Planning working-hours overlap with a remote hire

Decide what actually needs overlap

Go through a normal week and sort the work into three kinds:

• Live: calls, meetings you want them in, same-day scheduling, urgent customer questions.
• Same day: things you need done before your evening, but not this minute.
• Next morning: research, documents, inbox clean-up, bookkeeping, anything that can be ready when you start.

Only the first kind needs shared hours. For many assistant roles it fits into a few hours a day; for live chat support it may be the whole shift.

The time differences in practice

Our candidates live in time zones that barely move: Tbilisi and Yerevan are UTC+4 all year, Almaty is UTC+5 all year, and Kyiv is UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 in summer. Against your office, that gives roughly:

• London and Paris: Kyiv is one or two hours ahead, Tbilisi and Yerevan two to four, Almaty three to five. Most of a European working day is shared.
• New York: Kyiv is seven hours ahead for most of the year, so a 9:00 start in New York is 16:00 in Kyiv. Tbilisi and Yerevan are eight or nine hours ahead, Almaty nine or ten.
• Chicago: one hour more than New York.
• Los Angeles: three hours more than New York, so Kyiv is ten hours ahead and shared hours mean an evening shift there.

The time-zone overlap tool shows the exact hours for your city against each of ours, in winter and in summer.

Three shift patterns that work

A local day

The person works a normal day in their time zone. For a European company this shares most of the day. For a US East Coast company it shares the first hours of your morning, and the rest of their day is ready for you when you start.

A shifted day

The person starts later, for example at 12:00 or 13:00 local time, to share more of a US morning. Ask candidates which shift they can keep for months, not just for the first weeks.

A split day

A block in their morning and a block in your morning. It gives more overlap but is tiring; use it only when the person prefers it, and keep it predictable.

Later shifts are real work at inconvenient hours. Say so in the ad, and agree whether the pay reflects it.

When the clocks change

The US and Europe move their clocks on different dates in spring and autumn, and Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan do not move theirs at all. For a few weeks a year, the gap with your office grows or shrinks by an hour.

• Write the hours in the person's time zone in the agreement, and say how they move when clocks change.
• Keep recurring meetings in a calendar that shows both time zones.
• Remind each other the week before a change; a call missed in that week is a calendar problem, not a reliability problem.

Write the hours into the offer

Hours that are written down get kept. Vague hours turn into friction within weeks.

Keep the overlap fair

• Protect the person's evenings: no messages that expect a reply outside the agreed hours.
• Share the burden: if a weekly call falls at an awkward hour for one side, move it now and then.
• Use the shared hours for conversations and decisions, and move status updates to writing; see our guide to async communication.
• Review the hours after the first month; you may need fewer live hours than you thought.

For customer support that must cover your whole business day, our guide to covering US business hours shows how to combine shifts.