Questionnaire - Large time zone difference
What is this?
GitLab is globally distributed and in addition to the handbook section on managing time zones we'd like to hear directly from our team what concrete actions they take.
How can I help?
You can drop a comment on this issue answering the following questions 
I have a X hour time zone difference with my Manager|Direct report
**What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?**
**What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?**
**How do you deal with this effect?**
**What can the team do to deal with this effect?**
**What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?**I have something to share but I don't want to do it in public
You can fill in this form with any additional details
Activity
assigned to @rhardarson
- I am in EMEA working hours
- I have a 12 hour time zone difference with my Manager
- I have a +12 to -7 hour time zone difference with my direct reports
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- We're forced to work async.
- We nearly have 24/7 coverage due to working hours for incoming requests as a team.
- We can start working on something in one time zone and close it in an other.
- It trains us to communicate clearer because we would otherwise be not effective.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Early 1:1 meeting times
- I need to wake up early to have my 1:1s. I honestly don't enjoy waking up before 8am. This is a bit better in Summer with timezone.
- My colleagues also need to stay/work later than their usual working hours (7-8pm) and I feel bad for them having one evening every week occupied.
- Social meetings & team days
- Planning a team day or social meeting where everyone can participate is just not possible
- Pandemic with the canceled contributes didn't help with the social aspect here.
- Planning a team day or social meeting where everyone can participate is just not possible
- Late meetings
- I have my meetings either early, or late in the evening for US.
- On Tuesday's I have most meetings. I start at 8am and end at 6pm, sometimes 7pm. Even with our non-linear working style, this is tough.
Negative effects that get a booster from time zone differences:
- Feeling overwhelmed – there is always something happening.
- A personal issue of mine as I get an anxious feeling from unread emails/slack messages.
- Regardless of how late I stop working, when I wake up, my inbox is filled up again. It sometimes feels like a never ending machinery.
- Communicating something to the team that needs attention
- It's too easy to miss something on Slack when nearly 50% of the company communicates outside of your working hours.
How do you deal with this effect?
- I take it a bit easier on Fridays to make up for the long Tuesdays
- I try to stop working at a certain time
- For late meetings: I try to be consequent and don't join meetings after my working hours and contribute async
- For early meetings:
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- Instead of team-wide social chats, schedule individual coffee chats.
- We schedule our team sync meetings in a 3-week rotation to account for most timezone overlaps and mix up the team.
- Use issues to communicate as much as possible
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- Communicating to the team: I record weekly videos to communicate more important updates/highlights/vision to the team. Benefit: I don't repeat myself and don't need to use valuable 1:1 time.
- Communicating in Slack doesn't work to get attention from everyone. By the time someone starts working, many things happened and it's easy to miss it on Slack. Assigning everyone to an issue works better.
Edited by Nicolas Dular- I have a 6-8 hour time zone difference with my Manager, depending on the time of year.
- I have direct reports in 6 different time zones, 10 including in-direct reports.
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Working async first, and dogfooding (using GitLab, rather than Slack or Zoom to communicate)
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- When there is a need to move faster (production incident, priority request), it takes longer to sync
- There are some meetings that are always outside my work hrs (DotCom standup) that are harder to contribute to
- I often end up with 4-5hrs of back-to-back meetings in my mornings, and one or two evenings (2-3hrs) to sync with others in their preferred working hours.
How do you deal with this effect?
- I contribute async to meet agendas
- I rely on other team members - my manager, peers, and direct reports - to represent my team interests
- I (try to remember to) block out time during my afternoons when I am going to work in the evening
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- As an organization we have prioritized sourcing for ELFs (and URGs), over time this will help grow our teams outside the main timezones (ref).
- A more even distribution requires everyone to work async-first at least some of the time, and as a team we will get better at this.
- We can advocate for async-first, for moving Slack threads into agenda docs and issues.
- We can practice and improve our effectiveness with 'follow the sun' initiatives, for priority requests and production incidents.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- It can take a while to get used to suggesting a plan / way forward, rather than asking a question async. Requires short toes. Definitely can speed up async conversations.
I have a X hour time zone difference with my Manager
- 9 hours
What’s biggest positive effect
- being a self starter and self motivated
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- late meetings
How do you deal with this effect?
- deal with it, it’s part of the job
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- regional manager
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- nothing
Edited by davidtachenyI have a X hour time zone difference with my Manager
- 9 hours (same for big part of our group)
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- My manager can jump in an help with questions/issues when most of our group is offline. This helps with covering multiple time zones in emergency cases.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- In a very important cases when the direct communication is really needed, it's sometimes postponed as either I'm already sleeping or my manager haven't yet woke up.
How do you deal with this effect?
- Async communication
- Being online in the time periods when our time zones are overlapping.
