Earlier this year, I helped coordinate the hiring and onboarding of an outsourced customer service team spanning the Philippines and Tunisia, while I was based in Toronto. It was the first time I'd worked across three continents simultaneously, and it broke most of my assumptions about how collaboration works.
The time zone math alone was disorienting. When it's 9am in Toronto, it's 3pm in Tunisia and 10pm in Manila. There was no single hour in the day when everyone was naturally awake and available. Every meeting was someone's inconvenient time.
Async by Default
The biggest lesson was that synchronous communication — meetings, real-time chat, quick calls — can't be the default when your team spans 12+ hours of time zones. In a co-located office, you turn to a colleague and ask a question. The cost is near zero. In a distributed team, that same question might have to wait 8 hours for an answer.
I had to learn to write things down obsessively. Meeting notes, decision rationales, context for tasks, status updates — everything needed to be documented so that the person starting their day in Manila could pick up where the person ending their day in Toronto left off. It felt excessive at first, but it quickly became clear that the alternative — waiting for overlapping hours to have conversations — created bottlenecks that slowed everything down.
The irony is that this documentation habit made everything better, not just the cross-timezone work. Decisions became more traceable. Context was easier to share with new team members. Misunderstandings dropped because things were written down rather than half-remembered from a conversation.
Culture Is Harder Than Clocks
What surprised me more than the time zone logistics was the cultural dimension. Working across Morocco, Canada, the Philippines, and Tunisia means working across very different communication norms — different expectations about directness, hierarchy, feedback, and even what "yes" means.
The direct, explicit style I'd gotten used to in Canada sometimes felt too blunt for team members in the Philippines, where communication tends to be more indirect and relationship-oriented. Conversely, what felt like polite agreement from some team members sometimes meant "I hear you but I disagree" — something I only learned to read after making a few mistakes.
I don't think there's a universal "right" communication style for distributed teams. What worked for us was making norms explicit. Instead of assuming everyone would communicate the same way, we established specific practices: disagreements go in writing with reasoning attached. Questions about tasks get posted in a shared channel, not in DMs. Weekly check-ins follow a consistent format so everyone knows what to expect.
The Small Things Matter
Some practical things I learned the hard way: always specify time zones when mentioning times (sounds obvious, but I forgot constantly at first). Rotate meeting times so the same people aren't always joining at midnight. "EOD" means nothing unless you say whose end of day. Set explicit response time expectations — in a distributed team, 24 hours for non-urgent items is reasonable, and saying this out loud prevents anxiety on both sides.
Also: build relationships on purpose. In an office, relationships happen over coffee, at lunch, in passing. In a distributed team, you have to create space for it. One-on-ones that aren't purely about work status. Asking about someone's weekend. Remembering that there's a person behind the Slack username in a different country living a completely different daily reality.
What I Took Away
The experience changed how I think about work in general, not just distributed work. The discipline of writing things down, being explicit about expectations, and designing processes for asynchronous collaboration — these are skills that improve any working environment. They just become non-negotiable when you're spread across the globe.
I also came away convinced that distributed teams aren't a compromise. Done well, they give you access to talent and perspectives that a single-location team can't match. The team we built brought together Tunisian customer service culture, Filipino hospitality norms, and Canadian operational expectations, and the result was richer than any of those individually.
It's hard. I won't pretend otherwise. But it's the kind of hard that teaches you things you can't learn any other way.