How to communicate with employees working across locations and time zones

Last year I spent a couple of months living and working in Nagasaki, as part of a programme that brought together digital nomads from all over the world.

We lived in the same apartment building, worked from the same spaces and gradually got to know one another. After a while, something occurred to me.

Almost nobody had a job.

We worked, obviously. Quite a lot, in most cases. But out of a group of around 20 people, only one had what you might call a conventional job with an employer. Everyone else was freelance, self-employed or running their own business.

I don’t think that’s because freelancing is intrinsically more appealing. You certainly don’t choose it for the pension. Or the security. Or the tremendous thrill of doing your own accounts.

They had chosen self-employment because, for many people, it’s still the only door through which that degree of flexibility is available.

That’s beginning to change. More employers now offer some version of “work from anywhere”: perhaps a few weeks a year in another country, within whatever tax, legal and employment restrictions apply. For someone with family overseas, that can mean spending meaningful time with them without burning through a year’s annual leave. For others, it’s simply an opportunity to live somewhere else for a while without having to resign first.

But the prospect of employees working from Japan, Johannesburg or just somewhere inconveniently far from head office tends to make organisations nervous. How will we communicate? How will their manager know what they’re doing? What about meetings? What about culture?

Earlier this week I hosted a discussion for IABC EMENA with communicators and people who work in and manage distributed teams about exactly these questions. And the more we talked, the clearer something became.

Digital nomads aren’t really a communications problem. They’re a stress test for all the communication problems you already have.

We bought the tools. We didn’t redesign the work.

Most organisations now have everything they technically need to work across locations and time zones.

Teams. Slack. Zoom. SharePoint. Google Drive. Pick your particular collection of tabs.

But when those tools arrived — particularly during the great everyone-go-home scramble of 2020 — we mostly poured our existing ways of working into them.

We took the meeting, put it inside Teams and congratulated ourselves on the digital workplace. The desk-side interruption became a chat message. The attachment became a SharePoint link nobody could open. And the working day remained stubbornly organised around the assumption that everyone important was awake at the same time.

We changed the interface without changing much underneath it.

I remember working for a global bank before video calls became routine. I would schlep all the way into the City for 8am in order to sit at a desk and get on the phone to colleagues in India, China and Singapore.

On reflection, this was absolute madness. But the office was considered the place where work happened, even when everyone I was actually working with was thousands of miles away.

Some of that assumption survives. We have distributed technology but surprisingly location-dependent habits. We still organise work around everybody being available at roughly the same time. We still use meetings to transfer information that could have been written down. Decisions still happen in rooms, then travel by osmosis to everyone who wasn’t there.

A digital nomad six time zones away makes those weaknesses obvious.

But they didn’t create them.

If you have to be there to know, you have a documentation problem

One of the most interesting points in our discussion was about what happens after a hybrid meeting.

The remote person can see the slides. They can hear the conversation. With decent facilitation, they can contribute perfectly well.

Then the call ends. The minutes record the decision. Three people walk towards the coffee machine, carry on talking and change it.

Congratulations: your source of truth is now a conversation nobody else knows happened.

For the people who were physically there, this is almost invisible. They know the extra context. They heard the objection raised afterwards. They know that when everyone said “yes” in the meeting, what they apparently meant was “yes, unless Dave catches me by the Nespresso machine.”

The remote colleague gets none of that.

That’s an influence gap, but it’s easy to interpret it as evidence that remote work doesn’t work.

I’d argue it shows something else: too much organisational knowledge and influence is still travelling informally.

The same problem affects people who work from home, people in regional offices, colleagues in other countries, part-time workers and anyone who has the temerity to leave the office before the boss does.

I’ve seen this close up. In one organisation, proximity to senior people had a surprisingly large effect on who got pulled into interesting pieces of work. Something came up, a senior person looked around, and the person sitting nearest got the juicy project.

Do that often enough and proximity starts to compound. Interesting work brings exposure; exposure brings opportunities; opportunities bring more interesting work.

Meanwhile the person doing the nursery pickup has committed the career-limiting offence of being somewhere else at 5.37pm.

That’s not collaboration; it’s rewarding familiarity.

If important decisions only exist in the heads of people who happened to be present when they were made, location isn’t your problem. Documentation is.

Not every meeting should be an email

I am temperamentally attracted to asynchronous working, not least because I have spent enough of my adult life in meetings to have developed Strong Opinions about them.

We’ve spent years talking about paperless meetings. But what if we look at it the other way round, as meetingless papers? Write the thing down, let people read it when they’re awake, and use everyone’s overlapping time for something more useful.

Nobody needs 45 minutes in a calendar to watch somebody read aloud from a slide.

But the discussion challenged me on this, rightly.

The question isn’t really whether we should have fewer meetings. It’s what synchronous communication is uniquely good at.

If the purpose is simply to transfer information, write it down. Your calendar does not need to become a theatrical venue for information that already exists elsewhere.

But if the quality of the outcome depends on interaction, that’s different.

High ambiguity. High emotional load. Conflict. Urgency. Several people needing to build on one another’s thinking. Creative or strategic problems where the friction between different views is part of the work.

Those are good reasons to be together at the same time.

There’s another one which is easier to dismiss because it sounds fluffy: sometimes humans need to see other humans.

If every interaction in a distributed team is transactional, people become a collection of avatars who materialise when they need something from you. The small conversations that build familiarity matter. They give us context. They help us understand someone’s tone. They make us more likely to give a slightly brusque message the benefit of the doubt rather than spending the afternoon constructing an elaborate theory about why Deborah in Procurement now hates us.

Culture needs some of what Tony Stewart called “squishy human stuff” too.

The answer isn’t meetings or async. It’s designing deliberately for both.