- Weekly 1:1, separate team call where we can all sync up on what's being done
- 1:1 on demand when important things are happening and sharing the knowledge quickly is needed
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
I have a 6-17 hour time zone difference with all my direct reports. (UTC-6 for me, UTC+0, UTC+1, UTC+8, UTC+11 for my reports)
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
Embrace non-linear workday, focus more on async communication.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
There is a lot of work each member of the team has in progress so there's a lot to keep track of and priorities can be a bit unclear at times.
How do you deal with this effect?
Try to communication priorities frequently and clearly. Rely on mentions for urgent requests
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
They do a good job managing this on their own.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
Embrace non-linear workdays, write down and communicate priorities clearly.
I have a 9 hour time zone difference with my manager.
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- As the majority of my meetings would be with US people, I don’t have many meetings.
- I minor benefit is if I need to do something before you wake up, instead of working in the evening, I have my morning hours for it.
- The cultural difference between Central Europe and US (with far-east origins) is huge. It teaches humbleness and openness every day.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- As the majority of GitLab is in the US, it is really hard to have calls organized, and I consider our 1-1-s very important and valuable, so i don’t want to cancel these.
- How do you deal with this effect?
- I join calls around 18:30-21:00 1-2 times per week.
Overall, I don't mind this setup. It must be more difficult for my manager. What I mind is not having any leaders and executives in my area. See the next answer.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- Hire more people globally, outside the US. Especially executives and other leaders.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- It’s not fun to be closed off of the leadership because of the time zone.
- My productivity drops drastically in the afternoon. The exact hour varies between 15:00-18:00, so I can not plan with it in advance. I can be relatively productive after a 20-30 minutes rest, but I want to totally switch off during this period.
- I am happy to work for a short time in the evening, but have to be careful not to do it too much.
Edited by Viktor Nagy (GitLab)
I have a 12/13 hour time zone difference with my Manager (depending on season)
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
Forced async. The culture exchange is also interesting as we share about two different countries.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
For my direct manager @johnhope, it's not a big deal, but he is cool so I wish we had more sync time.
I can often feel quite disconnected as the centre of gravity for our team is in EMEA and to a lesser extent AMER. That's not anyone's fault, but it does mean that all the action happens when I'm asleep. The upside is I get to focus on stuff during APAC day, which is relatively quiet, which means I can also have lots of things on at the same time since my focus isn't being pulled in many directions.
How do you deal with this effect?
We have a longer 1-1 for more sync catchup, and I generally stay up until 10 or 11pm to do so. My 1-1 starts around my childrens' bed time.
I tend to sandwich my day with focused work during the day, and then a big gap with my kids, and then three or four hours collaborating directly with EMEA. I've found it's the best way for me to be productive. I'm still not 100% sure if it's long-term sustainable, but it's working well at the moment.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
My team, or GitLab?
My team: We already do some social calls but they're not well attended so most have ceased. I would like more fun-only team days (or just team fun time) so we make up for the disconnect. I would also love an in-person meetup but that's probably not on the cards until there's a bit more covid certainty (NZ borders are essentially shut, and have been for ~2 years, so I wouldn't be able to go anywhere anyway)
I wouldn't change my team members because they are all amazing but it would be nice if I wasn't so far away from everyone
GitLab: Hire more APAC people, clearly
I also started https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/people-group/dib-diversity-inclusion-and-belonging/diversity-and-inclusion/-/issues/639 to talk about time zone (specifically APAC) inclusion.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
I have worked remotely my entire career (since it was called "telecommuting") and it's better at GitLab than anywhere else I've ever experienced. I'm sure there's little tweaks here and there, but generally speaking I was well placed to adapt.
For things that are urgent, I can tag-team with others in different time zones and I can trust that things will have lots of brilliant eyes on them. I trust my teammates.
For non-urgent things, the async nature of it means they sometimes take a bit longer and that is OK. If there is a big hurry we can communicate about it and take the necessary steps.
Culturally speaking - I do think trusting people is the best thing. Nobody is going to judge, everyone is here to help each other do great work. Be vulnerable and state your problem, and all these clever people will help.
Edited by charlie ablett
I will respond as a reply since it's been (over) a year and the responses are related
@cablett is no longer my direct report but was for over 3 years so I'll respond in reference to that period. I also had other reports with large time-zone deltas but this one was the largest.
I ha(d)ve a 12/13 hour time zone difference with my Direct report
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
It enforced better discipline; for example in our 1-1 docs, use of async communication, etc. This has been a net-positive for me as I can use those ideas with other team-members regardless of time-zone to better support async working.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
Understanding how the workday differs for the team-member when compared to mine. It's often in simple but disruptive ways that aren't immediately apparent to me. For example sharing no working-hours overlap with me or a counterpart in Product Management, UX, docs.
How do you deal with this effect?
