6pm CEST | 11am EST | 8am PST
I am based in München, Germany. It’s UTC +2.
I work with teams in NYC and Silicon Valley. They are in UTC -5 and UTC -8.
There’s 7 hours difference with teams in NYC, and 10 hours difference with teams in Silicon Valley.
How do you work & collaborate with them, you ask?
At first, it was a constant struggle. It’s either it’s too late for me or too early for them. There were times where I need to join late night meetings after dinner. Other times I need to see my colleagues from West Coast, barely awake from their sleep.
Sometimes I wonder, I work at a tech company, don’t we have a solution for this? Shouldn’t it be easy to fix this? Can we build a product for this?
Oooooh. We do have a lot! It’s already there, but not used the way it is designed. I guess humans are a creature of habit. It will be very hard to change people’s behaviour.
It needs a cultural shift. From synchronous to asynchronous. From face-to-face meetings to comment threads in a doc. It is hard. Not everyone wants to try and budge to change their existing behaviour.
It will be hard to ask people to change, but you can start. Be conscious about “this meeting should’ve been an email”. Don’t ping people before or after their working hours. Kickstart an asynchronous brainstorm where they can join anytime at their convenience. Record meetings so people can watch it later.
You should also create personal boundaries. Set work profiles in your phone or browser, set the schedule to automatically turn off any work messages after work hours. Decline meetings if you’re uncomfortable to join in late night or early morning. Ask people to record the meeting for you. Request for TL;DR or meeting agendas.
The clock strikes 6 now. So time to call it a day.