How has your remote team solved communication across time zones?

If you're working without any shared hours, then you've got to communicate differently or you will have multi week ping pong sessions.

Sometimes that's not avoidable, but if both parties recognize the situation and change styles, it can help in most situations. Provide all the relevant information in the first message; read the whole message before and while responding. Expect to not get instant feedback.

It's like writing a letter vs having a phone call.

Otherwise, have realtime sync up at the edges of the workday.

I've seen two primary strategies for handling cross-time zone communication in teams:

Synchronous: A single time zone is designated, and all team members adapt accordingly. Although, this can be a pain for people far away.

Asynchronous: Flexible “overlap” periods are defined where everyone must be online.

In practice, though, remote teams I've worked in just seem to understand and accept that: A) You don't need a 'call', 'quick chat' or 'meeting' over video or voice most of the time B) If you are in a remote team, there is shared acceptance that there will be A LOT of asynchronous communication and people will reply when they can or are available. C) The situation changes the more time-zones you cover. Be flexible.

Those with roles that are 'mission-critical' or 'perpetually online', are usually on call or have a phone that is always available.

A handy resource for aligning schedules: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Really depends on the kind of communication. We have a few tips in our handbook https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/ but here are my personal observations.

1) Things like code reviews should be more extensive if feedback loops are long. One should be clear whether something is blocking or not. A lot of people use (and came up with) https://conventionalcomments.org/. Personally I really like to assign someone in the States or APAC and come back the next day haben my code reviewed.

2) regular meetings are often being alternated to be friendly between different time zones. e.g. one week APAC/EMEA friendly and another EMEA/AMER. All meetings have agendas and everyone can add points, even if they cannot attend. Also all meetings should be optional.

Slack. Very few meetings. Defining projects and workflow so people don't get stuck waiting for answers or collaboration.

I think using slack asynchronously (and developing norms that support it) is useful. Also imo there's an unspoken tradeoff when you work for a full remote company across time zones. Most workers seem comfortable with trading the convenience of remote work for the possibility of getting pinged outside work hours.

Ya I’m a big remote guy but you gotta be +-3 hours. Anything more and one side needs to alter working hours.

Everyone works and speaks in EST regardless of where they live.