“Can a team spread across different time zones and cultures truly thrive? We set out to find the answer—and discovered something remarkable.”
“Remote work is a compromise”, “It’s very inefficient”, “Remote work just doesn’t work”. These are some of the sentiments we hear in the industry. Despite the remote work revolution, many still believe that it is unsustainable, and that companies are better off with collocated teams. Yet, our team spanning five countries and 4 time zones did more than just make it work; we turned the challenging situation into a stepping stone for success. Here’s how our team thrived against all odds.
Common Misconceptions
First, I’d like to address some common misconceptions. The word “remote work” is often always tied to the words “disengagement”, “miscommunication”, “inefficiency”. While they are not completely wrong, I’d like to believe there’s more to it. These words are just the tip of the iceberg, a nail in the coffin of a deeper problem. Behind every “disengagement” is a leadership failure. Behind every “miscommunication“ is a lack of psychological safety. And behind every “inefficiency” is a broken development process. Remote work isn’t the root of these issues, it’s just a contributing factor. Companies face lack of engagement and miscommunication issues long before remote work was even a thing.
Our Journey
Canada chapter
It wasn’t easy at first—I had to adjust to life in Canada while continuing to work remotely in a different time zone. I had classes during the day and worked at night, which was challenging. At one point, I remember having classes until 8 PM PST (1 PM JST), which meant I had to miss some of our daily meetings. Realizing this wasn’t sustainable, we decided to shift our approach. Instead of sticking to typical daily meetings, we embraced asynchronous updates, holding synchronous meetings only when absolutely necessary. This change not only accommodated our schedules but also made our communication more efficient and focused. Thanks to our open communication culture, where everyone shares openly and transparently, I could easily catch up through Slack messages. We are not forced or micromanaged to share everything we are doing, instead, we voluntarily share our status with the intention of letting our team know what's happening with our projects (yes, we undertake multiple projects at the same time).
Psychological safety and trust was the key player here. We didn’t cultivate it overnight. We nurtured it everyday, incrementally, until it was evident enough for other teams to notice it.
Kenya chapter
Our manager, who lives in Japan, but is originally from Kenya, occasionally takes month long trips back home and continues his work there. At this point, our team had already established psychological safety, so this wasn’t a concern. But that didn’t mean we stopped there. We shouldn’t stop our growth just because the odds are against us. We wanted to become a product team that is capable of simultaneous decisions and full accountability of our work. At that time, our manager was a key decision maker in specifications and direction of the project and the team. But in order to improve, we needed to split accountability to each of us equally. With the timezone difference, our manager will not always be present, so we took this problem as an opportunity to share accountability. For all specification inquiries, we make the decisions ourselves, follow through, and take shared credit and accountability. If things go south, it’s not the end of the world—we adapt, we improve. After all, that’s what being agile is all about.
There was a period where our team was handling simultaneous projects. The product was both technical and business heavy, meaning that one can get lost easily in the code because there are thousands of business requirements we are not aware of as several teams were also working on it at the same time. This required on-demand context switching in business specifications, code architecture and projects. Given our situation, it was going to be troublesome for one person to take lead in all of the projects as they will need to split their energy x ways. (If 1 person is leading 4 projects, then he/she naturally will exert 25% on all projects). So we decided to each take lead on our own projects, effectively exerting 100% of our everything into that single domain. We didn’t miss details and we were able to deliver it without compromise.
Australia chapter
Now that we’ve adapted to the Philippines, Japan, Canada, and Kenya, it's time for a new country (LOL). Our company encourages self growth, and luckily, our teammate was approved to live in Australia temporarily. At the same time, we were given an opportunity to handle a more complex project with a longer roadmap than anything we’ve handled previously. It was the perfect chance to see how well our systems will do against further remote teams.
