🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

How do you connect and collaborate in global teams that span multiple time zones?

💡 Concept

As companies become increasingly global and distributed, working with team members across multiple time zones is becoming the norm. Here are four strategies to make it easier for global team members to work together.

👓 Practice perspective-taking.

Perspective-taking means actively working to understand and consider the viewpoints, thoughts, and emotions of others. In remote work settings, having strong perspective-taking skills helps you better navigate cultural differences, varying time zones, and diverse working styles. Learn more here.

🕗 Set core meeting hours.

Core meeting hours are periods of time during the workday that are reserved for essential team meetings. Setting core meeting hours helps to streamline communication, facilitate coordination, and establish and hold boundaries, especially in teams that span multiple time zones or schedules. Learn more here.

🗺️ Proactively share your time zone.

Confirming someone else’s time zone whenever you schedule a meeting is essential, and proactively sharing your own time zone is helpful, too. Learn more here.

👍 Add async steps to your decision-making process.

Scheduling meetings to make decisions can be a time and energy drain—waiting for everyone to be available to meet synchronously can really slow things down, especially when teams span multiple time zones. One way to speed up decision-making and make it more inclusive is by incorporating asynchronous steps into the process. Learn more here.

🎬 Take Action

• Choose one of the actions listed in this microlesson and commit to trying it. 

• Complete your action within the next two weeks. 

• Reflect on the impact that your action has. 

• Share your results.

🧠 Keep Learning

Learn more about collaboration in distributed teams in the Remote Work Certification program.

✅ Check In

🎁Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.