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.”