At the time of writing, we have finished the first lot of projects, proving that open communication, psychological safety and shared accountability works under more extreme circumstances. We were able to develop smoothly. If you think about it, we should be having trouble with dependencies with each other right? Either not getting hold of one person, or someone has pending tasks that will be handled during our evening (their morning). But we’ve never experienced any of those, because we’ve built processes around them. We’ve fine grained our tasks to not have immediate dependencies, we’ve set up sync calls to always stay on the same page, and we’ve embodied an agile mindset. (Most people think that agile is a methodology, but it's not, not entirely anyway. Agile methodologies only work when the team embodies an Agile mindset. ).
How we made it work
The key strategy that we’ve employed in order to thrive as a full global team is broken down into 3 parts as I’ve mentioned in our journey.
Adapting -> Growing -> Sustaining Momentum
Adapting
Adapting to the situation (remote work) will be hard unless the company already has systems in place. It requires effort and understanding. At this phase, teams might underperform, or even worse, completely fall off. But once they’ve figured out their groove, they can easily gain momentum. Remote work can either amplify a team’s productivity, or awaken a company’s underlying problems.
We’ve adapted through a series of microactivities(which will be tackled more later) and mindset shifts. Having an agile mindset is crucial at this phase. Agile mindset spans not only in product development, but also in day to day life. Embodying the agile manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/) will have more benefits than just studying scrum guides.
Adapting is arguably the most difficult phase, so if your team is having a hard time adapting to remote work, the first step should be to adopt an agile mindset. The team’s leader should be the first person to embrace agile, and the rest of the team will follow naturally. Having an agile coach or a certified scrum master can also speed up this process. Following this, try to innovate your development process. Employ new ways of working like asynchronous stand-ups, focus days, scrum master rotations, etc. See what works best for the team, and once you find the right process, ride it until you find a better one again.
Growing
Evolving as a full remote team follows naturally after adapting. Companies should NOT experiment if a full remote team can “work”, instead, they should see if a full remote team can “grow”. If a company is trying to nurture a remote team so they can “work”, then they are already 1 step behind. Growth is subjective, linear growth is expected under normal circumstances, but stacked against all odds, a team can grow exponentially. A flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.
A remote team can grow 2-ways, first is as individuals and second is as a team. Team members can learn individuality and independence while working with a team. Kind of like learning “assertion and coexistence”. Being a full remote team helped us grow as individuals. We became more independent because of the situation. As a result, our accountability and decision making grew significantly. That doesn’t mean we lost our sense of team, it just boosted our sense of individuality more that resulted in better flow efficiency for the team. A member who is overshadowed by everyone else in the team tends to remain in a follower mentality. By boosting his/her individuality, he/she will be able to assert his existence more while coexisting with the team, allowing to grow into a suited leader.
Growth is and always will be a problem for individuals first, and team problem second. Every team will face growth problems whether they are a full remote team or a collocated team. So if growth is a problem for your team, then consider addressing individuals first. Potential is like an unpolished gem—rough, unrefined, and often overlooked. But with the right environment, guidance, and effort, that raw stone can be cut, shaped, and polished into something extraordinary. Talent, like a gemstone, doesn’t shine on its own; it takes patience, pressure, and craftsmanship to bring out its brilliance. When nurtured and refined, what once seemed ordinary can become something truly remarkable.
Sustaining Momentum
This is a concept often overlooked. Every cycle of everything has a decline phase, whether it be product life, company life, and even the 1992 dream team. A prime example of this is the S&P 500 companies. Of the companies included in the S&P 500 in 1955, only 61 remain on the list as of 2024. Even the goliaths of the industry fall down over time. A team’s growth is no different. Growing alone is not enough, a team must also sustain their pace over long periods of time. Longevity is one of the key measures of success in any industry.
As of writing, our team has been operating full remote for almost 2 years and we’re not gonna slow down our momentum anytime soon. In order to sustain momentum, we’ve constantly challenged ourselves and delved into new domains that we are not comfortable with. We constantly moved our goal posts and set more ambitious ones every time, all while having a single purpose in mind.
