How to Run Global Teams Across 6 Time Zones

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Special Ops with Emma Rainville – "How to Run Global Teams Across 6 Time Zones"
Date: November 4, 2025
Guests: Richard & Tiago, Operators at Shockwave Solutions
Host: Emma Rainville (Emma sits out most of this episode, giving the mic to Richard and Tiago)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the real-world tactics and daily routines that allow Shockwave Solutions to excel while running a global, remote team spread across six time zones, from Mauritius to the Philippines and the Americas. Richard and Tiago share their operational routines, meeting rhythms, scorecard strategies, and key lessons on cross-time-zone leadership that ensure smooth collaboration and operational excellence—without endless firefighting or founder burnout.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Challenges & Benefits of Multi-Time-Zone Teams

• Geographic Spread:
  • Team members sit across Mauritius, England, Argentina, the US East and Central Coasts, and the Philippines.
  • [00:04] Tiago: “We have Mauritius, England, Argentina, the eastern coast, and then we have Central Time and we have Philippines.”
• Impact:
  • Offers flexibility but creates coordination challenges, especially for scheduling and aligning on priorities.
  • [01:32] Richard: “We don’t have anyone in Tokyo yet, but I’m sure we’ll get there. Yeah, just this huge spread between when everyone gets up … That’s a tremendous boundary to kind of cross.”

2. Daily Alignment: The Morning Face-to-Face

• Purpose:
  • A short, daily sync where the team discusses tasks for the day, delegates responsibilities, and flags issues needing attention.
  • Provides everyone with shared context and keeps the team aligned, despite most joining at different times of their workday.
  • [01:32] Richard: “We start with a morning face-to-face ... the entire team sitting down behind the cameras and talking through their tasks of the day. It’s an alignment for basically everyone in the team.”
• Inclusivity:
  • Recognizes team members’ different time zones and adapts expectations.
  • [02:18] Richard: “It’s got a different kind of connotation for everyone, particularly the guys in the Philippines where it’s a very, very late hour.”

3. Meeting Cadence: Structured, Repetitive, and Essential

• Types of Meetings:

  • Four Weekly Standups:
    • [03:06] Tiago: "If you have that four times a week, like we do have it, it provides you with the context of what everyone’s been focused on, which helps a lot with alignment and coordination.”
  • Monday Ops Meeting:
    • Focused on key clients/projects, sets week’s priorities.
    • [03:44] Richard: “This is ... a very early week discussion of all our key clients, like the key projects that we have going for them, the overall goals that they want to reach both in the quarter in terms of the year.”
  • Thursday Leadership "Breaker":
    • A retreat from “working in the business” to “working on the business.”
    • Focuses on internal goals, quarterly objectives, and identifying “signals” or potential issues.
    • [06:03] Tiago: “Having a break from breaking working in the business to working on the business. And that’s the big matter of perspective.”

• The Importance of Agenda Discipline:

  • [04:52] Tiago: “For both meetings and all meetings, the agenda is a must have and a must respect. ... If you’re jumping from one topic to the other ... that’s not going to provide a stable result.”

4. Scorecards & KPIs: The Backbone of Operational Visibility

• Scorecard Purpose & Design:
  • Concise tracking of vital KPIs for the business and clients.
  • Must be ruthlessly focused on what truly matters (not vanity metrics).
  • [08:34] Richard: “The scorecard is basically this rundown of KPIs for the business. Now, this ... can be a really fantastic thing. It can be a complete waste of time. It can just be filling in a number because, well, it’s tradition.”
• Selecting the Right Metrics:
  • Maintain a tight set: typically six or seven KPIs.
  • [09:24] Richard: “It’s really just a case of figuring out what those numbers are and being pretty ruthless about cutting them down.”
  • Cover every department: sales, finance, fulfillment, CS.
  • [09:33] Tiago: “Think about the different areas or departments of your company ... A scorecard that lets you check the health for the overall company.”
• Manual Updates Over Automation:
  • Keeping it manual encourages engagement and reflection.
  • [10:43] Tiago: “Cursory KPI and manually filling the scorecard is also important. Don’t try to automate, just keep it manual. It’s important enough that you want to keep it that way.”

