How to Make Working Across Time Zones Easier in a Remote Setting

The Marketing Team

Learn how hiring a virtual assistant can increase productivity, diversify culture, and enhance efficiency across time zones and remote settings.

Businesses and companies worldwide are embracing a global shift in the workplace. Slowly, the traditional office setting is being replaced with a remote office, which not only expands and diversifies the recruitment pool for your company or business but helps fundamentally enhance the workplace culture and productivity.

Think about it: if you have personnel worldwide satisfying different time zones, you can theoretically start producing non-stop. At OkayRelax, we pride ourselves on connecting dedicated personnel with passionate companies who want to expand their horizons and bring themselves virtual assistants for remote office settings.

But how can you adapt a business for remote work? How do you handle scheduling, team meetings, culture fostering, and, most importantly, consistent productivity?

Effective Scheduling Across the Globe

Whether you are a multi-layered company or a start-up looking for remote secretarial services, having a pool of six thousand possible employees is better than six hundred. Across the globe, thousands of educated individuals are struggling to find work in their respective fields, with many being located in countries that cannot support their passionate ethos.

Whether you are looking for a virtual assistant for your remote office or a personal remote assistant in general, it behooves you to look outside of your local or even the national sphere of influence. You might just find someone you want to work with in perpetuity.

What if you found a virtual assistant for your remote office in a different country, like the Philippines? Wouldn’t there be conflicts due to the different timezone? The simplest solution is to discuss scheduling at the time of hiring. Make sure to confirm that malleable schedules for meetings are an option. 

What are malleable schedules? Imagine you host a meeting at 9:00 AM your time, which is PDT, Pacific Daylight Time. Comparatively, it is 12:00 AM in the Philippines, almost 15 hours ahead of you. While you could schedule the meeting and enforce their attendance, discussing malleable scheduling with your employee(s) in a remote setting would be far more considerate. Set up pre-determined meeting times, where some meetings are more convenient for you and others are more suitable for them. Have one session at 4:00 PM your time, so they meet you at 7:00 AM, or schedule the meeting at the end of the week (Friday) at 10:00 PM your time so they can attend at 1:00 PM their time.

Effective scheduling for team meetings will increase productivity and keep morale high as your employees, and virtual assistants for a remote business know you are considering their needs. It takes a small amount of extra work on your behalf, but it rewards you in dividends with loyal, valued employees.

Fostering Culture

Having employees from across the world increases productivity and brings in diverse individuals with unique perspectives. Every country has its own culture and may view certain business practices and products differently than how you perceive them. For example, one individual in India may have an outlook on the company’s product and usage that reveals something different from the traditional, expected market. Maybe there is a comfort grip to the item, or some of the tools are unintuitive for their intended purpose.

Alternatively, having virtual assistants in remote locations, such as Malaysia, can broaden a company’s view on personal culture. Certain aspects of a product or service can be scrutinized by employees, whom you eagerly ask to express their opinions, and can help guide the product into more robust, more diverse markets to maximize efficiency.

Perspectives like these can be shared through a virtual assistant in remote offices with different time zones, ensuring the company continues with a culture of solidarity and embracing change in a diverse workplace with flexible work ethics that maximize productivity and success.

Neverending Productivity

With virtual assistants in a remote office environment, productivity never stops. That is the beauty of hiring through different time zones; as your employees inhabit other parts of the world, they are up at different times. This means that while you sleep or rest or take a day off, the hours you are not present are being filled by remote secretarial services that are in constant communication with one another.

Think of it like a never-ending race. When you pass the stick, it becomes someone else’s responsibility. When they need to stop, they give it to someone else, and the cycle repeats itself with more than one stick in constant motion, returning to you when you have rested and are eager to run again.

For service industries, such as counseling, advising, or other services, clients can always reach you at any time and receive excellent service from the employees you fostered with a culture of mutual respect and success. That is the power of a timezone-diverse team. Even if half of the team has gone to bed in their timezone, another is just starting their day.

How Virtual Assistants Can Benefit You

If you want to expand your remote operations with cross-timezone employment, remote secretarial services might be right for you. Virtual assistants in remote environments work with companies to build and foster a diverse employee roster. A dedicated virtual assistant in a remote setting could schedule your team meetings across time zones, communicate through language barriers if any arise, and preserve documentation that will lead to effective productivity and growth across your grand undertaking.

Personal remote assistants are skilled in working with various teams across different time zones and supporting many fostered cultures. Whether you are trying to create a product, sell a service, or research content, virtual assistants in a remote setting alleviate much of the busy work so you can focus on your drive and passions.

If you are looking for a virtual assistant inspired by what you have just read, click here and learn why virtual assistants in remote settings can benefit your business. Also offer live chat, e-mail, and phone support here.