Protocol - Too many time zones

View email in browser | Forward this email

Protocol | Workplace

By the Workplace team and
August 14, 2022

Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. Are you still making your co-workers look at your cord-management issues in the background of your Zoom call? Cut that out and get some tips from the Room Rater Twitter account for making your video calls easier on the eyes. Today: teams and time zones, Salesforce sets more ambitious diversity goals for female and nonbinary employees, and Google extends its hiring freeze. It’s Sunday, so if you’re working, make sure you let yourself have a little bit of fun, as a treat.

— Meg Morrone, senior editor (email | twitter)

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Protocol's newsletters.

What time zone is it?

 

Work-from-anywhere policies are life-changing for employees, and they can simplify hiring. But unless everyone is in the same time zone, true collaboration can be tricky.

Here’s how the experts overcome some of the thorniest time zone challenges.

Embrace async work, but do it right. Asynchronous work can solve a lot of the headaches that come with working across time zones, and there’s no shortage of tools that can help you embrace this style of collaboration.

  • “The traditional 9-to-5 workday, where we're all working in the same place at the same time, is a thing of the past,” Ali Rayl, SVP of product management at Slack, told Protocol.
  • This requires training for leaders, says HubSpot’s hybrid culture enablement manager Meaghan Williams. "We’ve developed an ongoing series to provide managers with the tools and resources they need to lead a distributed team at scale. We focus on topics like proximity bias, inclusive hiring and psychological safety.”
  • “And some of our leaders include canned messaging in their email signatures that acknowledge that they’re sending an email at a time that’s convenient for them, but they don’t expect a response outside of the recipient’s working hours,” adds Williams.

Document everything. Remote workforce management company Oyster helps startups hire and onboard talent across 180 countries. Co-founder Jack Mardack told Protocol that the company is so proud of its hybrid-work best practices that they recently made the Oyster employee handbook public.

  • “When working synchronously — either in an office or remote — it's very easy to just walk over and ask other people for information,” Mardack said. “In a globally distributed team, this isn't always possible. So we need to ensure that other people have access to the information they need if you're not around. We’ve found the solution to be over-documentation.”
  • HubSpot takes a similar approach. “Our teams create ‘operating systems’ that include best practices for working together, including where to find shared internal documentation, links to video meeting recordings for later viewing, written agendas and more,” Williams from HubSpot told Protocol.

If total async work isn’t possible, find a few hours where workers can overlap. It’s crucial to avoid a culture where everyone is expected to be available in each other’s time zone. Rayl stresses that organizations need to be flexible.

  • “One thing we’ve done at Slack is to encourage our teams to set their own ‘core collaboration hours.’ Team members agree on a time span of a few hours each day (say, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. PT) when everyone on the team will be online and available for live conversations,” Rayl said.
  • Williams says they encourage everyone at HubSpot to make their working hours clear. She suggests employees add hours to their Google calendar and turn off Slack notifications when they’re done for the day. “Our team leverages schedule-send features to respect those boundaries and be empathetic to time differences,” says Williams.
  • Christine Lees, senior communications manager at the communications platform Intercom, calls this overlapping time “Golden Hours.” Intercom executives live on the U.S. West Coast and Dublin, which makes the Golden Hours 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and 4 to 6:30 pm GMT. “We encourage employees to communicate with their managers and teams about their preferred work hours and speak up to find a better time (or ask for a recording) if they are invited to a meeting outside of them,” says Lees.

Be intentional about decision-making. Mardack from Oyster warns that group decisions can take a long time if people are working in different time zones.

  • “Treat decisions as reversible by default,” says Mardack. “Most decisions can be undone easily, and the negative effect of delaying a decision is often worse than the negative effect of making the wrong one.”
  • Choose one person to make a decision. “If it's proving difficult to make a decision, try to identify a decision owner — it's this person's responsibility to make the call. By being explicit about this early, we can save a lot of back and forth,” says Mardack.
  • Mardack says decisions don’t always have to come from the top. “Make decisions at the lowest level possible. Most decisions should be made by the people closest to the problem. This is rarely the CEO.”

— Meg Morrone, senior editor (email | twitter)
twitter
 
linkedin
 
facebook
 
Open URL

Salesforce sets new nonbinary and female employee diversity goals

 

This week Salesforce set new hiring and retention goals for nonbinary and female employees:

0.2% — Current nonbinary/other/undisclosed global employee gender representation at Salesforce
35.7% — Current female global employee gender representation at Salesforce
40% — Goal for female and nonbinary employees globally by 2026 at Salesforce

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM CISCO

 

How cybercrime is going small time: Cybercrime is often thought of on a relatively large scale. Massive breaches lead to painful financial losses, bankrupting companies and causing untold embarrassment, splashed across the front pages of news websites worldwide.

Read more from Cisco

Some personnel news

 

Anyone else having a bad case of Great Resignation whiplash? It’s hard to keep up with which tech companies are growing, shrinking, floating or sinking. We’re here to help.