5. Information Flow: Reading Everything & Leveraging Communication

• Operational Context:
  • Leaders should read all relevant communication channels (e.g., Slack), even if it means just skimming.
  • [10:56] Tiago: “Read everything for operations. ... Always scan that information for operations. You need the full context every time.”
• CS as a Signal Source:
  • Customer service teams surface ground-level issues and trends.
  • [11:37] Richard: “They don’t necessarily know the full context ... but they do see where the issues are happening. ... It’s a fantastic way to be aware of what’s really going on behind the scenes.”

6. Templating Tasks & Continual Iteration

• Project Templates:
  • Use ClickUp templates for repeatable projects (workshops, consultations, etc.), with tasks broken down and assigned.
  • [13:07] Richard: “The template here ... is a broken down sheet of everything that needs to be done for say running a new workshop ... broken down into individual tasks to be assigned.”
• Iterative Improvement:
  • You need to run projects, learn, and update templates as you go—don’t expect to get it right the first time.
  • [13:48] Richard: “You can’t just start with the template ... it needs to evolve.”

7. The Power of a Rigid Routine

• Consistency Above All:
  • Meeting times do not change. This stability signals seriousness and ensures everyone is prepared, reducing “emergency” chaos.
  • [14:32] Richard: “It is really important that this does not move. ... Having the actual time means people actually are prepared for the thing.”
• Stability Enables Planning:
  • [15:10] Tiago: “Yeah. You can plan ahead and it also provides stability and structure as well.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [01:32] Richard: “We don’t have anyone in Tokyo yet, but I’m sure we’ll get there.”
• [06:03] Tiago (referring to Emma’s book ‘Scope’): “Having a break from breaking working in the business to working on the business. And that’s the big matter of perspective.”
• [08:34] Richard: “The scorecard is basically this rundown of KPIs for the business. Now, this ... can be a really fantastic thing. It can be a complete waste of time.”
• [10:43] Tiago: “Cursory KPI and manually filling the scorecard is also important. Don’t try to automate, just keep it manual.”
• [13:48] Richard: “Because sometimes there’s just going to be something that made sense at the time which doesn’t make sense three months down the line ... it needs to be adjustable in that sense.”
• [14:32] Richard: “Having the actual time means people actually are prepared for the thing. They come to the thing. It’s not just a, oh, here's an emergency meeting where we don’t have our stuff together for it.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Team Time Zone Overview: [00:04] – [01:32]
• Daily Face-to-Face Meeting Structure: [01:32] – [03:06]
• Meeting Cadence: Ops and Breaker Meetings: [03:06] – [06:50]
• Signals and Scorecards Discussion: [07:22] – [10:43]
• Information Flow and CS Impact: [10:43] – [12:03]
• Task Templating and Continuous Improvement: [13:07] – [14:20]
• Importance of Routine and Schedule Discipline: [14:32] – [15:11]

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Final Takeaways

• Establish a non-negotiable, predictable meeting cadence for global teams.
• Use concise, relevant scorecards and KPIs to maintain visibility—don’t waste time tracking vanity metrics.
• Read and synthesize all operational communications to stay ahead of arising issues.
• Build and evolve reusable project templates for operational excellence.
• Stability, communication, and attention to context are the cornerstones of running global, high-velocity operations.

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For the full playbook and tools checklist mentioned by Tiago and Richard, visit:
specialopspodcast.com

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Transcript

[Richard]

We have very different time zones across the team. It does make some things easier, it does make some things harder.

[Tiago]

We have Mauritius, England, Argentina, the eastern coast, and then we have Central Time and we have Philippines.

[Richard]

That's a tremendous boundary to cross and I think the routine evolves from that. We start with a morning face to face. Where do we get started for the day? What do we need to get through.

[Tiago]

Quick exchanges, keep things moving forward and it really helps keep everyone aligned for daily routines, for operational excellence. There's a good deal to be said about checking KPIs. We call it checking our scorecards. Summary of the help for specific sides of the business.

[Richard]

The scorecard is basically this rundown of KPIs for the business. This can be a really fantastic thing. It really depends on.

[Podcast Host]

Hi and welcome to a special episode of Special Ops Podcast. Today, Shockwave's own Richard and Tiago are here to talk to you about inside the ops room, daily routines that keep the machine running by two of the three people that pretty much keep the wheels on Shockwave Solutions.

