Working with remote teams that are off by 8+ hours
Address the unique challenges of teams off by 8+ hours by considering the interactions at three levels - tactics, structures, and context.
How do you think about building teams across wide cultural gaps, gulfs of time zones, and with profound power imbalances at play?
There are unique challenges that come up with a team that’s off by 8+ hours (vs. North America or EMEA only). I know I’ve felt the pain of waiting a full workday to collaborate, or missing a launch date because of a miscommunication.
There’s a lot to consider as you lead teams with these challenges, and I recommend thinking about it at three levels:
Tactical: What is your day-to-day workflow?
Structural: How to form teams to enable the best ideas?
Contextual: What is each culture bringing to the work?
Setting daily expectations
While it can feel like an eternity when you first start this practice, set a 24-hour clock for decision-making. You want to build a team where great ideas can come from any team member, and if they know there is time to weigh in, they are more likely to contribute.
Sometimes identifying a decision-maker helps here — use RACI/use the DRI framework/what have you — but knowing who makes the decision will save your team from grinding through cycles.
Build a culture of internal documentation — write it down. This is a journey, and you’ll never get to 100%, but if you set keyboard shortcuts to your internal documentation (how you work, the rhythm of the business, orientation materials) people will be happier and less confused.
Less “offshore” more “distributed”
One of my former team members in India recently mentioned:
To some degree we still wait to be told what to do — that colonial thinking is still around in the workplace.
That’s a power imbalance if I’ve ever heard one.
Even the term “offshore” insinuates all of the decision-making and generative creativity happens in one place, and the implementation happens in another. “Offshore” is a transactional way of thinking. If you design a transactional relationship, you will get transactional results.
The number of promotion and leadership opportunities for folks who are abroad is also limited. How can we expect people do their best work when the opportunities are so finite?
Instead, how can you break off initiatives and form teams that are more closely geolocated, with full autonomy and decision-making? Also, in thinking through your team structure, plan to recognize and promote folks who are 8+ hours offset.
Find out the assumptions team members bring to their work
“You are very direct” is feedback I received a handful of times from non-US team members. Each time, it made me think about how information flows — and how it’s expressed.
In the US we spell things out— we assume the other party doesn’t have the context, what’s called a “low-context culture.” But when you’re working with global teams, how much context do they usually share? How subtle are the messages and the allusions?
Erin Meyer’s book The Culture Map helped me build trust with folks who have more of a shared identity and background.
Many cultures 8+ hours away from EST are “high-context cultures” where information is subtle, because everyone shares a common context.
For offsites and team activities, ask team members to invite you in to that context — it could be a reading from their astrologer, could be a ritual at the beginning of meetings, it could be participating in a holiday.
Takeaways:
Set (at least) a 24 hour clock for decision-making and write everything down
Cluster teams to enable creativity and autonomous decision-making
Create opportunities to understand the communication culture of each team member
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