When you decentralize the workplace, employees and new hires can be totally location independent, meaning your colleagues can work from wherever suits them best. This opens up a whole world of talent and possibilities for remote companies. 

At Shield, we have teammates living and working in over 15 countries across the world. Many of them work from their homes, others prefer to prioritize traveling (at least in safer times), and some like working in co-working spaces. Whenever teammates are in the same city, they might get together to work (or more likely eat!). 

Having a distributed company means our team is full of diverse people from many different backgrounds. I think it makes us better to be surrounded by so many cultures, experiences, and ways of thought. We can be more accommodating, more innovative, and solve problems more creatively. 

But with our team spread across all these different countries, it also comes with vastly different time zones. 

In many cases, teammates are logging on just as others are logging off or meeting have to be scheduled outside of traditional work hours to catch everyone at the same time.

So how do we manage? 

What does collaboration look like? 

Does everything have to be asynchronous? 

Do we ever get to work together in real-time?

To answer these questions, I asked our Shield team to weigh in on their thoughts about time zones and whether they think having teams across the world makes their work harder or easier. 

How do you work with teams across different time zones?

“It is harder and easier in different ways,” says Anna Duncanson, our Salesforce Development Manager and Head of Tech, who manages a team of... read more

Shield GEO makes international employment simple. Our customers use Shield GEO to employ and payroll hundreds of workers in over fifty countries. Find out more.