Time Syncing

Global operations introduce one extra variable to all equations applied to run an organization: time zones. At Seed we are Asia (UTC +8), Europe (UTC +1 in Winter / UTC +2 in Summer) and California (UTC -8 in Winter / UTC -7 in Summer). And we have customers spread across the North America, so count in Eastern Time (UTC -5 / UTC -4) too.

This poses several challenges for a small organization, but with careful planning can be turned into a significant advantage, which is almost round - the - clock operations. If you are willing to do so, of course.

Last week a friend of mine was telling me the story how great it was working in Europe with a team in India. They could exchange only two emails daily. "Because when I replied to his 2nd email, he already left". Well, this is not how you want play this...

It is a learning curve, but our team gets better and better understanding the advantages of time synchronized global engagements. For our engineering / R&D team in Poland the rules are rather simple:

1. Start processing the inbound messages from Asia early in the morning - your partners in Shenzhen or Kuala Lumpur will still be able to talk to you.
2. Make sure all the day's final decisions to Asia are communicated by the end of the day. They will start working on them early morning on the next day - with 6 hours advantage it is very likely you will get feedback the next morning you arrive at work.
3. Make sure you send the outband traffic to North America early afternoon (there is a good period between [1] and here to accomplish this.
4. Try to be online in the evening to support the Americas

This way we can keep the processes spinning as the planet revolves. Giving us significant advantages in project processing cycle. This requires the team to be flexible and imagine the time-zone engagements. We are getting better at this, almost every day! I know this is challenging, therefore I'm so happy how good the self-organizing progress is. Keep going this way!