Outsourcing to India: how to handle time zone differences?

Many Indian outsourcing firms offer to work almost the same office hours as their clients – they will work “in your time zone” so to speak. This can be an attractive proposition to rich-world clients located in faraway time zones such as Europe, Australia and North America.

Clients who insist on their Indian outsourcing team to work much outside of their own time zone can stand to lose in the long-term though. In India as in much of the rest of the world, top talent has plenty of job options. Especially IT professionals.

Making an offshoring project successful is all about recruiting and retaining the best talent. Requiring talent to work uncomfortable hours every day is a sure way to lose them to the competition.

A normal and comfortable work shift in India would be 9 AM to 6 PM. With flexible timings, Indian staff could comfortably come in either 7.00 AM or stay late to 8.30 PM (from my experience, the typical young software developer more often stays late).

If so, their 13-hour comfortable hours would make meetings possible with clients from all around the world, from California via Europe to eastern Australia.

Even with limited overlap, outsourcing companies and agencies can successfully collaborate with clients especially when focused on providing great service quality which reduces the need for frequent webcam meetings.

The timezone gap can even be turned into an advantage, where clients send requests in the evening and can see the results when they come back into the office the next morning.

Here at LiteBreeze, our software developers focus on providing great service quality and maximizing the value they add, to make collaboration in faraway time zones simple for our clients.

In some cases, staff can even handle planned and occasional odd-hour webcam meetings from home.

Uptime of software systems are ensured through reliable and trusted cloud server infrastructure providers such as AWS and Rackspace. For large critical business systems, we can provide on-call developers.

The following regions overlap during daylight savings time (DST) with the following number of hours:

European time zones overlap with India

Australia and New Zealand time zones overlap with India

In Australia, Daylight saving is observed in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and the Australian Capital Territory.

Daylight saving is not observed in Queensland, the Northern Territory or Western Australia.

Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 AM on the first Sunday in October, when clocks are put forward one hour. It ends at 2 AM (which is 3 AM Daylight Saving Time) on the first Sunday in April, when clocks are put back one hour.

During DST, the clocks on the Chatham Islands are set forward 1 hour from UTC+12:45 to UTC+13:45.

DST starts on the last Sunday of September and ends the first Sunday of April, the same as mainland New Zealand.

US and Canada time zones overlap with India

In Edmonton, DST started on March 11 at 2 AM where clocks were turned one hour forward to 3 AM. It ended on November 4 where the clocks were turned back one hour.
DST changes do not necessarily occur on the same date every year.

The Middle East and Gulf countries overlap with India

Asia time zone overlap with India

South Korea

Japan

Hong Kong