You're managing a dispersed team across time zones. How do you gauge your communication's success?
Effective communication is crucial when managing a team spread across different time zones. To ensure your messages are understood and acted upon, consider these strategies:
How do you ensure effective communication with your dispersed team? Share your thoughts.
You're managing a dispersed team across time zones. How do you gauge your communication's success?
Effective communication is crucial when managing a team spread across different time zones. To ensure your messages are understood and acted upon, consider these strategies:
How do you ensure effective communication with your dispersed team? Share your thoughts.
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I would look at this from a different angle - communication across time zones isn’t just about coordination, it’s about connection. We often measure success by response times and meeting attendance, but what if the real indicator is how well our teams operate without constant check-ins? Are we building a culture where people have the clarity and autonomy to move forward, or are we just managing around time gaps? Let’s structure our communication for momentum, ensuring progress continues, even when we’re offline.
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For many years I a had a very interesting role managing engineering and production teams in multiple locations around the world. I had a set of clocks on my wall to keep me from calling to early or just before someone was finishing for the day. I once sent an email suggesting a course of action to two engineering managers, one in the UK and the other in the USA. On checking progress a few weeks later, I found that the UK manager had completed the task, but the US manager had decided not to. I asked each of them what they had taken from my original email. The UK manager had read it as do this or suggest an alternative. The US manager had taken it as just a suggestion. They are both great managers, and I learnt a lot about how to communicate
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Managing a global program with dispersed stakeholders, who have been accustomed to operate in silos, requires first a sense of community to be built. This is achieved through periodic connects where all are on the same platform to align with the common strategy (no separate meetings for time zones). Metric to track initially will be attendance rates. As this community matures with each connect, participation of different stakeholders will signal how well your communication drives their engagement and autonomy to progress on topics.
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In my experience, effective communication should involve only relevant teams or team members. If there are too many participants then it will not be effective communication. Relevant team should alo reside in closer time zones
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In my experience and education, I have found that when coordinating across time zones, it helps to plan in advance how to make the best of the overlapping times, and establish clear expectations about asynchronous communication. A lot can be done in even a one or two hour burst if people are on the same page about when to spend that extra energy and focus. Some people prefer a detailed asynchronous backlog of information to trade off and work through, while others prefer asynchronous preparation for a (brief, if necessary) period of working directly in tandem.
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