[Tiago]

Thinking about the daily routines that you and I have on a daily basis to keep the operations and the whole machine running smoothly, we have very different.

[Richard]

Time zones across the team. I think this is part of the whole picture here because it does make some things easier, it does make some things harder.

[Tiago]

Can we hint on the time zones that we manage? Because we have Mauritius, we have England, we have Argentina, and now we're different with Eastern coast and then we have Central Time and we have Philippines, definitely.

[Richard]

So basically the entire geographic spread. We don't have anyone in Tokyo yet, but I'm sure we'll get there. Yeah, just this huge spread between when everyone gets up, just taking a look at the clock now we're here in San Diego. I didn't realize it's an 11 hour difference between here and Demurcius for instance. That's a tremendous boundary to kind of cross. And I think the routine kind of evolves from that, kind of supports it and is kind of necessary to have everything work consistently on a day to day basis. We start with a morning face to face. We've talked about this in a couple of past episodes. It's essentially the entire team sitting down behind the cameras and talking through their tasks of the day. It's an alignment for basically everyone in the team and I think this comes across differently for most every part of it. For me it's fairly early in my working day. For Saka, it's midway through. But for you, Orm, I assume it's more of a, hey, where do we get started for the day? What do we need to get through? So it's got a different kind of connotation for everyone, particularly the guys in the Philippines where it's a very, very late hour. So everyone kind of comes in that from a different perspective. But it gives us a way to actually align the team because we talk through what's actually happening, what we need to delegate internally, and gives us all an idea of, is there anything that's going to need adjustment throughout the day. I think that's fair to say.

[Tiago]

Right. And quick exchanges that are going to keep things moving forward. And it really helps. Usually for me, for example, it really helps just one sentence, hey, this, these X happen.

[Richard]

Absolutely.

[Tiago]

And it really does help keep everyone aligned. And I think it also keeps a shared context. We know what everyone's focused on because of course, if you have just one meeting, that's not going to provide that quite as good. But if you have that four times a week, like we do have it, it provides you with the context of what everyone's been focused on, which helps a lot with alignment and coordination. And that's not the only meeting we have for meeting cadence. We have two other meetings. I would call the Monday one. We call it Ops. It could be for different. It could be departmental, it could be. It's fulfillment in a sense of the word. So could you walk us through what's the value?

[Richard]

For sure. So this is kind of a very early week discussion of all our key clients, like the key projects that we have going for them, the overall goals that they want to reach both in the quarter in terms of the year, everything like that. It gets us a chance with the key member of the team to actually sit down and actually talk through the projects that we're going to be working on in the week ahead. I think it is necessary for that to be a Monday because it's just a way to essentially build that routine for the week. Right after the meeting, I have this big list of tasks and ClickUp that we break down throughout the week. See the same for yourself. It gives us a synchronized point, really, like a way to really get down to business, like what needs to be done, who needs to do X, Y and Z? Who needs to support X, Y and Z? Who needs to be checking X, Y and Z. It's a way to set those paths rather than have everything just come up out of nowhere. Things do come up out of nowhere, but being able to talk through what we expect to happen is I Think a very big difference to make.

[Tiago]

Yep, totally. And for both meetings and all meetings, the agenda is a must have and a must respect.

[Richard]

Absolutely.

[Tiago]

And it's a joint effort to respect the focus. If you're jumping from one topic to the other, we don't have an agenda and every day is different or every meeting is different. That's not going to provide a stable result that we can count on a daily basis. And that comes back to the purpose of the meeting which is going to structure the agenda. And then the last meeting we have is on Thursdays which is the leadership. So we're thinking about different levels of depth probably. And on Thursday we have our own breaker at Shoga Solutions. Every Thursday.

[Richard]

Yeah. So kind of similar to the obstacle but with a little bit more of an internal focus. This is a way to talk through our. Well, it starts with us talking through what we've actually done for the week. Again, a kind of realignment on where we are with the goals that we set on the OPS call on Monday we talk through the goals that we have internally for the quarter. Like what are we working. Because it's. If we don't talk about our internal business doesn't necessarily move. The clients are a lot more engaged as say yeah, we are taking out their money from them. So it makes sense for that to be the priority.

