It sounds like a dream, right? You’ve got a massive software outage at 3:00 AM in New York, but instead of waking up a groggy, annoyed engineer who can’t find their glasses, you just... pass the ticket to Sydney. That is the core promise of follow the sun. It's a workflow designed to keep the lights on and the code moving 24 hours a day without forcing any single human being to survive on a diet of caffeine and regret during a graveyard shift.
But honestly, it’s a lot harder than the LinkedIn thought leaders make it sound.
The concept is simple: you distribute your workforce across different time zones—usually about eight hours apart—so that as one team finishes their day, the next team is just grabbing their first cup of coffee. You see this in global tech giants like IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. They’ve been doing it for decades. It isn't just about answering phones. It’s about continuous development, rapid incident response, and keeping that "always-on" promise we’ve all become addicted to in the 2020s.
If you're trying to scale a business today, you've probably realized that customers don't care what time it is where you live. They just want their stuff to work.
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The Brutal Reality of the Handover
The "handover" is where follow the sun either thrives or dies a slow, painful death. Imagine a game of telephone, but with high-stakes server migrations or complex legal documents. If the team in London doesn't document exactly what they did, the team in Los Angeles spends the first three hours of their shift just trying to figure out where the last guy left off. That's a massive waste of money.
In a true follow the sun model, the transition needs to be seamless. We’re talking about standardized documentation that feels almost surgical. Companies that nail this, like Gitlab or Atlassian, rely heavily on "asynchronous" communication. They don't wait for a meeting. They write everything down. If it isn't in the ticket, it didn't happen.
There’s also the "cultural drift" problem. You might have a team in Bangalore, one in Prague, and one in Austin. Even if they all speak English, the way they solve problems might be totally different. One team might be more risk-averse, while another prefers to "move fast and break things." Without a unified company culture, you end up with three different companies wearing the same hat, and your product starts to look like a Frankenstein's monster of conflicting ideas.
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You might think this is only for people who write Java or manage AWS instances. Not really. We’re seeing a huge shift in the creative and legal sectors.
Take a global ad agency. A designer in Tokyo can finish a set of mocks, pass them to a copywriter in London, and have the final version ready for a client in New York by 9:00 AM Eastern Time. It effectively triples your productivity without anyone actually working overtime. It’s basically a cheat code for deadlines.
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However, you can't just hire three people in different countries and call it a day. You need the infrastructure. You need a "Single Source of Truth." Whether that’s Jira, Notion, or some proprietary tool, everyone has to be looking at the same data. If the London team is using Slack but the Tokyo team prefers email, the whole follow the sun strategy collapses in about forty-eight hours.
The Stealth Costs Nobody Mentions
Everyone talks about the savings. "Oh, you don't have to pay shift differentials for night workers!" Sure. That's true. But you’re going to spend a fortune on management overhead.
Managing people you never see in person is hard. Managing people who are literally asleep when you are awake is an Olympic sport. You need managers who are willing to occasionally hop on a 10:00 PM call to stay aligned. You need "overlap periods." Usually, a successful follow the sun model requires about one to two hours of overlap between shifts. That’s when the real magic happens—the face-to-face (or Zoom-to-Zoom) download.
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If you skip the overlap, you get "siloing." People start resenting the other teams. "Why did the morning shift leave this mess for us?" It’s a classic human reaction. Without that overlap, you lose the empathy that keeps a team together.
Practical Steps to Make It Work
If you're actually going to pull this off, you need to stop thinking about "global" and start thinking about "standardized."
- Standardize the Stack: Every team uses the same tools. No exceptions. If one office uses Trello and another uses Asana, you are doomed.
- The 90-Minute Handover: Build in a mandatory window where both the outgoing and incoming teams are online. This is for clarification, not just status updates.
- Cultural Exchange: This sounds fluffy, but it's vital. Fly people to different offices. Let the Austin team see how the Manila team works. It builds the "one team" mentality that is so easily lost across time zones.
- Rotate the Pain: Don't always make the same team stay late for the global "all-hands" meeting. Shift the meeting times so everyone takes a turn being the one in their pajamas.
Follow the sun isn't a silver bullet. It’s a complex, high-maintenance engine. When it's tuned correctly, it allows a company to outpace competitors by literally working while they sleep. But if you ignore the friction of the handovers or the need for a unified culture, you’re just creating a global headache that never ends.
To move forward, audit your current handoff process. If a task takes more than 15 minutes for a new person to pick up, your documentation isn't ready for a global scale. Fix the writing first, then hire the time zones. Focus on building a "Document-First" culture where the written word is the final authority. This reduces the need for constant "quick syncs" that drain energy and disrupt the flow of work across the globe.