Teaming Over Time Zones

Part of the CSC program involves a weekly dialup meeting with everyone in the team. When the first meeting appeared in my calendar, the start time for the meeting was 12:00am to 1:00am. Surely that’s not the best time for a team meeting? However, when the team is made up of people from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Singapore and the USA, that’s unfortunately the most appropriate time for the majority of people. Thanks to timeanddate.com for curing my time-zone ineptitude.

Photo From Flickr, By Michele Mazzone

So how does a conference call go with 12 people scattered across the planet? Surprisingly well. There are the standard extended semi-awkward pauses when people try not to politely talk over each other, and the occasional call dropout, but apart from that the two calls thus far have gone well — apart from 12:00am being past my bedtime. We’ve been using the Lotus Live meeting service which makes it a little easier to share presentations and screens between participants.

As part of the preparation, we’ve been given a set of tasks to complete every week, with a number of them centring on team work. We’ve developed introductory participant profiles to help introduce ourselves to each other, and collaboratively developed a code of conduct for the team. Interestingly, regardless of our backgrounds, business units or areas of expertise, we all came up with a similar set of suggestions for the code of conduct. Good teams aren’t restricted by time zones.