💡 5 Ideas to Bring the Best of Teams Across Time Zones

When it comes to leading global calls, it’s hard to fathom what it’s like on the other end of the call, if you haven’t had the distinct pleasure of living in their world, walking a mile in their shoes, and understanding the hoops they jump through each day to be a connected, contributing, collaborative team member.  I remember the fun we had as an Asia Pacific regional leadership team, preparing a video for a quarterly global call, that showed clips of each of us taking routine midnight calls, and the unique things we did to keep ourselves focused & awake: taking the call in a closet so not to disturb sleeping family, sealed with a fresh a mud mask and cool cucumber eye pads, meditating to background sounds of Tibetan singing bowls, yoga poses to keep present in the moment, and multiple shots of espresso and hits of sugary snacks.  Our team did our best to paint the picture of what calls were like in the “unfriendly time zone.”  Humorous as it was at the time bonding over similar experiences, there was a shared sense of frustration of being disadvantaged; the ability to present, contribute, debate, and bring our best selves to represent our region was limited on midnight calls.  Not just a global dilemma, with lines between work and home now blurred working from home for the past 10 months, it’s now our new reality globally, and more imperative to succeed as teams for the long haul.

Many articles in the public domain talk about ways to deal with this, but there’s no silver bullet.  We live in a global world, multi-national teams, spread across so many time zones that there’s not an ideal way to ensure everyone can participate when their brains are at their best.  That said, I’ve revisited this topic through my neuroscience lenses, and conversations with many globally remote leaders, sharing practical ideas that might help us all come a little closer to creating a more compassionate, inclusive and collaborative environment in a 7×24 world, while simultaneously developing and elevating all members and accelerating team performance.

1. Cultivate a Culture of Empathy & Compassion: Empathy is the art of putting yourself in another’s shoes, with intention to understand their perspectives, feelings and comes from the emotion centers of the brain. Compassion, different from empathy, steps back from the emotions, comes from the cognitive center of the brain, and allows us to filter the emotions to guide us to better actions. With compassion we are able to turn empathy outward with intention to help; choosing consciously to benefit each individual and team through reflections, discussions and decisions that improve the team’s ability to collaborate and communicate.  To elevate above our unconscious biases, judgments and agendas, we must be able to understand how and why others think and feel the way they do.  When considering your globally dispersed team, have you taken the time to truly get to know each member, and how are you synthesizing this information to bring them together in ways that allows each member to bring their best self forward to contribute?

Tips:  Get to know your team members and what helps/hinders their contribution to virtual team: 

• Walk a Mile in My Shoes: Learn what it is like to live their daily life and let them share ideas & solutions that would help them to best contribute to the team. Ask open ended questions that allow them to share what the ideal conditions for them are to participate in virtual team calls and allow them to share their experience through their eyes.  You may just discover some of the following considerations:
  • The physical environment they are in may inhibit their participation – inconsistent internet, sufficient power-supply, taking calls from or is it family shared space, or a sub optimized space like a closet, garage or outdoors to minimize disruptions, are others sleeping and concerned about disruption?
  • They are living a zoom-a-thon nightmare. Besides your team call, they have other calls piling on off-hour calls throughout the week.
  • Perhaps they prefer late night, early morning calls and it suits the rest of the team well?
  • Trying balance work/life with the current call demands are compromising their ability to show up well; perhaps they are living with extended family, or the sole provider needing to home school, cook, get the kids ready for bed, caring for aging parents requiring their attention during the time you have your calls.
  • Is “your workday” meeting actually requiring them to attend on their weekend, or local country holiday?
  • Does daylight savings time in some countries cause significant issues for part of the year?
  • Is there something significant happening in their country, city that impacts them; be aware of the environment and stressors they are operating amongst.
• Reframe: Knowing what you have learned about each team member, how can you reimagine and reset your meeting time, format, to support the ability of each team member to participate and contribute fully? 
• Invite Solutions: Acknowledge with the team that one solution will not meet everyone’s needs and invite them for ideas to allow everyone to participate fully.  Facilitate a video break out where 2 individuals get to know each other better in each breakout, what helps/hinders their participation, and they come up with barriers to solve for and ideas to share back with the full group.  This humanizes the needs across the group and empowers the team to solution ways forward.

2. Build a Foundation of Psychological Safety and Authentic Conversations: Neuroscience teaches us that when people are in a “reward emotional state” we can see more options, choices, opportunities and take in more information. When we feel threatened, we move into an “threat emotional state” and experience fear, anger, frustration, confusion and pain, our ability to see options, choices, opportunities and receive information is limited.  Have you played the icebreaker game of learning a few things about another person in a meeting and sharing out about that person later with the broader group?  It’s a skill to put others at ease, hold space in the moment, intent to listen, appreciate, and capture what they’re saying, how and why they’re feeling as they do; hear their story and hold no agenda or judgement but absorb and represent exactly what that person has shared with you.  We all want to be listened too, to have our feelings acknowledged.  Creating and holding space helps to disarm fear, build trust, engage and create an environment that brings out the best individually.  How are you helping to facilitate authentic conversations in your remote team calls?

