How do you handle different time zone challenges?

The main challenges are time zones and cultures. You need to make sure projects run smoothly and that nobody is stuck waiting for someone’s reply in order to do their part. Different cultures can interpret a comment, a tone of voice, or even a joke in a different way than the intended one. Luckily in our organization, we all have a good relationship with one another, so things are not misinterpreted.

We work asynchronously, so most of the time time zones don't really pose much of a challenge. Only when we need to have a video conference do we coordinate schedules to arrange a time to meet.

About half our team is able to set their own schedule. While we ask everyone to pick and keep consistent hours, many folks are able to set their own hours and use flex time at their discretion (and in coordination with their manager and coworkers).

The other half of our team does have to work fixed schedules because they're doing things like providing customer support and monitoring our infrastructure. For those folks, we fix their schedules to UTC to ensure we have consistent coverage across time zones and changes. In addition, they use scheduling tools like WhenIWork so that everyone on the team can see everyone else that is working at any given them.

Team Sync hours by department. But honestly it's hard. Our monthly company AMA is at 4am my time, I rarely make it.

We have a common 2 hours core team 3 days per week

We always take into account different timezones when we plan meetings, and there have only been a couple of occasions where someone who is about about 7 hours behind had to get up super early for a meeting! We're very considerate about not having people take meetings super late or early on their timezone.

Most of the time, I take care of east coast client projects in the morning since I am in Alaska. On rare occasions, I take the zoom session at 7, 6, or 5am.

The intent is to work normal hours as much as possible.

We only employ remote workers in the UK.