If you’re interested in Firefox you might want to tune in to air.mozilla.com on a Monday at 10:00 AM Pacific time. You can watch Mozilla’s weekly all company staff meeting. Mozilla employees and volunteers work from all over the world. When it’s 10:00 AM in California, what time is it for other Mozilla engineers?
| Mountain View, California, USA | 10:00 AM |
| Toronto, Canada | 1:00 PM |
| Copenhagen, Denmark | 7:00 PM |
| Tokyo, Japan | 2:00 AM |
| Auckland, New Zealand | 5:00 AM |
Mozilla doesn’t segregate their teams by geography. People in New Zealand work in the same team with people in the United States and Denmark. How do they work together with such a big time difference?
American companies that outsource to India have the same problem. The time difference between San Francisco, USA and Bangalore, India is 12.5 hours. The effects on team cohesion and productivity are so bad that many companies are moving their outsourcing from India to Brazil where the time difference is only six hours.
So what does Mozilla know that other companies don’t? How do they make it work? They know that three hours is magic. A team needs a window of at least three hours for real-time communication every day. That doesn’t mean a three hour conference call, it means three hours where you can call someone if you need them, your emails will be answered promptly, and you can find your teammates on IM or IRC.
Ade Miller, the Development Manager for Microsoft’s patterns & practices group, agrees. In his paper Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices he wrote, “A time zone distribution of three or four hours is workable with the whole team sharing either morning or afternoon hours.” I haven’t seen any studies, but a lot of anecdotal evidence shows a simple division: more than three hours of overlap is a team, less is outsourcing.
So how does Mozilla get three hours of overlap between America and Japan? They work at night. The answer is simple and a little brutal, but it works. Many of their employees and volunteers are hackers who work well outside of the standard nine to five. They value the connections, teamwork, and productivity they get from real-time communication more than sleep.
Real-time communication is a fundamental part of every team. It’s the difference between playing chess by post and Yahoo! Games. You can’t be an effective team without communication. If you’re creating a distributed team remember that three hours is magic. If you already work on a distributed team change your work hours to get the three hours of overlap you need succeed.
So what are you secrets for building overlap? Do you work at night or just keep everyone in the same time zone?