[Tiago]

Almost sounded like we were stealing from them.

[Richard]

Oh yeah, robbing them blind.

[Tiago]

What I love about the breaker meeting is that again Emma put it this way, I think she also wrote it like this in Scope in her book, which is like having a break from breaking working in the business to working on the business. And that's the big matter of perspective. And what it provides from an operation standpoint is that we're going to move away from the daily day to day, even the week to week. Right. But we're looking at goals as well for the quarter. We're looking at signals we call which is any sort of issue problem that could signal to us, hey, there's something missing in the structure. There's something missing in the flows, in the systems, in the sop. And that's going to allow us to think and operate at a level that integrates the midterm and long term as well into the day to day.

[Richard]

Nice.

[Podcast Host]

Yo, we interrupt this pod to tell you like and subscribe. What are you doing? Why haven't you liked? Why haven't you subscribed? Just subscribe. What's the problem? In all seriousness, subscribe so that you get notifications every time we drop new Content. Additionally, if you have not signed up for our visionary vault, what the hell? Www.specialopspodcast.com Go sign up. It's free. We never try and sell you, and we're putting all kinds of stuff in there to help you with the operations of your business because we're passionate about it and we want to share operational excellence with our direct response, e commerce and online selling. Family.

[Richard]

The thing about signals, it does have to be said that it's not necessarily stuff that's going wrong. It's signals. It's, hey, here's something that we need to look at, whether it's actually something wrong or whether it's. Here's something that we want to bring up. Can we do this better? Can we adjust this? Or is it some kind of neutral thing where, hey, I just need the information here. And we've all got the leadership stuff and the call. So this is probably a good place to ask. But I think that is definitely the piece that we spend the most time on. I think it's the piece where we spend the most productive time for the meeting.

[Tiago]

Totally. And I think that one of the steps, actually, it's the second step for our breaker, it's checking our scorecard. And I think that for daily routines for operational excellence, there's a good deal to be said about checking KPI. You could call it checking metrics. You get like, very fast summary of the health for specific sides of the business and departments of the business. So I wanted to get your thoughts on the value and the effects of the scorecard and if you have some notes for the audience on how to build that, what to keep in mind. And also if you want to go into monitoring cadence beyond the scorecard, like what we do for clients, that'd be awesome as well.

[Richard]

Definitely. So, I mean, the scorecard is basically. So this rundown of KPIs for the. For the business. Now this, it really depends on. This can be a really fantastic thing. It can be a complete waste of time. It can just be filling in a number because, well, we. It's tradition. We want to fill it in.

[Tiago]

Or Bunny KPI.

[Richard]

Absolutely. Really? The. I think we've done a previous episode about how to build scorecards. I believe that's in the version Revolt. But essentially the core thing there that we've kind of alluded to is, is this number, is this KPI actually relevant to me? Like, if you're running workshops, the number of signups, that's going to be relevant, the number of impressions on your ads is probably not really going to be important. Is this driving a business forward? Yeah.

[Tiago]

So it's almost like you're picking proxy, the term.

[Richard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tiago]

Right.

[Richard]

Like something that approximates the overall health of the business as you said.

[Tiago]

Right.

[Richard]

It's really just a case of figuring out what those numbers are and being pretty ruthless about cutting them down. You probably don't need more than six or seven depending on the size of your business.

[Tiago]

And there's something else that, that you can think about when building a scorecard is like think about the different areas or departments of your company. So do you have a KPI? Yeah. KPI you're tracking for finance, is it for sales, for fulfillment, for CS for example. If you want to talk about health, for example, I think it's good to try to have a scorecard that lets you check the health for the overall company as a whole as well.

[Richard]

Yeah, definitely. I think the best one that we've had for those. It's been quite a while since we worked with this client but they were selling these courses online. So we track the number of sales, the refund rate, chargeback rate, basically money coming in, money coming out and just seeing on a week to week basis. How is this changing? Is there any issue that needs to be talked about on this week? Well, we'll see it in the scorecard if so because there'll be some sea change. We've had refunds go up to 15%. What is going on here? Because that's obviously indicating not necessarily a problem, but probably a problem, something to look into. And that's really the point of the scorecard. Like is there something that needs more than that?

