Are you in a senior role and relocated far from HQ since pandemic?

I’m in a senior role working for an SF company, and my permanent address is in the Bay Area. Although I haven’t relocated per se, I work from the EU for months at a time because my partner lives there. It’s occasionally inconvenient for me because meetings occur when it’s evening / nighttime in Europe —- sometimes quite late —- but fortunately I don’t have too many such meetings, and I’m a night owl anyway. For coding tasks, sometimes it can actually work out better because I can do my day’s tasks before anyone in the US is awake, then submit my PRs, attend my standups, and sign off. Sometimes it works out worse because if I’m waiting on a code review or need help during the daytime in Europe, it won’t come till nighttime. And of course there are the random times when someone in the US legitimately needs to chat with me near bedtime etc. I do believe that being so remote so often means that I wouldn’t be a good fit for roles that require more leadership, because the time zone difference makes it hard to maintain a very high level of responsive communication and availability, particularly when it comes to meetings and chat. However, I’ve more or less accepted it for now as a reasonable trade-off of being a bit of a digital nomad.

I find it really tough.

I jumped from a very successful post-IPO business where I helped form the global organisational culture, and ran a key part of their business, which in pre-pandemic times, was very in-office and collaborative with a lot of travel to keep remote colleagues and teams aligned and socially connected to a much smaller business whose offices are a few hours flight time away, with the whole pandemic WFH thing there too.

Motivation has been a big challenge. Sitting alone in my "office" trying to stay in a flow state for things I'm not sure are that important in the global scheme of things, and trying to batch up my interactions to keep from disrupting colleagues.

Notification channels are diverse and easy to lose track of: workflow and documentation apps, calendar, slack, email as well as texts on multiple channels. It seems like priorities and current work of others aren't easy for me to get a good handle on.

I really like my colleagues but don't know them well. I collaborate relatively closely with a few but mostly feel super isolated. A lot of what I have to offer them as a colleague are hard to bring across without seeming (to me at least!) pushy or rude. It felt different when you were sitting in the same room and could grab a coffee with someone and have a casual conversation about things that were going on or not working out or to ask wide-ranging questions.

Timezones are a bit of a thing, but we span only a couple of hours so it's manageable with a bit of care. I was used to managing teams and stakeholders in Z-8 through to Z+11 in the last couple of jobs so this is pretty easy.

I don't enjoy sustained WFH, mostly on the motivation and peer and stakeholder contact front. I regret that many jobs like mine probably won't return to the office apart from occasional planned visits.

I am in a senior role; I have not relocated since the pandemic, but I have changed jobs, and I'm an hour behind my company's main office. My manager is two hours further behind me. We have employees across several timezones, including some in Europe who keep European time.

What our company does mostly works, with some caveats:

Officially, the office hours are 9AM to 6PM Monday - Friday, in EST. Theoretically, if you work regular hours, these are your working hours (minus lunch hour).

Semi-officially, different departments and teams set their own hours. Some departments, like customer service, are always available for exactly the official hours regardless of physical timezone - if you are a customer service rep in LA, you'd likely have to be be online at 6AM. I have quibbled with some departments (for instance, project management) which enforce this despite it not being strictly necessary, resulting in people having to be up early or logging off late for no good reason.

Unofficially, on my team, on my team, we work whatever hours they'd like so long as we a) make all our meetings, b) are available when we say we'll be available, and c) get work done. I work 10AM to 6PM my time, give or take an hour on both ends, Monday - Friday. My working hours are written down in my employee profile, which everyone has access to. If someone schedules a meeting with me earlier, I'll usually attend it, but I will ask for it to be moved if it's a recurring meeting. I have never been told this is an inappropriate request (I've never even been asked to provide a reason so far). Nobody's tried to schedule a later meeting with me yet, except ad-hoc calls between me and someone else who was also working late.

Sometimes, if I've had a late night, I'll take a nap for an hour or so in the middle of the day and work an hour later in exchange. On days when I don't nap, I will often take a walk for a similar amount of time if the weather is nice. I usually do these things later in the afternoon so I'm less likely to have urgent messages/calls. I have never hidden these activities, but I don't broadcast that I'm doing it outside my team. It's a nice routine.

Overall, I wish my company would embrace the semi-official/unofficial policy more officially, but I am generally happy with how they respect my time.