My team's all around the world

Hey,

I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is my Remote Work newsletter 👋

My remote teams spread across time zones, and some colleagues don't overlap much with each others. Whenever I tweet about it, some people ask me how is that possible?

• “You got rid of the office. But how come you got rid of meetings too?", they ask. “That must affect your team's productivity!”, they claim.

It sounds more complex than it actually is.

In fact, most people don't know about asynchronous communication, so they assume meetings are the only way to get work done.

For me, going from a meeting heavy schedule to async-first processes enabled me to hire people across different time zones. Indeed, my team members are all around the world!

These are the 4 stages I went through:

1) Within my city:

Early in my career, I worked in a physical office, so I'd hire only people within commute distance from my company's office. First in Lisbon, then in Amsterdam. I was constrained to candidates in only one city, which made it very challenging for me to hire.

2) Within the same time zone:

When I started working remote, I didn't know much about async communication. I used the same processes as I'd use in the office. I'd gather people in a virtual meeting to make any decisions. I'd message people on Slack and demand them immediate reply, causing them to drop whatever they were doing. It was common for me and for my team members to work long hours, since we'd do the actual work only when meetings stopped.

3) A few time zones away:

I figured that people just a few time zones away would still work. If we'd overlap just part of the day, we'd schedule meetings during that time only. This way, we could do deep work during the rest of the time. I obviously needed to reduce the overall amount of meetings, and recurring meetings were the first ones I dropped. It work very well, and the team appreciated spending fewer time in meetings.

4) Global!

As I made all my processes async-first, I enabled people in my teams to work in any time zone, which means some of them live in the other side of the world, others like traveling all the time. With that, I enabled myself and my clients to hire the best talent anywhere in the world. This allows US clients to hire in India. UK clients to hire in the Philippines. UAE clients to hire in Brazil. Big talent pools are unlocked by making the processes asynchronous!

I explain in detail this evolution I went through in my course Mastering Remote Work. I go deep into the async processes that made this transition possible, and share my personal wiki materials and templates for free with the course. Have a look!

Thank you for reading this newsletter issue until the end! Feedback is always welcome :)

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover