Working Across Time Zones Without Making One Team Stay Up Late

All Remote Work Desk Editorial Desk

On many distributed teams, the time-zone problem has a face: the one colleague whose calendar shows a recurring meeting at 10 p.m. local time, every week, because it suits everyone else. Perhaps the meeting was set when the team was smaller, and its timing was never reconsidered. Fixing it starts with noticing who is absorbing the inconvenience.

What research shows about time-shifting

A study led by Tommy Pan Fang of Rice University, with Prithwiraj Choudhury of Harvard and Jasmina Chauvin of Georgetown, examined communication records from more than 12,000 employees at a large multinational company. As summarized by Rice, the researchers found that a one-hour increase in time difference around daylight-saving changes was associated with about 11 percent less synchronous communication, compared with roughly 19 percent fewer overlapping business hours. Those estimates describe this firm's data, not a fixed rule for every team. The gap suggests that people partly compensate by shifting their own hours. That adjustment keeps work moving, but it has a personal cost, and the study found it was not shared evenly: women, and employees in places with strict limits on working hours, were less likely to time-shift, which the researchers suggested could eventually affect career progression.

The practical takeaway is not that time-shifting is bad. It is that it should be a visible, shared choice rather than a hidden tax on certain people.

Map real hours, not just time zones

Start by listing each person's actual working window, in their own local time, alongside the hours they have agreed to be available. People need not disclose private reasons for unavailable times. Then convert everything to a single reference, such as Coordinated Universal Time, to see where windows genuinely overlap. Two people in the same zone may have very different usable hours.

When you write times in messages and documents, include the zone, such as 14:00 UTC, or list the time in each relevant city. A bare 3 p.m. invites mistakes.

Watch the daylight saving transitions

Overlap windows move when clocks change, and they do not all change together. In the United States, NIST explains that daylight saving time begins at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday of March and ends at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November, and that Hawaii, most of Arizona and several U.S. territories do not observe it. Many other countries change on different dates or not at all. For a few weeks each spring and autumn, a meeting that normally lands at 5 p.m. for someone may land at 6 p.m. Put those transition weeks on the team calendar and recheck recurring meetings.

Keep a short, protected overlap

Rather than trying to fit everything into shared hours, keep a short window for the conversations that need real-time discussion: decisions with tradeoffs, sensitive feedback, unblocking urgent problems. Consider written handoffs for routine status updates and document reviews, while offering accessible alternatives when writing alone is insufficient. A good handoff note at the end of one person's day, saying what was done, what is waiting and what decision is needed, lets someone eight hours away pick up the work without a meeting.

Rotate the awkward slots

When a meeting truly needs everyone and no time is comfortable for all, rotate it so the early or late slot moves between regions over a set cycle. Rotation feels less efficient, because someone always has to adjust their week, but it spreads the cost instead of assigning it permanently to whoever is furthest from headquarters. Record meetings, with consent, and share notes so people who cannot attend live are not penalized for missing them.

A hypothetical example

Imagine a product team with members in New York, London and Bengaluru. During the months when both the U.S. and the U.K. are on summer time, 9 a.m. in New York is 2 p.m. in London and 6:30 p.m. in Bengaluru. The team keeps one live planning meeting a week. In alternating weeks it moves to 8 a.m. London time, which is 12:30 p.m. in Bengaluru and 3 a.m. in New York, so instead the New York members join by recorded update and written comments that week. Daily status lives in a shared document. The Bengaluru members can also use a written update when the 6:30 p.m. slot falls outside their agreed hours. Decisions stay open for comments until each region has had a working day to respond; missing the live call does not mean losing a voice.

Why late nights are worth avoiding

Occasional off-hours calls are part of global work. Regular ones are a different matter. A NIOSH science bulletin on working hours and fatigue notes that fatigued workers can have trouble concentrating and slower reactions, and stresses that fatigue has many causes and no single fix suits every situation or person. Scheduling is one factor a team can address together, alongside workload and reasonable time for rest.

Tradeoffs to accept

Teams that move most work into writing can lose some speed on fast-moving decisions, and the person at the end of the handoff chain may wait a day for answers. Some organizations choose instead to hire within a narrower band of time zones for roles that depend heavily on live collaboration; the Rice researchers noted that teams spread north to south keep more overlap than those spread east to west. Neither approach is free. What matters is choosing it openly, reviewing it when the team changes, and asking the person furthest away how the schedule actually feels.

Sources

Rice University News, The hidden cost of working across time zones: https://news.rice.edu/news/2024/hidden-cost-working-across-time-zones National Institute of Standards and Technology, Daylight Saving Time Rules: https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/popular-links/daylight-saving-time-dst CDC NIOSH Science Blog, Working Hours and Fatigue: Meeting the Needs of American Workers and Employers: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/bulletin/2023/fatigue.html