Working practice
Time-zone tax
The hidden cost of every question taking a day to answer.
Definition
The compounding delay a team pays when its partner works while it sleeps. A single question that would take five minutes in a shared working day instead costs a full day of elapsed time, and a task needing three such exchanges takes a working week.
Why it matters
It rarely appears in a business case, which is why far-shore engagements so often come in cheaper on paper and slower in reality. If you are comparing locations, count the exchanges a typical task needs and multiply. That number, not the hourly rate, is usually what decides the outcome.
Related
Read next
Overlap hours
How much of your working day you share with the team.
Read the definition ›Follow-the-sun
Passing work between time zones so it never stops.
Read the definition ›Asynchronous communication
Working through written messages that do not need an immediate reply.
Read the definition ›Far-shore
Outsourcing to a location six or more hours from your working day.
Read the definition ›Next step
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