Hi everyone!
Does anyone have any tips and tricks or processes they are using to help manage distributed teams, especially across multiple time zones? Or links to good resources on this topic?
Our engineering teams are distributed across multiple time zones, with most managers being based in Australia. We are exchanging notes on how handle this but we would love to hear more around what is working for other people out there 
Right now all of my team is only +1/-1 hours apart, but, in the past, I had situations where most of the team members were in Europe, and some were in the US, South America, Africa, and east Asia.
Usually, it would be inconvenient for all the teams to have the same working hours, due to big time-zone differences, but we’d have a few hours of overlap so we could synch with each other. The big part here is a question of how responsible the team members are, as async communication is a bit more challenging compared to when people are close by and can communicate almost in real time. If possible, at least have a standup meeting all together.
We try to have stand ups but some teams are across 6 different time zones so it can be difficult to co-ordinate that. We are trying a lot of async communication as working late every night can be a killer for some.
We are doing things like recording videos to show new features being built (I do this for our quality engineer in Poland and it is proving to be a useful resource for her) and having a dedicated slack channel where we post an update at the end of the day (so like stand up but via slack).
I am just wondering if anyone else has something they are doing to help with communication?
Most of our department are in the UK but we have some team members with a 2 hour time difference and some with a 5 1/2 difference (teams consist of people in a mixture of locations). Those with a time difference tend to start work an hour or so before the UK although some prefer to work UK times. This gives us more cover during the day and we endeavour to keep all meetings that include non-UK team members to the morning or early afternoon. Each of our teams includes people from a variety of time zones and it gives us some advantages such as being able to get an emergency job tested before the dev starts the next day (devs are GMT or GMT + 2 but test have more variety of time zones).
The essential is that everyone attends stand-up and key meetings (and we schedule these for mornings or at the latest early afternoon).
Hey Deborah,
Having worked on several globally distributed teams, I feel your pain. I’m no guru on this subject but I shall share what I’ve come to see as essential based on the many times I’ve gotten this wrong.
TL/DR:
Okay, now for the dissertation:
There are two sides to managing any team: The Task and The Personal. An effective team culture needs to address both well.
(I’m going to pause here to say that there are nuances to this and one could argue it’s really a multi-sided polyhedron not a coin, but I’m trying to keep it simple, not play D&D…so I’m sticking with my two basic categories.)
Distributed teams experience the added wrinkle of not being able to gather everyone together easily in the same meat-space. Scattering your team around the globe increases those difficulties with little things like time-zones and cultural differences.
The Task
Daily All-Hands Meeting: This is imperative. It can be inconvenient for some, but it’s necessary. Call this a Standup, Daily Scrum, All-Hands, whatever. The point is, you NEED one meeting (preferably on video with all faces seen), with everyone on the team attending.
When I ran a team with resources in the U.S., Ukraine, India, and Australia, we picked a time that was pretty much horrible for everyone. We met at 05:00 Central US (where I lived) which turned out to be 06:00 for U.S. East Coast people, 13:00 in Ukraine, 16:30 in India, and 22:00 for the folks in Sydney Australia. This meant we all adjusted our work days accordingly. My work day began at 04:30 for me so I could get 30 min to pull my thoughts together before Standup. For those in Australia, Standup ended their work day. As a manager, sometimes I had to change my schedule to match one of my reports around the world. I thus had to make sure I communicated with everyone what my schedule would be like during that time.
Set clear short-term goals: One of the keys to making sure everyone is on the same page and moving in the same direction it to make sure everyone knows where the team is headed and what it takes to get there and when they expect to reach their destination. Scrum comes prepackaged with the Scrum Goal so if you’re already using that you have a ready made way to remind everyone what the team is focused on this Sprint. If not, start setting goals and arranging work priorities around those goals.
Have a shared Knowledge repository: The company I’m with now uses Confluence. A previous company just used Google Docs. Whatever it is, have a centralized place where you team can share documentation, how-tos, etc. I’ve also found creating a wiki of some kind to be a valuable asset.
Synchronous & Asynchronous communication channels: I love that your teams has started making videos of features in development, and posting status updates in Slack. Great use of asynchronous tools. Tools like Slack (and I have to admit, Teams 
) provide a great avenue for both types of communication. My previous global team also had a daily status update channel where everyone posted their progress/roadblocks so we didn’t have to wait till the next Standup before addressing issues. The knowledge repository I mentioned above can be folded into this as well.
The Personal
Regular 1-on-1 meetings: Good managers care about their people holistically. The 1-on-1 is not just about the job, the tasks, and business. Use the time to get to know your reports. Frequently spikes and dips in performance are connected more to issues outside of work. That interpersonal stuff doesn’t come naturally for me so I found a mentor to teach me how to do it better.
Create ways to build team relationships: Okay, in general, I HATE “team-building activities,” at least they way they were implemented when I started out (last century…yea, I’m old). Think small. My current team has Standups scheduled at 09:15, however the meeting space opens at 09:00. That first fifteen minutes is general chat. Those who wish jump on and we just chat about whatever. At 09:15 we pull it together and get down to The Tasks.
We also do “Daily Posts.”
Encourage “water cooler conversations.” Since we’re remote, we don’t bump into each other at the water cooler or in the break room and strike up a chat. So we need to be intentional about these. I almost always begin any chat by asking how the other person is doing and taking a few minutes to talk about non-work related things. Then we segue into whatever topic we needed to actually discuss. But for this to work, managers have to lead by example.
Use video, not just text or voice: Not everyone loves this. I get it. And, that’s just too bad. As someone who started working remote in 2005, I will definitively say that face-to-face communication is CRITICAL! And I’m an introvert!!
Being able to see someone’s face adds so much to the conversation. I have a hard enough time reading social cues at the best of times. It’s impossible to read tone in text only. It’s difficult to gauge it with voice only. When we see facial expression and body posture we begin to have a chance to understand the other.
When we interview for our team, we are up front that video communication is expected. It is the default. So all those early morning Standups at O-dark-hundred…yup, I was on camera, even if my hair was a mess. Sometimes there’s a good reason to switch the camera off. The other week a meeting was schedule over my lunch time. I still needed to eat. I went camera dark until I was done (and made sure my mic was off if I wasn’t speaking), then turned my camera back on.
Understand cultural differences: My first time working in a multi-ethnic team, I was super frustrated that many of my teammates just couldn’t seem to show up for meetings on time, or start a meeting on time. I was getting really bent out of shape about it. Then someone helped me understand that my cultural worldview valued Time itself as a commodity. Theirs placed people and relationships above time. So if they bumped into someone they hadn’t seen in a while, it would have been a betrayal of their worldview if they failed to stop and caught up with them, and thus showing up late for our meeting. My journey toward understanding multi-cultural relational dynamics started with first understanding the water in which I swam, or the cultural assumptions which had been programmed into me. There’s a neat article by Louise Rasmussen (Cross-Cultural Competence: Engage People from any Culture - Global Cognition) that list some basic ways to start developing cross-cultural competence.
Disclaimer
This was sort of “off the cuff” and I’m sure there are holes you could fly an Airbus 380 through. I hope there was something in this rambling missive which benefits you.
Feel free to DM me or hit me up on Slack to chat about any of this.
And if anyone is actually still reading this long-winded exposition, you really need to find a hobby. 
Thank you SO much for taking the time to write this out. I really appreciate this! We already do some of this stuff, like confluence and 1-1’s with our direct reports and skip 1-1’s. I really love your last point though, understand cultural differences. That really made me pause and think about my general approach. Thank you 