The hidden cost of working across time zones

Remote work lets people live where they want, but ‘time shifting’ can put a strain on team collaboration and communication.

Image

Remote working tools like Zoom and Slack have been around for more than a decade, but it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that remote work really took off. Since then, work-from-anywhere arrangements have allowed more workers to perform their jobs from the places they want to live, whether that is nearer to friends and family or in a resort town in the Rocky Mountains.  

“Some companies now advertise job vacancies by time zone rather than geographical location,” says Tommy Pan Fang, assistant professor of strategic management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. “In one sense, it is a win-win: Companies deepen their talent pool, and workers have more opportunity. But living in one time zone while working in another can affect the way employees communicate and collaborate.”

The research, “Working Around the Clock: Temporal Distance, Intrafirm Communication, and Time Shifting of the Employee Workday,” by Fang, Harvard University’s Prithwiraj Choudhury and Georgetown University’s Jasmina Chauvin, found that strategically aligning employees along a North-South axis could improve team productivity.

“An East-West distribution of workers could be fine for teams that perform routine tasks,” Fang said. “But when projects depend on synchronous collaboration and communication, a firm might benefit from intentionally aligning workers along a shared time zone.”

The impacts of temporal distance

If team members are distributed across multiple time zones and everyone works standard business hours in the time zone where they reside, the overlap between their workdays will be less than it would if they all worked in the same time zone. Differences in working time are called “temporal distance,” and they limit the hours in which synchronous communication can take place.

Talking person-to-person in a video or phone call can play an important role in collaborative projects — speaking is usually faster and conveys tone better than emails do. If opportunities to talk with collaborators are limited, it could slow work on some projects. But it’s not clear how much this type of communication is being affected or even if synchronous communication is what is affected the most.

To address these questions, the research team analyzed communications data from more than 12,000 employees at a Fortune 100 multinational firm with operations around the globe. Published in the journal Organization Science, the research found that employees do something called “time shifting” to counteract the effect of temporal distance. This involves employees choosing to engage in work tasks or communications to accommodate varying schedules or to meet urgent demands of the job.

Time shifting can potentially impact team communication patterns, work-life balance, collaboration dynamics and project management strategy.

“Working outside of regular business hours has a cost. It can negatively affect work-life balance and has a direct impact on your personal time,” said Fang. “But workers may choose to do it anyway to meet the demands of their job.”

‘Time shifting’ and daylight saving: How workers adapt

To test the relationship between temporal distance and internal communications, Fang and his colleagues designed a study that centers on daylight saving time, a practice observed in many, but not all, parts of the world. Twice each year, clocks are adjusted by one hour — forward in spring and back in fall. But this practice varies widely, even within the same country. For example, in the United States, Arizona opts out of daylight saving, meaning they share a time zone with California for only half the year. These semiannual shifts create an opportunity to measure the difference an hour makes — before and after a time change.

The team analyzed the Outlook and Skype records of the Fortune 100 firm’s scheduled calls and meetings, unscheduled calls, instant message chats and email messages. Its employees were based on every continent except Antarctica, including numerous jurisdictions that don’t adopt daylight saving time such as India, Argentina and Malaysia. The research found that a one-hour increase in temporal distance — that is, when daylight saving time occurred in one jurisdiction but not another — reduced synchronous communication by 11%.

“This was less than we expected,” said Fang. “The loss of an hour from the workday represented a 19% loss in the overlap of business hours. So proportionally, communications went down less than opportunities to communicate did.”

Houston/Chicago vs. Houston/Orlando

The study observed an increase in the volume of communication taking place outside of standard working hours. Workers who have strong collaborative relationships and perform tasks that are not routine were more likely to time shift. The findings raise questions about what type of work is best suited to geographic distributions that span multiple time zones.

“When an employee’s role is collaborative and nonroutine, they place a premium on synchronous communication,” said Fang. “They adjust their workday to get their job done. But not everyone is able to do this, and firms might have lower productivity because of it.”

The study also observed that not all workers time shift equally. Individual characteristics like gender and cultural context may lead to disparities in productivity and engagement. For example, women are less likely to communicate outside of business hours than men are, possibly because of the added responsibility that many women assume in home life. Employees based in jurisdictions with stricter limits on working hours are also less likely to communicate outside of working hours. And if a firm’s management places a premium on synchronous forms of communication, these differences could lead to disparities in pay and career advancement emerging over time. Fang said this suggests that firms might benefit from favoring North-South distributions of their workforce.

Chauvin, Choudhury, and Fang. “Working Around the Clock: Temporal Distance, Intrafirm Communication, and Time Shifting of the Employee Workday.” Organization Science 35.5 (2024): https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17558.

This story originally appeared in Rice Business Wisdom and was lightly edited for Rice News.