[Tiago]

Cursory KPI and manually filling the scorecard is also important. Don't try to not to automate, just keep it manual. It's important enough that you, you want to keep it that way. And beyond the meetings and the scorecard I want it talks through templating tasks and projects. The short note is read everything for operations. Read everything. Like your insider for example Slack for your company, read everything for every channel that you're on, maybe you can discern and say okay, I know this channel. If I'm not tagged, I don't need to read it right away this day. But always scan that information for operations. You need the full context every time and you never know when someone's actually dropping a piece of information about how a system is working. A process is being done and you probably going to come back to that when you want to diagnose why it's.

[Richard]

Failing I think customer service is probably the best example of this. They don't necessarily know the full context behind it, but they do see where the issues are happening. Are people really unsatisfied with the delivery of this product? They will know and if you're giving them the right kind of SOP backing they will say there's a problem where you have this big jump in refunds. It's not necessarily something you need to read immediately, but it's a fantastic way to be aware of what's really going on behind the scenes, 100%.

[Tiago]

And I think that you can do it the you can do it two ways. One is get on a 30 minute call and just ask what's your impression? Of course it's a human being and if you have a small team it probably is going to be easier to do this. But let me know what you think are the main problems. The other part is like should be more accurate but it will also miss a bit of the human factor. But would be just when you bring in the whole log of conversations you can get that, get to analyze that. Nowadays you could leverage AI or you could take samples as well and just study those or focus on studying the escalated issues and conversations as well. And beyond the CS as we mentioned and reading everything how has we have implemented templating tasks and projects. So we're going to build a project into a, in our case, ClickUp task and we're going to reuse that template every time we need to prepare for set project. So any key note you have about building this and the value it provides.

[Richard]

So basically the template here, just to break it out, is a broken down sheet of everything that needs to be done for say running a new workshop, running a new consultation, whatever the case may be broken down into individual tasks to be assigned out to the people responsible for delivering them. I think the. There's a couple of things that need to be considered there. First thing is you can't just start, you can't start with the template. It's a shame. But you do have to actually figure out what needs to be in this. You need to actually do these tasks. You can start with a basic understanding of what you're going to need to do, but you can't necessarily get every single piece the first time around. It needs to evolve.

[Tiago]

Yeah, iteration, right?

[Richard]

Absolutely. Because sometimes there's just going to be something that made sense at the time which doesn't make sense three months down the line or there's something that the template never quite covers this. So it needs to be adjustable in that sense. But yeah, it's really a case of understanding the granularity between the tasks. There are some things in all our templates which are five minute pieces which just have to be done, checked off. And then there's other things that take a couple of hours, a lot more, which will take up the same space on a ClickUp page, but they don't necessarily need to be broken out because it's fully documented within the SOPs we have.

[Tiago]

Yeah. Okay, so before we go, any final note you want to mention regarding daily ops routine or maybe just what to focus on before we part?

[Richard]

I guess the. We've. We've talked a lot about the actual schedule that we have and it is really important that this does not move. I think is the, the one thing that we haven't mentioned. We have a very set time for all this stuff that doesn't shift because if it shifts, a, it gets done less because moving it is the second best to canceling it. And B, having the actual time means people actually are prepared for the thing. They come to the thing. It's not just a, oh, here's an emergency meeting where we don't have our stuff together for it. It's a chance to actually sit down and say, okay, let's talk about this stuff directly.

[Tiago]

Right.

[Richard]

Yeah. It's just the importance of a routine.

[Tiago]

Yeah. You can plan ahead and it also provides stability and she said. And structure as well. Right. Thank you very much, Richard.

[Richard]

Fantastic. Nice.

[Podcast Host]

I hope you enjoyed this episode. As much as I enjoyed watching it from the sidelines, I decided to sit out today because these two were dropping such nuggets of gold. I wanted you to just hear what they had to say about it. They also built for you a checklist. They're 25 favorite tools, so don't forget to go to www.sheetsheet special ops podcast and sign up for our visionary Vault if you haven't already, and grab tiago and Richard's 25 favorite tools. If you love this episode, don't forget to like and subscribe and make sure to leave them some comments and questions in the comment section.