Agreed ways of working with timezones
I’m reading an excellent book at the moment called Distributed Work by Pamela Hinds and Sara Kiesler (eds.). While reading the chapter on ‘Face-to-face Communication’ I was reminded of the global projects I worked on at IBM and how linking people across three continents required at least one geography to take the conference call in the wee hours of the night. It was interesting how different groups worked out who would take the late call.
Two projects/communities stand out. While working for the software group I was on a team to develop the supporting services for the Knowledge Discovery Server. Our team was distributed across France, Australia, Singapore, UK and USA. It was a small team of six peers—each was head of knowledge management for their region. We quickly agreed to rotate the conference calls so each had a turn staying up late.
The IBM knowledge management community was quite different. It was run from the USA and each time we met on the phone the time was set for a leisurely early afternoon meeting—as long as you lived in New York! We protested many times suggesting a rotation of times only to be ignored. In this case there was definitely a power differential and the view from New York was simply that the US and Europe were the two most important regions and Asia could get up late.
I retell these stories to highlight how a seemingly small thing of scheduling meetings can become a major impediment to distributed work. Resentment grew in my second example and after a while the Asian contingent just didn’t show up for the meetings (you can read in Distributed Work how important ‘showing up’ is in social bonding).
Developing a set of ways distributed work might be done by the team or community (and effective boundary object) would help to dispel issues before they affected the group. Agreeing how the group will rotate timings for meetings should be early on the agenda.
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on: