MBA1182 Tips to Managing Time Zones with a Remote Team + Free Ride Friday!

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It's our way to say thanks for leaving us love on itunes. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because you need to get things done every single day. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson I'll be sharing tips on managing time zones with a remote team. Building a remote team is a real viable option for most businesses out there. We run a remote team and it's great. It has its challenges. One of them we're going to be talking about today. But it's totally doable if you have the systems in place. We literally have teammates all around the world. We're talking about Australia, Europe, as Asia, the U.S. that means when I'm ready to go to bed, somebody starting their day on our team. Well, how to communicate with a team like that? How do you manage them? How do you run a well oiled machine when you're not all in the same place, let alone in the same time zone? Well, we've been doing this for years, so I want to share with you what works, how to actually manage this so it works for you instead of against you. By having a remote team, you have an incredible advantage. You can hire the best talent for the best price because you're open to the world. But those time zones, they're a hurdle you're going to have to get over. And that's what we're going to be talking about in today's episode, how to do that. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Like I mentioned at the start of the episode, we have teammates all over the world and it seems like no matter what time of day, whether I'm awake or I'm asleep, somebody is trying to get ahold of me now. When we started running our team and running our company, Webinar Ninja, our software company back in 2014, we soon realized we're going to lose our minds if we don't have some systems in place because I can't be on call 24 7. Just not feasible. So I'm going to share with you three main strategies you want to use when building your remote team to manage all these time zone conflicts. Literally, when I go to bed, whether it's 11pm, somebody's starting their day on our team at 7am there's people on our team that are still asleep because it's 5am Pacific crazy, I know, but it's still doable and I'll show you how. The first principle you have to establish is that all your communication doesn't have to be all at the same time. You want to make sure the majority of your communication is asynchronous, meaning that you're not always going back and forth on a call or a chat message instantly. Instant chat is just not doable. With a remote team. You have to have some systems that to communicate asynchronously, it means if I send a message, if I put a note, if I Ask for feedback. If somebody asks me a question, there's no expectation to get back to them immediately. You get to that person when it's your working hours. Now, some software really lends itself to helping you build a team like this and some don't. So the don'ts first let's get over the way is Slack. Slack does not help you. It's instant message. It's a good way to hash out a problem and talk things out when you're in the same kind of time zone range. We use Slack as a tool in our company, but we don't use it for asynchronous communication. For that we use something called Basecamp. Basecamp is a great software to, you know, post messages, get answers, share ideas, mark off to do's and do some planning and general communication that's not super urgent. If you're running your business properly, most of your communication should not be Code Red. It should be, hey, I can afford to wait 12 hours to get an answer. Code Red is a phone call. That's really how it is for us in our company. So Basecamp is a great way to kind of set up your team. It's about $100 a month for unlimited team members. Pretty affordable. There's another option called twist. I know the guys from Todoist. Amir, who's the founder, does a great job with this new software and it's all about, you know, again, communicating asynchronously by making sure, I would say 80% of your communication. Asynchronous communication is going to help you not worry about time zones. For example, when I finish recording this podcast episode and I hit stop and hit save and upload it to the cloud, I will send a message to our editor, Carl. That message is in Basecamp. I sent him a message in our hundred RMBA podcast thread. It's actually called a campfire. It's like where everybody who works on the podcast is living and I'll throw him a message. Hey Carl, I just finished this episode. You can find it at this link now. Carl might see that right now. After I record and start working on it and give me a thumbs up. He may see it an hour from now, he might see it tomorrow. I'm not expecting an instant answer unless it's a code red. Right in that point there's a message or a phone call that happens. And code reds are few and far. But for the most part, again, I'm sending him a message. He's going to get back to it. When he is done, that's step one, encourage and build in asynchronous communication in your team. Number two, when you're building out your team, even if you have a very small team, even if you have like three people on your team, think ahead. Make sure your departments as much as possible share at least four hours of time zone during their working hours. So for example, if you're running a software company and you're going to hire some developers, it's very helpful if you're going to hire developers in Europe to make sure you keep them in Europe or as much as possible, Europe and the U.S. because the time zone difference is within eight hours, it's about four hours overlap for working hours during the day. Why do I say that? Because within departments they're going to need to work together, they're going to have to hash out some problems, they're going to have to go back and forth, have conversations, have video calls, have chats on Slack, and it's going to be important for as you're building your team to make sure you hire people within the same region that will share at least four hours together. So that means they have four hours to communicate with each other on the same time zone. So say for example, you're hiring somebody in sales and marketing. So hire somebody and you hire them in Australia. Make sure you hire people from Australia in that department again or in New Zealand or in Singapore or in Thailand. That is all within the same range. Not in Hawaii because you're crossing the prime meridian line and they're in the other day, the previous day. So make sure that you group your departments as much as you can with a four hour overlap in time zone. So they have at least four hours to work together during the day, every day. Okay, but you might be thinking, Omar, I gotta meet with my team, I gotta speak to them. I have to, you