How to work best with teams in other time zones

February 1, 2021

2 minutes read

Working with a global team across different time zones can be hard!

There are a lot of benefits that come from working with a global team. The talent pool which is available to you and your company expands dramatically when you are willing to work with people from overseas. One of the most important challenges to consider is the time zone difference between each team member. After working with a global team for 20+ years, Rubico has developed several processes and ideologies for working effectively with a global team.

Working across different time zones has unique challenges. #GlobalTeams #Outsourcing #TimeZoneManagement Share on X

When Rubico started, it was clear that we didn’t want our team in India to stay up all night to solve the time zone challenge. We want our team members to be able to experience life on a normal schedule of sleep. Keeping developers up all night to work on projects in a U.S. time zone would lead to burn out and exhaustion. We had to find another way. We plan our meetings for clients on the East Coast in the morning (USA) and will instead meet in the evening (USA) for clients on the West Coast.

To keep projects running smoothly, project management becomes more important than normal. Everybody needs to be on the same page before the time difference is too much, and somebody needs to go to sleep (in either time zone). Rubico uses a variety of project management systems and we are always willing to adopt the system our clients are using. We use Asana, Trello, and Jira just to name a few.

Finally, if a client ever needs to get a hold of a contact person, we do have a team in America who is able to pick up the phone to answer any urgent questions. We have policies in place that will allow our team to be available to fix any issues, even in the middle of the night. By thinking through how to best handle time zones, and developing systems, Rubico has been able to overcome the global challenge.

Interested in working with a team that has mastered operating across different time zones? Reach out to solutions@RubicoTech.com for your next web or app development project.