Working on a Geographically Dispersed Team
In every instructional design role I’ve had, my team has been distributed, first nationally, and now globally. My team today lives across South Africa, Canada, Brazil, India, Colombia, England, and the US.
Occasionally that makes for some weird hours, but it is manageable if you follow a couple of guidelines for successfully working on a globally dispersed team:
Set up working hours in Outlook. This makes scheduling meetings much easier.
Bookmark a world clock on your browser. Always nice to quickly check that you aren’t disrupting someone right as their work day is ending.
Embrace asynchronous collaboration. Overlapping free time to meet is sparse, so have ways to leave each other comments, questions, etc. Chat apps like Slack or Teams are good for this.
Have a clear process for documentation. Knowing where to locate source files, procedures, job aids, meeting notes, etc. is important because you won’t always be able to reach people synchronously if you don’t have a lot of overlap with their schedule.
Establish clear communication norms. Do you email people outside of their office hours, or send them a chat message? Is it better to call, someone or send an invitation to talk? Agree on these norms as a group.
Develop meeting norms. There should be clear expectations around meeting across different time zones. Wonky hours may be expected, or normal working hours may be respected. Either way, employees should be aware of the policy.
Use your time together wisely, for things like team-building and big picture thinking. This is not the time for business as usual. The bonding that can happen during retreats carries back over to remote work.
These tips and tricks should help with logistics and making things run smoothly.