know, project manage. I gotta make sure that I evaluate them, all that kind of stuff. Yes, we do meet with our team on video calls. In fact, I meet with the development team twice a week and we also have a development management meeting once a week and Nicole meets with our customer service manager once a week as well. So, so there are video calls that happen now. This is not gonna be our situation forever. There's a few hires we're about to make very soon where I don't have to be in these meetings anymore. And when I make that hire, who do I think I'm gonna be looking for somebody in the same time zone region as that department so they can run the meetings efficiently. Right now, those two days a week when I meet with the dev team, I'm staying up late so I can meet with them. It's a sacrifice I'm making, but I'm not least last piece of the puzzle. The last hire I gotta make now is a director of product and that person is gonna lead those meetings instead of me. So third strategy, do meet on a regular basis. I say at least once a week with your teams. And this could be just a regular video call, it could be 30 minutes and it's just a touch base. What have you done last week? What are you doing this week? This will make sure we're hitting our deadlines. Why didn't we hit our deadlines? Hold people accountable. That's what we're talking about here. Of course, plan to replace yourself from doing these meetings so you're not killing yourself for, you know, years on end. Of course you can promote somebody in that department to become a manager if that's something that they're good at and something that they're willing to do and happy to take on that promotion within that department and they're within the time zone range and you're good to go. But I do recommend as a third tip, as my third strategy, to meet with your team on a video call for a minimum of 30 minutes once a week. I like to do twice a week because I like touch base at the start of the week, like on Monday and then again towards the end of the week on Thursday. So we got asynchronous time. We got make sure that we're grouping our departments in the right time zone range so there's at least a four hour overlap with their working hours. And then we, of course we have meet with them regularly and you're going to have to sacrifice at least once a week to get on a video call. Now how do you schedule these calls to make sure that it's convenient or it's within the hours of everybody? There's a great tool called World Time buddy. It's so, so simple. There's a free version and there's a paid version. The paid version basically allows you to have more time zones where you can schedule calls and schedule any kind of appointment and know exactly what time it is for every time zone so you don't screw anything up. This is so easy to screw up. But with this it makes it super simple. You can link to that time and you can set up a calendar invite with that time slot so everybody knows what time the appointment is for their time zone. World Time, buddy. Awesome app.

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Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, running a remote team is great. You save money, you have great talent, you have a global team, meaning you're getting a global perspective on your product. So you make sure that you're catering to all kinds of customers. But it has its challenges when it comes to time zones. But use the strategies I shared with you today to get the ball rolling and make sure that you maximize the asynchronous time as much as possible. And trust me, your employees will love you for it. Because, hey, you hired them to do a job. Whether it's a developer, a marketing person, a copywriter, a customer service agent. That's their superpower. The more time they do that and the less time they're in meetings, the better for you, the company, the product, the customer, and for them. So asynchronous time as much as possible. And of course, if they meet with their peers to make sure that they're within the same time zone range in their department. And then of course, when you want to meet with them on a regular basis, make sure you do that at least once a week. We also do an all hands meeting, which is once a month, everybody in the company. And that's a one hour meeting. And it's basically a chance for us to get to know each other on a personal basis just to have water cooler time, just catch up, see how they're doing, you know, celebrate birthdays for that month, maybe share some updates and news about the company, share some wins, things like that. And that one is the hardest meeting to schedule, but it's only once a month, so everybody across the board makes a little bit of sacrifice to make sure we can schedule time that works for everybody. All right, guys, that wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode is not over because it's Free ride Friday. I gotta give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs, which is easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is Gavials and Gavial says Binge Worthy Listen five stars I've heard of this podcast before, but decided to give it a try a listen over this weekend. I ended up binging on 10 episodes. Omar not only knows his stuff, he knows how to communicate what he knows. Well, thank you Gaviles for that awesome, awesome review. You are our Freeride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to easy course at $500 value. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. You enter the draw automatically for every week until you win. Thanks again for listening to the $100 NBA show. Make sure you hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Whether it's Spotify, whether it's Stitcher, Apple podcasts, Overcast, it doesn't matter. We're on everything. Hit subscribe so you get all our episodes automatically. Before I go, I want to leave you with this if you don't decide to run a remote team. Let's say you decide to build a team in a local office in your local town. It doesn't mean you're not going to have any challenges when it comes to meetings and your staff and hiring and all that stuff. It comes with its own challenges. Just like remote teams have their own challenges. You're going to have to choose from a very small pool of candidates because they have to be local. You are limited to the salary that you have to pay them because, hey, there's a certain expectation and economy to that local area. Interruptions are a problem when you're in a physical office. So every business with every setup is going to have their own challenges. So don't think just because remote teams have these challenges that the other teams don't have challenges at all. Everybody got their own challenges they got to deal with. You just got to choose what fits best for your lifestyle and the kind of business you want to run. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.