For teams composed of different people around the world, how do you deal with different time zones?

[Txus]

As part of "Open road, open roles: celebrate AtlassiVan and remote work" exploration I would like to raise a topic that I have been thinking about for some time.

For teams composed of different people around the world, how do you deal with different time zones?

For coordinating meetings, supporting the team, etc etc etc.

Let me put it in context, at different parts of the day we think about consulting colleagues about something, the problem that I am having or that I see is that due to the workload I don't stop to think about what time the colleague has.

In our profiles we can only choose one time zone, our time zone.
It would be nice to be able to choose different time zones in our profiles and have them displayed together.

What do you think about this, how do you deal with this kind of situation?
Just curious.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This one is quite a simple one to solve, because you don't really have a lot of options.

Just be aware of when your people are working and when they can't (or don't want to)

And plan around it.

Adaptavist has our email done by Google, and calendars are a good adjunct.  All most of us do is set a timezone we live in, and people then know not to try to book stuff out of our normal working hours.  I'd prefer it if we could set up three types - "yep, I'll join you if there's no clashes", "don't try to book me, I'm asleep/busy" and the missing one of "please ask, but don't expect".

But it still comes back to "when are your people happy to work?"

[Andy Gladstone]

@Txus it's a challange, and as more of us go remote and workforces expand past natural boundaries and borders it is only getting harder. Asynchronous work is something that takes a lot of practice to succeed. But we all have those moments when we really need input from a team member and they are (to use @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- words, 'asleep/busy' or at a time of 'don't expect'. 

What I have done in the past is set up a single weekly meeting time that everyone committed to, and we brought all of our intercontinental blockers to the meeting for discussion and resolution - this way people could move forward and know that there was a time to already set for the discussions. 

Ultimately, someone will be on the meeting that is not at an optimal time. I used to have teams in New York, California, Singapore and Amsterdam and our weekly call was 2AM Eastern Time so that it was 11PM in California, 8AM in Amsterdam and 2PM in Singapore. We held it Thursday nights so that the NY team at least was near the end of the week and hit it took to their sleep schedules was not going to impact their whole week. #TGIF! As a NY based team member, I always scheduled some project work Thursday night-Friday morning to make the best use of the time I was staying up. And a beer or vodka (or a few) didn't hurt either!

[Michiel Schuijer]

I agree with Nic's reply on this. There are various ways to maintain awareness, with calendars, tools, etc.

In the end, it will come down to realization where your teammate(s) reside and what are their preferred/available times.