Tips:  Modeling good behaviors and techniques helps reinforce authentic and inclusive virtual calls.  I recall trip to India, I saw a sign posted on a wall read, “Good Behaviors are Noticed and Copied by Others.”

• Be Present: Turn off beeping, buzzing, flashing devices so you are focused. Notice non-verbal expressions and gestures; be truly focused in the moment on the person you are conversing with.  Resist the urge to multi-task, people sense it even if they can’t see you; and look at the screen, not at your phone.
• Positive Levity: Start calls with a light icebreaker – each person sharing one accomplishment they’re most proud of (personal or professional).  This helps move the individual into a positive, reward state of mind, and creates a level of shared permission to participate within the group from the start.
• Silence is Golden: Get comfortable with it, allow others to fill the space, actively listen and reflect back what you’ve heard.
• All About Them: Make the conversation about the other person, focus on their feelings (not yours).  Check in in advance or follow up after 1:1 to help a remote member feel connected.  How can you make the meeting a better experience for them, and ensure the team benefits from their perspectives and contribution?
• Clear the Space: A technique of naming the emotion buzzing around in one’s mind.  Name it, state it, set it aside.  This helps to clear the space and allow the individual to move beyond the distraction to focus forward.
• Every Voice Matters: Set the intention, and make it known you want to hear from everyone.  Use polling, surveys chat functions, and inclusive facilitation: HBR Article on pros/cons of different techniques.  https://hbr.org/2020/08/how-to-foster-psychological-safety-in-virtual-meetings.
  • Use break out groups of 2 or three individuals ensure more participants actually speak – report out and represent to the bigger group
  • Have team members use celebration (clap, thumbs up function) when others share an idea; positive reinforcement for speaking up boosts confidence and puts our brain in a toward state.
  • Begin the call with each person stating an emotion they want to clear before the call, tamps down the limbic system. End of the call, state one word around how you are feeling after the call, creates shared space to be vulnerable and share emotions.  How does this compare to where people were in the beginning of the meeting?
  • Actively moderate your virtual calls, ensuring all have the chance to speak, express their views, and role modeling acknowledging their participation and ideas. This creates a safe space for others to be vulnerable and share.
• Create Space: Ask open ended questions and facilitate the team to ideate the way forward; be open to and recognize new and different solutions.  HBR Article shares ideas for opening up vulnerability and sharing: https://hbr.org/2019/04/make-your-meetings-a-safe-space-for-honest-conversation

3. Foster Allyship: Creating a culture of shared accountability for success and support across a globally distributed team can cultivate deeper compassion, empathy, trust, collaboration, not to mention a far more holistic perspective of the business and the diverse set of customers you support for each team member. Building a community of allies that are accountable to recognize and represent the diversity of opinions in the group and support each other can reduce actual and perceived status barriers between different levels/seniority team members and stigmas sometimes associated with roles at corporate, regional and local levels.

Tips:  Create an all for one, one for all “one team” culture.  Understand, appreciate, and authentically represent another’s perspective.  We’re more likely to participate when we know others have our back and want to see us succeed.

• Buddy Up: Appoint shared pairings of individuals to represent another that can’t attend the meeting to collect inputs and feedback in advance of the meeting and share output through 1:1 follow-up after the meeting.
• Musical Chairs: Rotate that appointment for each meeting facilitates greater shared understanding and perspective across the team and for the individuals tasked with having the pre-meeting conversation; your team becomes far more integrated, with a broad and more diverse and inclusive perspective.
• Share Outside the Box: Create breakouts in the virtual meeting 1:1 to share, discuss and integrate diverse ideas, with each person needing to report out the other’s needs, input, perspectives.
• Instant Replay: Technology can be our ally.  Record the video call so team members can see how their feedback was represented by their ally; creates sense of accountability and builds trust when seeing allyship in action.
• Thrive Asynchronously: Project teams can record their own segments presenting their portions of project plans for teams to review and provide feedback via teams. While live debate is valued, differentiating and prioritizing what must be discussed live and what can be worked on in parallel allows the ability to tap full global potential of the team.
• Times Up, Stand Up: Take a stand for others during the meeting, ensure their voice, their ideas are heard and understood; more ideas that are shared and understood create a better solution.  Modeling this can create a positive movement.
• Trip the Wire: We are wired to hear the negative. Model and encourage others to call out great ideas, supporting team behaviors, and breathe a little love, light into each person – that does of oxytocin puts the individual and others in a reward state.