Open channels of communication with the person and trying to listen as much as possible. Trying out process changes towards asynchronicity, and non-blocking. Taking feedback to assess whether helpful.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
Continual improvement, and effective retrospectives.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
A few things stick out:
- An open 1-1 doc that I check and add to multiple times per week, rather than just on the day of the 1-1, is more effective and makes sync 1-1 time more productive.
- More time spent reading and writing on a daily basis is to be expected and is necessary. 1-1s typically would run out of time otherwise.
I have an 11/12 hour time zone difference with my Manager (@arturoherrero) depending on daylight savings times.
What’s the biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
As many others have mentioned; the forced effect of our timezone difference leads us to:
- Champion asynchronous processes.
- Communicate clearly and effectively.
- Think ahead.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Our 1:1 times can never land perfectly within one of our natural working hours.
- Communicating days and times are always more difficult than one would think (we generally experience the same real-time day on different calendar days). This can be exasperated by systems that don't recognise time zones properly, like PTO roots showing my time off on my manager's calendar incorrectly (raised https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/people-group/people-operations/General/-/issues/285#note_208371687 but the solution was reverted https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/people-group/people-operations/General/-/issues/285#note_209021567).
How do you deal with this effect?
- We have a bi-weekly cycle of face-to-face 1:1 and fully asynchronous 1:1, and we also shift our face-to-face 1:1 times according to daylight savings to accommodate the best time for each other.
- Our group meetings have become mostly fully async.
- We often discuss how weird time is.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
I feel my team groupintegrations already do these things well:
- Follow good asynchronous processes.
- Schedule social calls and meetings in a variety of time zones.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- It's okay for some things to take days rather than hours due to the effect of having a conversation with someone in opposite working hours. When it's not okay, line up others within your team to push it forward while you're asleep.
- Be strategic with your week's planning to ensure you're not blocked by lack of information.
Edited by Luke Duncalfe
This issue is fantastic, thanks @rhardarson and everyone for the discussion!
We're currently seeking feedback on the Async Weeks program and potential iterations. I'll review all the comments here, and if anyone would like to add thoughts to the feedback issue, it would be very welcome.
I have a X hour time zone difference with my Manager|Direct report
- 0 hours (same time zone)
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- No worries about meetings.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- None.
How do you deal with this effect?
- Because the time zone difference doesn't exist I have no worries.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- Everything is well managed.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- Writing down concise messages keeps people focused.
- I'm in EMEA time zone and I do have a 7 hour time zone difference with my manager.
- I have a 0 to -10 hour time zone difference with my direct reports depending on daylight savings times.
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- The number of sync meetings is kept to an absolute minimum.
- We are forced to write things down.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Some 1:1s are scheduled outside our regular working hours. This becomes an even bigger issue when daylight savings time ends in EMEA and starts in APAC as the time differences becomes bigger.
- Only a portion of the team is able to participate in weekly team meetings.
- Sync planning becomes more difficult when input from a team member is required who cannot participate
How do you deal with this effect?
- We recently switched to rotating Weekly calls in groupoptimize to allow APAC team members to sync with the rest of the team (alternating) every two weeks.
- For the frontend in groupoptimize (which is mostly affected by time difference), we slowly started to switch to a more asynchronous pre-planning process.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- Continue to identify pain points in synchronous processes and look into whether they can be replaced by asynchronous processes.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- Accept that things may take longer than expected and make sure that you are not blocked on too many things at once. This also means, that when asking a question, already think about the possible answers and bring up follow-up questions at the same time. Essentially, try to get as much information as possible with one question/comment to avoid unnecessary back and forth in discussions.
Edited by Martin WortschackI currently have a 9 hr time zone difference with my direct report. I used to have a 10 hr time zone difference with several direct reports.
What’s the biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Async communications
- Build-in forcing function to start my day early (usually at 6am) which allows me to participate in my children's activities in the afternoon
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Unscheduled, watercooler style chats, brainstorm, problem-solving doesn't happen
- Sometimes the cycle time is slow (days instead of resolved within the day)
- I sometimes have to unexpectedly cover for them (release posts, customers)
- Rescheduling meetings are a pain
- Can't sleep in when feeling tired
How do you deal with this effect?
- Build trust, leave my virtual office door always open so people feel welcome to reach out
- Be disciplined about when I go to sleep and manage my time
- Have appropriate expectations how long things will take. Take advantage of time overlaps
- Be strategic when you schedule things and when you leave blocks of time open
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- Everyone has to be flexible
- There's a center of gravity in the US time zones...I think by having other clusters would be helpful for collaboration, camaraderie, and work health
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- Plan your week and days early - don't leave things to the day of
Edited by Kevin Chu
I have a 9.5 hour time zone difference with my Manager
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Our team has developed fantastic async communication
- Ideally, I can complete tasks during my day that can be handed over to a team member who starts their day as I'm finishing mine. This includes my manager (status updates, planning/issue refinement, etc.). This ends up being more efficient than if we were in the same TZ.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Our 1:1s are later-than-ideal for me/earlier-than-ideal for him.
