Global talent, local obstacles: Why time zones matter in remote work

Working from home provides companies with new opportunities to tap into additional markets and talent pools. However, a global workforce also brings a challenge: while some employees get up in the morning, others finish their workday.

“The introduction of location-independent work brings numerous advantages for both the individual and the company.”

Unequal working hours make it difficult for employees to connect, and even a one-hour difference can impair communication, create complexity and potentially lead to new gender inequalities, according to a recent study by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Lumry Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School.

“Introducing remote work brings many benefits for both the individual and the company,” says Choudhury. “But there are also challenges – and one of them is that communication is compromised when employees are spread across different time zones.”

As the need for global collaboration increases and companies recalibrate their remote and hybrid arrangements, Choudhury and colleagues present the first real-time data on how different time zones affect employees’ ability to communicate in a paper published in . Organizational Science in May.

The team found that when work schedules overlap, real-time communication decreases and some workers feel pressured to schedule work-related conversations early or late in the day when they can’t actually work. But for some workers, talking after work can be particularly difficult, including women with caregiving responsibilities and workers in countries with strict work-hour limits, Choudhury says.

Scheduling presentations in multiple time zones

In real-time or synchronous communication – including face-to-face meetings, video conferences, phone calls or instant messaging – employees exchange large amounts of information quickly and receive immediate feedback, including cues from tone of voice and body language, researchers say, allowing them to adjust their work and clear up misunderstandings.

Choudhury and his colleagues – Jasmina Chauvin of Georgetown University and Tommy Pan Fang of Rice University – studied the communication patterns of more than 12,000 employees of a large multinational corporation across all major time zones. The team examined their Skype messages, emails, phone calls and all other means of communication during a three-month period in 2017, long before the COVID-19 pandemic increased telework.

“Two people have the same job and do exactly the same work. The only thing that has changed is the time distance.”

First, the team investigated how being in different time zones affected the quality of communication among employees. They took advantage of the start of daylight saving time in some countries to test how interactions changed before and after the one-hour time change.

“Two people have the same job and do exactly the same type of work. The only thing that has changed is the time distance,” says Choudhury.

An hour break can make a big difference

The researcher found that the share of synchronous communication, such as phone calls and video chats, decreased by an average of 11 percent when the time gap between employees increased by one hour. At the same time, the share of asynchronous communication, such as emails and Slack messages, remained the same.

This one-hour loss of overlap represented a 19 percent decrease in opportunities for synchronous communication during a typical workday—but the impact of this gap also depended on the type of job. The researchers found:

Employees performing routine tasks switched to asynchronous communication. The loss of real-time chat did not impact the daily routines of machine operators and other workers performing non-collaborative tasks, who used email and other asynchronous tools to keep communication channels open.

Employees who collaborate more closely try to adapt to the working hours of their colleagues, which comes at the expense of their personal time. For example, after the elimination of the overlap hour, software developers tended to shift their working hours outside of local business hours more frequently and use their time in the early morning or evening to remain available for real-time communication.

On average, 57 percent of synchronous communication occurred during employee business hours, while 43 percent occurred when at least one employee was working outside of local business hours. Most common out-of-work hours communication occurred among employees who needed to collaborate on short notice, such as managers and their direct reports.

“These non-routine tasks are characterized by their ambiguity,” explains Choudhury. “You have more temporary and sudden problems, so you have to be able to speak without warning.”

Working around the clock is not right for everyone

Two groups of workers seem least likely to adapt their working hours to different time zones, raising questions about potential injustices:

Caring women. Both men and women tend to work more overtime as the difference in working hours increases, but women communicate significantly less often outside of regular working hours. In fact, the average proportion of communication outside of regular working hours was almost 14 percent for men and almost 9 percent for women.

“Previous publications show that women have the least flexible time management because they often have family and parenting responsibilities,” explains Choudhury.

A retreat from communication could negatively impact the careers of women, who may then choose positions that require less time shifting – which in the long run could limit their employment opportunities, salary and promotion prospects, the researchers say.

People in countries where cultural norms or labor laws restrict the working day. While in countries without legal working time restrictions an average of 32 percent of the time was spent on overtime, the proportion of overtime fell to nine percent in countries with a weekly working time restriction of 35 to 39 hours.

Both women and workers with time constraints risk losing the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues. Such disruptions in communication could negatively impact both the employment prospects of individual workers and the productivity of teams, Choudhury says.

“They will only participate in a portion of the calls, and that will lead to a lack of information that could be critical to their work,” he says.

How to prevent communication problems

To maintain dialogue among employees, Choudhury advises company leaders:

Consider the position and the required level of cooperation. “Follow-the-sun” arrangements, where employees in different locations work one after the other around the clock, can work well for very routine, simple, or administrative tasks that require little real-time communication. However, conflicting work schedules are less effective for complex, team-based tasks.

“You have to set expectations and train people, especially managers, that they cannot expect immediate answers.”

Examine the geographic distribution of your teams.
Companies that distribute their employees north and south to minimize time differences could maintain more synchronized communication even if employees are far apart. “There will be no friction, so no one will be left out,” he says.

“If your team is aligned east-west, you need to be aware that some people are less able to shift time,” Choudhury says. In that case, he says, teams will either need to move north-south or learn to communicate better asynchronously. Ultimately, a little more patience might be required.

“You have to set expectations and make people, especially managers, aware that they can’t expect immediate answers,” he says. “You have to be patient and wait until the person sleeping in Tokyo wakes up and reads your question before they can answer it in Slack.”

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Image: Image by HBSWK with asset from AdobeStock/FutureStock Studio