Kate's Blog
Working around the World
Work-life balance on a global team? I work in one of Sun's global teams. Since we support the Sun's field organization with processes and tools for solution delivery, being globally distributed means we are closer to our customers, and we can effectively cover Asia, Europe and the Americas. It means, though, that our team meetings are held at 6 am for me and my colleague in Sydney, and quite late in the evening for our colleague in Germany. Scheduling calls can be a challenge! So, here are a few things I've found that help:
Work in sub-groups. It is easy to schedule calls between any two locations on the planet, without requiring someone to be working much outside their normal working hours. Throw in a third location and it becomes much trickier.
Take advantage of geographical distribution. If something is required by Monday morning US Pacific time, and we only find out on Friday (US Pacific), remember that APAC has all day Monday to work on it, and Europe will be working for hours before the US Pacific starts work on their Monday.
Be available to the team, but not 24x7. We all need to sleep sometimes. It's not possible to get focussed work done without some time free of interruptions, or enough sleep and "real life" time. I don't set my email to notify me every time I receive mail - I check it every hour or so while I'm working, when I get to a reasonable time to stop what I'm doing. On the other hand, I usually sit on IM, and if anyone on the team need me urgently, they send me a quick message and we then move to the phone.
Work from home. None of this would be possible without the ability to work from home (or the airport, or a hotel room...). The Open Work program at Sun is great enabling technology for this. Sun saves real estate costs, and it means I don't waste time or energy commuting. I can fit late night / early morning calls around the rest of my life. It increases employee loyalty due to level of trust and autonomy given to employees.
The timezone ready-reckoner. We need to know the time anywhere in the world so we can schedule meetings. I use a little spreadsheet that I can print out, double-sided so I have one side for summer / daylight savings time in the Northern hemisphere and the other for the northern winter. There are numerous websites that do the same thing, but I like having a piece of paper that can sit on my desk.
Posted at 01:05PM 20 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun | Comments[0]