How to make SLAs fair across Time Zones

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Picture this: your developer in Berlin closes a ticket at 5:55 PM on a Friday. For them, it’s a win and perfect timing before the weekend. But for a manager in New York, where it’s still morning, that ticket looks "stuck," and the SLA has been "bleeding red" for hours. Sound familiar?

The Global Remote era: When "Business Hours" become relative

Today, the Full Remote format has become the standard for businesses worldwide. Companies hire the best talent regardless of location: your designer might be in Lisbon, your developer in Warsaw, and your support manager in Toronto. This provides a massive advantage in expertise but creates a real logistical challenge for tracking SLAs.

When a team is scattered across the globe, using a single static schedule becomes ineffective. The solution to this challenge is Multiple Schedules. This approach allows the system to be flexible: instead of forcing everyone to live by the head office's clock, the SLA adapts to the local context of each specific task, accounting for the time zone and public holidays of the specific assignee.

The "Average Temperature in the Hospital" trap

When a company tries to implement a single SLA for a global team, it inevitably falls into one of two traps:

1. Too Rigid: You set the SLA based on the head office time. The result? Demotivated employees in other time zones who see breached tickets before they’ve even had their first coffee.
2. Too Loose: You stretch the SLA to "24/5" to cover everyone. The result? Customers wait too long, and you lose control over actual performance metrics like Cycle Time.

Static calendars simply aren't built for the dynamics of modern business. They create an illusion of control but, in practice, produce skewed data that cannot be used for serious process auditing.

Why Excel and manual adjustments are a dead end

Many teams try to solve the "fairness" problem manually: exporting reports to Excel and subtracting hours spent on public holidays in different countries.

Why is this a bad idea?

• The Human Factor: It’s easy to forget that one developer had a local holiday on Monday.
• Loss of Real-Time Data: While you're correcting yesterday's reports, you aren't managing the situation in real-time. A manager needs to see the current SLA status "here and now," not a week after the sprint ends.
• Scalability Issues: What works for a team of 10 becomes administrative hell when you grow to 50 or 100.

True flexibility only appears when the scheduling logic is integrated directly into the tracking tool.

Introducing the new SLA type in SLA Time and Report for Jira

At SaasJet, we always listen to our community. Recently, we’ve been receiving more requests from customers whose teams work in hybrid or fully distributed formats. The headache was always the same: “How can I set up an SLA so it doesn't count overdue time while one of my developers is on an official public holiday that the rest of the team doesn't even know about?”

So, we’ve added a new configuration type to our app – the Multiple-scheduler SLA.

This solution allows you to combine several different schedules into a single SLA rule. Instead of creating dozens of duplicate configurations for every region, you create one smart rule that dynamically selects the correct calendar based on ticket data.

Classic SLA vs. Multiple-scheduler SLA

Feature	Classic SLA (Single Schedule)	Multiple-scheduler SLA
Geography	Focused on one time zone.	Adapts to any number of locations.
Public Holidays	Accounts for holidays of only one country.	Switches holiday calendars.
Report Accuracy	High margin of error due to "night" hours and foreign holidays.	Maximum accuracy – reflects the assignee's real working hours.
Administration	Requires a separate rule for every team.	One rule manages all regions via field mapping.
Fairness	Employees in other time zones often get false Breached SLAs.	Everyone works on equal terms according to their local schedule.

Practical Use Cases: How it works in real life

Case 1: Global Support Desk (Singapore – London)

Tickets arriving at night for London should be handled by Singapore. Previously, a general SLA calculated time based on the "main" office, which distorted the Singapore team's statistics. With Multiple-scheduler SLA, the system checks the Region field. If the ticket is assigned to Singapore, the Singapore calendar kicks in. Reporting finally reflects reality.

Case 2: Local Public Holidays (Ukraine – Poland)

November 11th is a public holiday in Poland but a regular working day in Ukraine. When a task moved from a Ukrainian developer to a Polish QA engineer, the SLA used to keep running, creating an artificial breach. Now, the SLA for the task automatically "pauses" during the Polish holiday and resumes as soon as the team returns to work.

How to Set up a Multiple-scheduler in 3 steps

We’ve integrated this feature to fit seamlessly into your workflow:

Step 1. Create a new SLA configuration

1. Go to SLA Configuration Manager
2. Click + Add SLA configuration
3. Select multi-schedule as the SLA goal type

Step 2. Select work schedules

In the Work schedule section:

1. Open the Work schedule selector
2. Choose one or more predefined work schedules
   (for example, schedules for different regions or teams)

Step 3. Assign schedules to users or groups

Work schedules must be assigned in advance:

• Each user or group is linked to one specific work schedule
• SLA calculation automatically uses the schedule of the current assignee
• When the assignee changes, the SLA switches to the new assignee’s calendar

No additional SLA goals or configurations are required.

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Conclusion

Time is the most valuable resource, but in a global world, it is relative. Using the Multiple-scheduler SLA in the SLA Time and Report for Jira app allows your team to work at their own pace without fearing unfair reports or missed deadlines due to geographical differences.

This update isn't just a technical feature; it's a way to make the work environment more human and adaptive to the needs of every employee, wherever they are.

Ready to set up fair SLAs for your team?

Try SLA Time and Report for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace and experience the benefits of multiple schedules today.