 worker in five. We can’t escape the future, so we should embrace it. Remote work offers a wide range of benefits, including expanding talent pools, reducing costs, employee retention, and plenty more.
In short, remote work promotes greater efficiency, productivity, and satisfaction for employers and employees, positioning companies for success. It is not a surprise that many managers are employing remote workers. The World Economic Forum expects that by 2030, the number of global digital jobs will rise by roughly 25% to around 92 million.
Despite all these benefits, maybe you are still asking yourself, “How can I manage a whole remote team across multiple time zones without being able to tell if they are actually working?”.
Don’t worry, you are not alone. Remote work remains a tough challenge for many teams worldwide. A survey from Buffer suggests that 14% of remote teams see time zone disparities as a significant struggle. That is a bit more than one out of ten!
Why does that happen?
- Scheduling and Asynchronous Workflows: Remote teams working across three or more time zones may take 25% longer to finish project tasks, according to an internal analysis compiled by Toggl, referencing aggregated user timesheet data. The solution is to organize the timeframe properly.
- Cultural Barriers vs Diversity: Culturally diverse teams are 33–35% more likely to financially outperform their less-diverse peers, but miscommunication risk rises without strong communication frameworks. For instance, Paul Block, CEO of US Merisant, commented, “Diversity creates dissent, and you need that. Without it, you’re not going to get any deep inquiry or breakthroughs”. Dissension is part of the game; miscommunication is not.
- Cultural Clash: 42% of remote workers in different time zones have experienced a misunderstanding due to cultural norms, according to a study published in Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in 2021.
This is why I wrote this article to help you out. Here are four tips to manage remote workers in different time zones than yours.
1. Keeping Remote Workers Engaged
“On average, only 15% of employees who work for a manager who does not meet with them regularly are engaged; managers who regularly meet with their employees almost tripled that level of engagement.” (Gallup)
Since your remote team members are in vastly different time zones, instead of thinking about people working at business hours, think, “My company has remote workers who will work full time; it just happens that they are in different time zones”.
Feels great, right? Think about that, before you get some sleep: “while I am sleeping, my company keeps working”.
Now that you have adjusted your mindset, instead of managing their time, you manage their results. Traditional productivity tracking isn’t as straightforward in a remote setup.. When teams are distributed across different locations and time zones, measuring what they actually achieve becomes more important than tracking their time.
Ask them to answer you every day three easy questions:
- What did I do yesterday for the project?
- What am I going to do today for the project?
- What problems do I have while working on the project?
It’s good for them, helps them to organize themselves with their tasks, and it helps you to build trust in your remote team.
2. Build Trust Between Your Remote Workers And You
I already talked about building trust, but I will do it again because it is a vital part of managing. Period. Not only between Remote Teams and you, but it is vital for your whole company.
As managers and company owners, we are always in a constant state of anxiety, thinking if we did the right thing while employing someone. And it gets worse when we are talking about people we have never met in real life.
How do we build trust? The daily “three questions” report I mentioned earlier is an important step, but we need to go further.
Prepare a weekly meeting with your remote team (or every 15 days if you are really that busy). These meetings shouldn’t last more than 25 minutes.
The weekly meeting has two purposes: to align you and your team around the same goals and to build trust.
You and your team will focus on the central objective of your project with a North Star Metric. This objective must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound).
Answer these four questions for this meeting:
- What was our objective for this week?
- How much had we advanced for this objective?
- How better should we have advanced towards our objective?
These first three questions exist to identify any problems you and your team can work on for the next week.
- Finally: What will be our objective for the next week?
You will be able to build trust and respect between you and your team when you repeat these cycles of inspection and adaptation for your project. By pinpointing all your achievements and learnings, you will be able to trust them, and they will trust you as well.
Of course, not everyone will be able to attend every meeting. Record the meeting and let remote workers who were unable to attend know what was discussed by sending them the recording.
3. Standardized Scheduling
Once you have devised a plan that works for the majority of remote workers in your company, stick to it. Make up a schedule in advance, so the workers will have a sense of continuity. However, never assume that the schedule you think will work actually will. Ask remote workers what is best for them.
Don’t forget to use a good project management software like Monday, ClickUp, or Basecamp. If they have a task list with To-Do tasks, they can’t do anything wrong!
If you don’t like schedules, you may be interested in using a Gantt chart or a board for Kanban. Select what works better for your team!
4. Share A Vision of the Future
I am not good at math, but once I learned from a scrum master a formula for the company’s success with remote workers.
Ideal Team + Aligned Values + Reinforceable Trust + Indisputable Results + Shared Vision of the Future
An Ideal Team means that you hired the right people with all the abilities and experience needed.
Aligned Values mean that you and your remote workers know exactly what tasks and deliverables are expected and must be done.
Reinforceable Trust is that set of daily reports and weekly meetings you and your team have to keep the communication and information flowing, building trust constantly.
Indisputable Results are the results that help your company to grow, aligned with your and your remote team’s expectations.
Finally, a Shared Vision of the Future is what makes them stay on board. If your team doesn’t imagine its future in your company, the remote workers will fly away, looking for new opportunities, new salaries, new experiences…
You have to show them that they can grow more inside of your company than outside of it. Ask them about how they are, both professionally and personally (respecting their boundaries, of course).
Maybe your remote hire will become a father or a mother and will need more time to spend with the baby. Maybe they will candidate themselves for a public office. Many things can change over the years.
You should share the vision of the future for your company. Because maybe you are thinking of making your company go international, and one of your hires may be the guy who will make your company easier to their country. Just a thought.
And here are the ways you can manage your remote workers in different time zones. But yeah, maybe you are thinking: “Fine, I know how to manage remote workers in time zones different from mine, but I don’t know how to hire them!”. Or maybe you know how to hire them and how to manage them, but you don’t know how to deal with remote workers according to the Law.
This is why you should contact me and my company. We have plenty of experience in remote hiring and management. It will be very easy: we will schedule a meeting, you will tell me everything about your company, and I will headhunt the best hire in the world. It will cost you less than hiring some random guy in your town.
And you have three months of guarantee to ask for your money back. I am offering it because you won’t need it. It is just to give you more safety; after all, changing to remote workers is not easy.
Got interested? Contact us. It will be a pleasure.