Async isn’t automatically equitable

There’s a comforting idea that asynchronous communication democratises work. And it can.

Writing things down removes some of the advantages enjoyed by the loudest person in the meeting. People in different time zones can contribute. Everyone can see the same information. People have time to think before responding.

But writing creates hierarchies of its own.

The person working in their first language may be able to formulate an argument faster than someone working in their second, third or fourth. Confident writers can sound more authoritative than people who think best by talking an idea through.

Then there’s the colleague who apparently has Slack surgically attached to their central nervous system and manages to respond to every question before the rest of the team has opened it.

Their answer becomes the starting point. Everyone else’s thinking bends around it.

Async cultures can still reward availability. If the same people always respond first because they’re permanently online, we’ve simply replaced proximity bias with notification bias.

Good distributed communication isn’t about declaring everything asynchronous and going home. It’s about sequencing.

Give people material in advance. Let them think and contribute independently — sometimes even without seeing everyone else’s answers first. Bring people together when interaction will improve the outcome. Then document the decision so nobody needs to have been there to know what happened.

That’s not a remote-work trick. It’s just good communication design.

Time zones are a design constraint, not a personal failing

If your team stretches from Japan to California, there is no magical meeting time that works for everybody.

Someone is getting the bad end of the deal. The question is whether it’s always the same someone.

Global organisations have a habit of discovering that “the time that works best globally” bears an uncanny resemblance to 10am wherever the most senior person sits. Funny, that.

Everyone else gets a recording and an invitation to feel included.

That isn’t an equivalent experience. If one group gets to ask questions, react, challenge and participate while another gets to press play eight hours later, you haven’t run a global event. You’ve run an HQ event with international distribution.

Sometimes the fairest answer is to run something twice. Sometimes you rotate the inconvenience. Sometimes the answer isn’t a global meeting at all, but stronger regional communities connected by good documentation and handovers.

And sometimes the time difference itself becomes useful.

When my business partner is in the UK and I’m working from Asia, we can use the gap almost as a superpower. I work through my day, hand something over, and he picks it up as his begins. With the right handover, we can fit two working days into one calendar day.

But that only works if the handover is good.

“Over to you!” followed by a mysterious SharePoint link and six hours of radio silence is not a handover.

Distributed work makes the quality of your communication infrastructure visible very quickly. Ambiguous ownership, missing context and decisions buried in someone’s inbox become much more expensive when the person who can explain them has just gone to bed.

Flexibility doesn’t have to mean the same thing for everyone

There is an obvious challenge here for employers.

If one employee can spend six weeks working from Lisbon, what do you say to someone whose job requires them to be physically present?

This matters because flexibility can very easily become another laptop-class perk: something available to senior people whose work can be done from a rooftop in Barcelona while everyone else is told that flexibility is one of the company’s core values and could they please confirm their Saturday shift.

But equity doesn’t require identical arrangements.

One of the points from our discussion that has stuck with me is that for someone working shifts, flexibility might actually mean certainty.

Knowing your rota far enough in advance to organise childcare, appointments or the rest of your life around it can give someone more meaningful control than a vague promise of “flexible working”.

For someone else it might mean more control over start and finish times. For another person it might be the ability to swap shifts more easily.

The useful question isn’t “can everybody work from Bali?”

It’s “how much autonomy can we reasonably give people over where, when and how they work, given the actual requirements of their role?”

And if the answer is none, organisations should at least be capable of explaining why.

“We’ve always done it this way” is an explanation. It’s just not a very good one.

Managers need object permanence

Technology is only part of this.

Some managers are excellent at managing distributed teams. Others are like toddlers, or possibly dolphins: they haven’t quite developed object permanence. If they can’t see you, they struggle to conceive that you continue to exist.

You disappear from view and, apparently, cease producing work.

Presence then becomes a proxy for performance. The green dot is good. A bum on a seat is better. Being within a two-metre radius of someone senior at precisely the moment they remember a project exists is best of all.

None of this is really about productivity. Visibility is simply easier to observe than outcomes.

And distributed work is deeply inconvenient to that style of management because it removes the comforting visual cues. You can’t glance across an office and see someone looking industrious. You have to know what they’re supposed to be doing, whether they’re doing it and whether the work is any good.

Which sounds suspiciously like management.

Distributed teams force managers to do more of that work explicitly: setting expectations, creating clarity, facilitating communication, connecting people, documenting decisions and judging contribution by something more meaningful than whether Teams thinks you’re available.

That takes more intentionality than walking around an office and assuming communication will happen by ambient magic.

But intentional doesn’t mean complicated.

Teams can agree where different kinds of communication belong. They can decide what requires a meeting and what doesn’t. They can establish handovers. They can create space for the non-transactional squishy human stuff. They can ask colleagues in different regions what would actually make participation easier rather than announcing that the global town hall will be at 3am their time and helpfully providing a recording.

None of this requires a new platform.

Which is unfortunate news for anyone hoping to solve it by buying one.

Digital nomads are the edge case that reveals the system

This is why I think organisations are asking the wrong question when they ask how to communicate with digital nomad employees.

You don’t need a digital nomad communication strategy.

You need ways of working that don’t depend on everybody being in the same building, in the same time zone, with the same working pattern and the same access to the boss.

Because the benefits extend far beyond the person answering Teams from Sarajevo (hi! 👋).

They extend to the parent doing the school run. The colleague working in their second language. The regional office six hours ahead of HQ. The person working part-time. The field worker who doesn’t spend all day looking at a laptop. The employee who thinks better before they speak. And, yes, the person who would quite like to spend six weeks closer to family without having to quit their job to do it.

Digital nomads make the cracks easier to see. But the cracks were already there.

And if your communication only works when everybody is in roughly the same place at roughly the same time, digital nomads aren’t your problem.

Your ways of working are.