Communication on a global team

I often see posts on LinkedIn about not sending messages during off hours.

That's all fine and well if your team is in the same time zone, but what happens when you have a team dispersed worldwide? Someone is always in "off hours".

You'd never be able to send a message to the entire team, and you’d constantly be checking a time zone calculator every time you wanted to send a message to someone.

This puts a lot of stress on the sender. Thus, we decided to take a different approach at Ambiki. Here's how we solved it in our team working agreement:

“Communication within our team should be considered, by default, to be asynchronous. You are not expected to reply to chat, email, etc. outside of work hours. On the flip side, you shouldn't need to hesitate or worry about the time of day when posting a message or sending an email. Our team is remote and on varying time zones.”