4. Allow Space for Autonomy: Neuroscience shows that having a degree of choice and ability to control our day helps to move us from threat state to a more engaged reward state. When we understand what makes each person tick, we can allow for highly relevant choice, allowing better adapt, compromise and show flexibility.  This is especially important now with work-from-home encroaching on our ability to establish a semblance of normalcy within an unpredictable pandemic, while managing and balancing professional and personal intersects throughout the day.

Tips: Enabling opportunity for choice and igniting empowerment.

• Share the Love: pleasure & pain.  Drawing the short end of the stick for an unfriendly meeting time all the time can cause burnout, misunderstanding, disengagement and resentment.  Rotate meeting times on a set schedule that can be planned for in advance.  Let the team come up with what this looks like.
• I Bend So I Don’t Break: Provide flexibility for individuals to reframe their workday to adjust to odd hour meetings, with flexible day time to reserve for balancing personal activities.  Instilling trust that we are all responsible for delivering to each other, and that how this happens during the day might look a little different for each of us, especially during times of lock down.
• Give Permission: Allow for the ability to opt in or opt out of specific meetings, without repercussion or judgement.  Your words matter.  How you respond to the request before, during the meeting in front of the team and after the meeting sends messages that it’s ok.  Don’t assume each person understands what that means, especially your remote employees.  Acknowledge their need, and the solution you both agreed to, and how you will support this individual; give permission for the agreed upon approach.
• Team Discovery: Ask the team to explore the success factors for each participant and come up with a shared solution (how, when, where) they can all support and hold themselves accountable for shared interaction and collaboration time.

5. Create Certainty and Boost Contribution: Clarity of expectation allows us to reduce threats that cause us our minds to stress, worry and spin. Our brains function well knowing how things will flow, being able to think or prepare in advance, especially in times of pandemic.  How many times have we attended meetings that we did not need to be attending, or were not expected to contribute to?  How often are meetings for informing versus active problem solving or decision making.  Knowing our role in a meeting, and what’s expected can help determine if those off-hour meetings require attendance for all and allow in advance for prior preparation for penultimate participation.

Tips: Establishing clarity and consistency of expectations.

• Set the Table: Clear meeting purpose, agenda, timeframe, outcomes, and stick to it. 
• Mirror the Method: Bringing into the virtual world familiar ways to express and collaborate that were used when the group was physically together creates confidence and paves the way for greater contribution.  I love using the application Miro – it’s just like facilitating an in-person meeting for team brainstorming, problem solving, process mapping, mind-mapping, you can have every person own their own sticky notes and be even more involved with a larger group of people, versus only a few fitting around a physical flip chart.  It brings the same familiar techniques back into the moment and actively engages each participant.
• Stick to It: I had a CEO who led a passionate commitment-based culture: “say what I mean and do what I say.”  It led to an entire cultural reset.  Well run meetings are efficient, productive, and keep participants engaged and on track to deliver the collaboration outcomes; they deliver on what was expected for participants.  Nothing worse than being on a midnight meeting, being told you are going to present, and the meeting runs late, and they don’t even get to your part.  A great slack blog running virtual geographically dispersed meetings: https://slack.com/blog/collaboration/ultimate-guide-remote-meetings
• Predictability Calms the Mind: Consistency in meeting frequency and what’s needed from participants.  If it’s a late-night meeting Asia time and you can incorporate the team members from that region to participate for a set time – they get the information they need, and share any regional inputs with the team to consider throughout the meeting.
• Pivotal Roles Required: Is every person invited really needed to be in the meeting, what do they contribute to the desired outcome.  If someone doesn’t attend will they be disadvantaged in any way? 
• Gift of Time: Words of wisdom from my scuba diving instructor stick with me over 30 years:  “Prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance.”  I never wanted to run out of air, be outside my depth, surface too quickly, end up in a hyperbaric chamber; I prepared for every single dive, even after having done hundreds, be focused and at my best for every dive.  Are you allowing equal chance for remote and in person participants to prepare and participate?  Does each member know what good contribution looks like?  Team members who are collocated know each other well, they have side chats during the day and may have more insight into what is expected.  Remote colleagues are not always in the loop.  If a meeting must be taken during sleepy time in a participant’s part of the world, it allows advance preparation, in the ‘awake’ hours before a meeting.  It also enables introverts in the group to introspect and think before being put on the spot.  Allow each participant to bring their best self and elevate the entire team.
• Rewind, Revisit & Reinforce Learnings: Follow up the meeting with a summary and reinforcing diverse perspectives to reflect how contributions helped shape the meeting outcomes.  Share the instant replay of the meeting.  What themes are you seeing, are we doing what we said we’d do?  What’s working, what needs course correction?  Put it back to the team to hear their insights and new ideas and build a culture of continuous improvement that fuels your team collaboration.

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