If your team is past the adapting and growth problem, congratulations, you’re almost at the end. Your team will decline or adjourn one day, it’s inevitable. But at this phase, your team should be around the Norming or Performing stage of Tuckman’s team development stages model as seen below. If not, then consider the direction your team wants to go. Stagnation is only for those who are lost. The most important skill to hone here as a team is goal setting. The goals you set as a team should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) and ambitious enough to hinder stagnation, but not too ambitious to cause burnouts as that causes decline as well. The team should find the balance between ambition and sustainability, all while having a clear destination in mind.
Of course, these strategies only worked because we’ve employed multiple micro actions along the way. We’ve set up systems and processes in place that are built for flexibility, so that the team can operate under any circumstances. The most important steps that we focused on are:
Fostering Psychological Safety
Transparency and communication is one of the most important factors in making remote teams work. Getting people to speak their honest opinions is no easy task. Scrum was built to improve team efficiency, but the hard truth is that it is only effective when team members are speaking their truths during planning and retrospective meetings. Otherwise, the team will not improve. As mentioned earlier, we’ve cultivated psychological safety everyday, and some activities we used are:
Small Talks - We always start every meeting with a small talk, just to get everyone comfortable. It doesn’t have to take more than 5 minutes, and it doesn’t have to pique everyone’s interest. Just get on the call, talk about your latest trip or gadget purchase, anything besides work, and I’m sure everyone will be at ease.
Acknowledgement - In the US, one of the most significant factors that leads to turnovers is lack of recognition. People want to be seen, to be acknowledged, and to be thanked for their hard work. Luckily in our company, there’s already a culture of acknowledgement, but we employ it in higher frequency in our everyday work as well. We start every message with “Thank you for your hard work”, or “Thank you for reviewing”. It might not be significant enough, but if we compound all these tiny gestures we do throughout the day, our teammates will surely feel appreciated. We never know the stress that our teammates are going through and hearing those words might just be what they need at that very moment (I know I did).
Icebreakers - The longest meetings in an agile and scrum team are planning and retrospective. And as such, the team’s energy tends to decline over the course of the meeting, resulting in poor inputs. So to lift each other’s energy and get them in the mood, we always employ icebreaker activities at the start of these long meetings (MIRO has lots of templates for icebreakers). This enables us to relax and be comfortable to speak the hard truths, which results in quality inputs.
Accountability
Our team operates at 100%, even if our resources are not all present. That is mainly the result of accountability. Our team members take responsibility and ownership of each one’s work. We make decisions ourselves and follow through with it. If our choices tend to be wrong, it’s not the end of the world. We adapt and we fix it. We never point fingers for bad choices, after all, we never really know if the grass is greener on the other side, so we have to make it greener on our side and that’s the only thing within our control.
Purpose
Based from the previous book I’ve read entitled “Your next five moves”, the author, Patrick Bet-David, stated that there are 4 stages of motivation:
- Necessity - this is the lowest form of motivation as we are only motivated to do things because we need it.
- Money - Yes, money is far down the list. Money is just a tool, it’s not the end game. And if money is your endgame, then you are bound to get lost along the way.
- Freedom - is the ability to make choices on your terms—where to live, how to work, and who to surround yourself with. It's not handed, it’s earned.
- Purpose - is connecting to a cause that is higher than yourself. Having a clear purpose in mind gives you direction on where you want to go. Money is the fuel, Freedom is the routine, and Purpose is the destination.
As individuals in our team, we may or may not have mastered this part, but as a team, we operate under one purpose. We try to achieve a common goal together. Having this mindset has allowed us to operate without getting lost.
Conclusion
Our journey as a global, remote team proves that thriving across cultures and time zones is not just possible, but sustainable with the right mindset and systems. By fostering psychological safety, sharing accountability, and uniting under a shared purpose, we’ve turned potential obstacles into opportunities for growth. Remote work doesn’t create problems—it reveals them, and with effort, these challenges can be transformed into strengths. Through adapting, growing, and sustaining momentum, we’ve built a resilient team capable of achieving extraordinary outcomes, no matter where in the world we work.
How did your team thrive across cultures and continents? Let us know in the comments below!
