Remote work is giving companies new opportunities to tap additional markets and talent pools. However, a global workforce also brings a challenge: As some employees are getting up in the morning, others are winding down their workday.
“There are many benefits to the individual and the company from embracing work-from-anywhere.”
Mismatched working hours makes it difficult for employees to connect, and even a one-hour schedule difference can hurt communication, introduce complexity, and potentially create new gender inequities, according to recent research by Prithwiraj Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School.
“There are many benefits to the individual and the company from embracing work-from-anywhere,” Choudhury says. “But there are also challenges—and one of those is that when people are spread out across time zones, communication is affected.”
As the need for global collaboration accelerates and companies recalibrate their remote and hybrid arrangements, Choudhury and colleagues present the first real-time data on how different time zones affect employees’ ability to communicate in a paper
published in Organizational Science in May.
The team found that when work schedules clash, real-time communication drops, and some workers feel pressure to shift their work-related conversations to early or late periods of the day when they should be off the clock. Yet talking after hours can be especially tough for some employees, including women with caregiving responsibilities, as well as workers in countries with strict hourly limits, Choudhury says.
Scheduling talks in multiple time zones
During real-time, or synchronous, communication—including in-person meetings, video conferencing, phone calls, or instant messaging—employees exchange large amounts of information quickly and receive immediate feedback, including the cues that come from tone of voice and body language, the researchers say. That enables them to adjust their work and clear up misunderstandings.
Choudhury and his fellow researchers—Jasmina Chauvin of Georgetown University and Tommy Pan Fang of Rice University—looked at communication patterns among more than 12,000 employees working for a large multinational corporation across all major time zones. The team studied their Skype messages, emails, phone calls, and all other communications during a three-month period in 2017, well before the COVID-19 pandemic increased remote work.
“Two individuals have the same job and are doing the exact same kind of work. The only thing that changed is the temporal distance.”
First, the team explored how being in different time zones affected the quality of worker communications, using the onset of daylight savings in some countries to test how interactions changed before and after the one-hour time change.
“Two individuals have the same job and are doing the exact same kind of work. The only thing that changed is the temporal distance,” Choudhury says.
A one-hour gap can make a big difference
The researcher found that, on average, the amount of synchronous communication, such as phone calls and video chats, declined by 11 percent when the time delay between workers increased by an hour. Meanwhile, the amount of asynchronous communication, such as emails and Slack messages, stayed the same.
That one-hour loss of overlap represented a 19 percent reduction in opportunities to communicate synchronously during the typical workday—but the impact of that gap also depended on the type of job. The researchers found:
Employees handling routine tasks turned to asynchronous communication. The loss of real-time chatter didn’t impact the daily schedules of machine operators and other workers handling noncollaborative tasks. They used email and other asynchronous tools to keep the lines of communication open.
Employees who work more collaboratively tried to match colleagues’ hours, cutting into their personal time. After losing the hour of overlap, software engineers, for example, tended to shift their work times outside of local business hours more often, using their time in the early morning or evening to remain available to communicate in real time.
On average, 57 percent of synchronous communication took place within employees’ business hours, while 43 percent occurred when at least one employee was working outside of local business hours. The amount of time-shifting to off hours was highest among those who needed to work with each other at a moment’s notice, such as managers and their direct reports.
“What characterizes these nonroutine tasks is ambiguity,” Choudhury explains. “You have more intermittent and sudden problems, so you need to be able to talk without advanced warning.”
Working around the clock doesn’t work for everyone
Two groups of employees seem least suited to aligning their schedules with other time zones, raising questions about potential inequities:
Women caregivers. Both men and women tend to increase their after-hours work as schedule differences increase, but women are significantly less likely to communicate outside of regular business hours. In fact, the average communication share outside of regular hours for men was nearly 14 percent, versus nearly 9 percent for women.
“Prior literature shows that women have the least flexible schedules because they often have family and child-rearing responsibilities,” Choudhury explains.
Bowing out of communicating has the potential of negatively impacting the careers of women, who may select positions that don’t require as much time-shifting—which in the long term might limit their job opportunities, wages, and promotion rates, the researchers say.
People in countries where cultural norms or labor laws limit the work day. While countries without legal limits spent an average share of 32 percent of their time working after hours, for those with a weekly limit of 35 to 39 hours, the share of off-hours work dropped to 9 percent.
Both women and workers with time restrictions risk losing out on the ability to collaborate with colleagues. Such interruptions in communication could negatively impact both job prospects for individual workers and the productivity of teams, Choudhury says.
“They will be participating in a subset of calls, and that will lead to a deficit of information that could be critically important for their job,” he says.
How to prevent communication breakdowns
To keep the conversation flowing among staff, Choudhury advises that business leaders:
Consider the position and the amount of collaboration required. “Follow-the-sun” arrangements, where distant employees work sequentially around the clock, can work well for highly routine, simple, or administrative tasks that require little real-time communication. But opposite schedules are less effective for complex, team-based tasks.
“You’ll have to set expectations and train people, especially managers, that they cannot expect answers instantaneously.”
Examine the geographical distribution of their teams.
Companies that distribute workers north and south to minimize time differences might maintain more synchronous communication, even if there are large distances among individuals. “There will be no friction, so nobody will be left out,” he says.
“If your team is east-west, then be aware that some people will be less able to time-shift,” Choudhury says. In that case, he says, teams must either relocate north to south or start learning how to communicate better asynchronously. Ultimately, some extra patience might be required.
“You’ll have to set expectations and train people, especially managers, that they cannot expect answers instantaneously,” he says. “You’ll have to be patient and wait for the person who is sleeping in Tokyo to wake up and read your question before they can answer it in Slack.”
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