We live in an increasingly globalized society, where businesses are expanding to offer products and services to consumers and companies in every corner of the world.
Providing the best level of service possible may require developing new physical locations or hiring employees in other time zones.
That’s the approach that the domain name company, Namecheap, takes, hiring talent from around the world whenever the company expands. “We want to build a business with the best talent we can find,” Hillan Klein, COO for Namecheap, has said. “We looked at talent without geographic boundaries. This gives us a global source pool.”
Buffer takes the same approach to pushing the limits of its business internationally, and like Namecheap, its team is split across time zones, one of the ways it’s been able to acquire such amazing talent.
Like Buffer, which is scattered across 11 time zones, my own companies, WebProfits and Mailshake, operate around the world in five zones, covering the cities of San Francisco, Austin, Indianapolis, Sydney and the nation of Romania.
That presents some unique challenges in the way we conduct business on a multinational level.
“Naturally, this fact changes the way we work just a bit,” writes Courtney Seiter, whose title at Buffer is inclusivity catalyst. “And, as our team grows and changes, we sometimes have to change and renegotiate the way we work through time zones.”
I recently featured Buffer in a post about the top 10 tools to get maximum value for your content, and there’s plenty more to learn about the company based on how it runs its operations. Here’s how the Buffer team handles its disconnects of time zones; these are tips any startup can utilize to improve its own operations.
1. Awareness of time zones
The team at Buffer developed a tool that tracks team performance across time zones. With it, the company’s leaders can see at a glance what their people are doing. This helps them avoid pushing projects on team members when they’re asleep (legitimately) or about to finish their workday.
If you yourself outsource work to other time zones, keep scheduling and availability in mind as projects crop up. A tool that’s similar to what Buffer uses…