- There is some stress in ensuring work is ready for timezone-handover by the end of the day.
- Fortunately my team has a strong APAC-located contingent so I don't feel too isolated. However my previous team was less APAC-centric and I had a similar experience to Charlie (#12740 (comment 754072393)): a feeling of detachment/fear-of-missing-out.
How do you deal with this effect?
- Sometimes it is necessary to have calls outside of my work hours. This happens so infrequently that I don't mind doing it occasionally.
- Sometimes I ended up working later so that I ensure work is ready for handover. I usually compensate for this by starting the following day later.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- Keep up our async communication. We do a good job at this.
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- .
Edited by Tom Quirk
I have a 9 hour time zone difference with my Manager and a 7-9 hour tz difference with my Direct report
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Async work
- Lots of the communication is written down allowing others to contribute as well
- Very productive morning work
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
- Lot's of afternoon meetings which comes at the expense of family time
- Many hours in front of the computer
- When I need help/response on something, the answer is delayed. The same is true if a clarification is needed from me
- FOMO - a lot of interesting things happen when I am sleeping
How do you deal with this effect?
- Work many hours in the day to accommodate everyone
- Flexible scheduling for after hour meetings
- I fill out agendas ahead of time
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
- Respect working hours
- Be flexible with their schedules as well
- Consider if a meeting is truly necessary or if it can be accomplished async
- Hire more product managers in Europe and APAC - it is very US centric right now making afternoons very busy
What have you learned in your time working like this that you wish you had known from the start?
- Created a README file for the preference of how I like to work and when I can be flexible and when I cannot be
- I create a weekly priority thread that let's the team know what my main priorities of the week are
- Be as clear as possible in async communication to reduce ping-pongs and work more effectively
As UX Manager, these are the people I'm regularly (at least every second week) meeting up with:
UX
-
@mle- APAC -
@sunjungp- EMEA -
@pedroms- EMEA -
@mnichols1- US -
@annabeldunstone- US -
@nickbrandt- US -
@lvanc- US -
@vkarnes- US
Technical Writing
-
@aqualls- US
UX Research
-
@leducmills- US -
@wleidheiser- US
Product
-
@swaldner- US -
@mushakov- US
Next to that, I have irregular (most often once a month) meetings with the following people that either have the same job title as me, or that I need to otherwise stay in touch with:
UX
-
@rverissimo- EMEA -
@clenneville- US -
@badnewsblair- US -
@tauriedavis- US -
@jackib- US -
@jmandell- US
Product
-
@phikai- US -
@ericschurter- US
TOTAL
- 17 US
- 4 Non-US
Next to that, all group/stage/department meetings are in the same ~3 hour timeframe that all my 1:1 meetings with US team members would be.
What’s biggest positive effect the timezone difference has on your work?
I'm learning how to set boundaries for myself.
What’s the biggest negative effect the timezone difference has on your work?
For myself
Almost all my meetings happen somewhere between 3-6pm of my time, as that's the only overlap between US and Europe. Because of the large number of meetings in that time frame, I have almost no chance to spontaneously sync with others from the US for urgent questions, which means I often times work into my non-working hours to deal with these kinds of problems.
Also, any meeting that has to be rescheduled between me and any team member in the US often times has to be canceled for that week because there is no replacement spot between 3-6pm where both I and the other person are free.
Another big problem: The department we in UX are supposed to be working the closest is Product. But because my direct counterparts (Group Product Managers) are all located in North America, I cannot meet up with them regularly and thus can't support them as well as I could if I was living in the US, or if the Product department was more distributed. The lack of geographical diversity is extreme in the Product department, of the 37 Product Managers we have, only 3 are not located in North America. I have brought this up previously (Product#1339 (closed)), but the percentages have actually gotten worse since then.
For my team
While all other Design teams have some kind of informal/formal weekly meeting, I had to push my team to work 100% async so far.
How do you deal with this effect?
For myself
I shift a lot of my work hours into the evening, which is ok in the current situation of living in a worldwide pandemic as someone without kids, but I don't know how this will work once the situations change.
For my team
We are constantly trying to figure out ways around that, especially for team bonding and creating trust (gitlab-org/create-stage#12917 (closed)), as our team size and the team members have shifted quite a bit over the last 1.5 years.
What can the team do to deal with this effect?
Become better again in hiring team members from other countries than the US. I don't have hard data on this, but I have a strong feeling based on many small data points that we have significantly gotten worse in that over the last 6-12 months. It had a notable effect on me and how I work.
Also, this topic has been brought up multiple times before, and the issue was recently closed without any resolution: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/people-group/dib-diversity-inclusion-and-belonging/diversity-and-inclusion/-/issues/14
-