⬇️ Get ready for the vibe change: Google employees tell Insider that the company has extended its hiring freeze.

⬇️ Mindfulness is out. Meditation app Calm lets 400 employees go, citing (you guessed it) macroeconomic trends.

⬇️ In a memo to employees on Friday, Peloton announced more layoffs.

⬆️ Cloud software company Zoho is hiring in India. The company told Protocol that it's planning to hire at least 2,000 employees across engineering, technology and product development.

🧺 Microsoft cuts back, and it’s a real travesty: “At a recent picnic for one Microsoft team, managers paid for their employees’ food and drinks instead of billing the company,” a source told The Wall Street Journal.

For more news on hiring, firing and rewiring, see our tech company tracker.

Around the internet

 

A roundup of workplace news from the farthest corners of the internet.

Everything you need to know about “quiet quitting”: when a worker decides they’re no longer defined by their work and takes back their free time.

LinkedIn (like everyone else right now) really wants you to be an influencer.

Why young people should be mentoring the olds.

Weekend long read: Will tech ever fix its gender problem?

Give this man a Pulitzer.

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM CISCO

 

How cybercrime is going small time: People have been swindled since before man created monetary systems. These aren’t new crimes; just new ways to commit them. But as cybercrime increasingly goes small-time, those on the front lines will need new and more effective ways to fight it.

Read more from Cisco

 

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com.

 

How likely are you to recommend Protocol to a colleague?

Copyright © 2022 Protocol Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

To update your preferences and manage newsletter subscriptions, log in here.

Unsubscribe from all Protocol newsletters. This will unsubscribe you from all Protocol newsletters and alerts. Click here to update your preferences instead.

facebook
 
linkedin
 
instagram
 
twitter

Older messages

We were promised a four-day workweek

Sunday, August 14, 2022

Plus, best stuff of the week. View email in browser | Forward this email By Brian Kahn and the Source Code team August 14, 2022 Good morning! Hybrid work is great in theory, but there's definitely

How Big Tech is preparing for midterms

Friday, August 12, 2022

FTC targets data – Marqeta shakeup — Messenger encryption View email in browser | Forward this email By Sarah Roach and Nat Rubio-Licht August 12, 2022 Good morning! This Friday, some companies are

Ditching Silicon Valley for climate tech

Friday, August 12, 2022

AppLovin courts Unity – Musk shares – BeReal's future View email in browser | Forward this email By Sarah Roach and Nat Rubio-Licht August 10, 2022 Good morning! There's a big migration

Honey, I shrunk the office

Friday, August 12, 2022

Crypto banking – foldable phones – who counts the bots? View email in browser | Forward this email By Sarah Roach and Nat Rubio-Licht August 11, 2022 Good morning! Companies haven't mentioned

Nudge, nudge

Friday, August 12, 2022

Diversity nudges — climate zeitgeist — benefits View email in browser | Forward this email By the Workplace team August 11, 2022 Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. If you're using the BeReal

You Might Also Like

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware [Fri Mar 29 2024]

Friday, March 29, 2024

Hi The Register Subscriber | Log in The Register {* Daily Headlines *} 29 March 2024 Illustration of someone in a hoodie looking at a bench with a cloud over it AI hallucinates software packages and

What A Day: Clown by law

Friday, March 29, 2024

Trump's lawyers are having another rough one. And the mainstream media could learn a lesson from the legal world about handling corruption. Thursday, March 28, 2024 BY CROOKED MEDIA —Steve Bannon,

🌶️ Is it getting hot in here?

Friday, March 29, 2024

Introducing our theme for April plus fun stuff to read, watch, and click on. March 28, 2024 Open in new tab Did a friend forward this? Subscribe today! April's Theme is SPICY It was chosen by our

What 58 Famous People Smell Like

Friday, March 29, 2024

Here's what you missed on the Strategist. The Strategist Every product is independently selected by editors. If you buy something through our links, New York may earn an affiliate commission. What

Trump Would Need New Tactics to Steal the 2024 Election

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Columns and commentary on news, politics, business, and technology from the Intelligencer team. Intelligencer early and often Trump Would Need New Tactics to Steal the 2024 Election Many avenues Trump

Let’s go fast

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Plus: The worst cleaning tool we've ever tried ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

Friday Briefing: Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Plus, three video game adventures for the weekend. View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story Ad Morning Briefing: Asia Pacific Edition March 29, 2024 Author Headshot By Justin Porter

Elevate Your Events: Exclusive Discount Inside!

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Explore the future of events at #NWES2024, April 3-4 in Seattle! GeekWire is pleased to present this message to our Pacific NW readers. Explore the future of events at #NWES2024, April 3-4 in Seattle!

Framing a Pitch

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Opening Day Edition ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

☕ We’ll be watching you

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Tag Heuer's watchmaking apprenticeship program. March 28, 2024 Retail Brew PRESENTED BY Listrak Hey hey, everyone. It seems people are unsure whether 7-Eleven's hot dog-flavored sparkling water