How does the time zone work in the USA?

26 comments

1. The same as it works in any large country bar China. Day shift will start around 8-9 regardless of the time zone. Scheduling meetings means you need to be cognizant of the time difference.

2. He goes to work at 9am local time. People are flexible with communications.

3. The guy on the west coast goest to work at 9 AM in his time zone.

   Unless, of course, his job starts at 6 AM in his time zone.

   Is there a country with multiple time zones that *doesn’t* do this?

4. Jobs will be decided based on the need of the job.

   If someone needs to go to work at 6am, they go to work at 6am.

   If they have clients or coworkers in another time zone, then they knowingly entered into a job knowing most of their co-workers are in X time zone so they’d need to adjust or they can find a different job that better suits their time zone.

5. Most people start their work or school day around 8 AM at their own local time.

6. We go to work, eat lunch, and go home at whatever *local* times make sense.

   I work in the Central Time Zone for a company that’s now headquartered in the Eastern Time Zone. All it means it that we have to clarify the timezone when scheduling online meetings between facilities.

7. The same way it works for someone like me, who works remotely in N. America and has remote coworkers in Europe and Asia. We all start at a normal morning time in our time zone (usually between 8 and 9 am), unless there’s an all-hands meeting that requires me to have an early start and the Asian team members to work in the evening.

8. As others have said it can depend.

   During COVID I worked for a period of time in a different time-zone (mountain) but I was working remotely from my office (eastern(. So when we’d have meetings, it’d be common to schedule them for 8 or 9 am eastern, and because i was choosing to work remotely, I’d have to be ok with waking up at 6 or 7am to attend.

   But, we also work with people in mountain/pacific time. And because they permanently live there, we typically just schedule those meetings to work with them.

   So ir can vary on the needs of the team, project, etc. But it’d defeat the purpose of having time-zones if everyone worked at the exact same time anyways.

9. Everyone lives and works according to their local time zone.

   E.g. if I live on the east coast and I have to call someone in California, I know I have to wait until at least 11:00 my time or else they won’t be at work yet.

10. People go to work at their local time.

11. My company has employees all around the world. We don’t all coordinate when we go to work. We sometimes have to coordinate for calls/meetings, but otherwise we all just work our individual schedule and communicate via e-mail or schedule calls when necessary.

12. Everyone goes to work at 8 or 9 in thier respective time zone. The only time this doesn’t happen is if you work for a company with an office in another time zone. Often times what ends up happening is the people on the West coast end up starting earlier in those instances.

    Also people in finance or stock markets that live on the West Coast tend to be up early since the markets open at 9 Eastern which would be 6am Pacific. Even earlier for Alaska and Hawaii.

13. People are generally getting up around the same time in their local time. At my last job, we would occasionally have to contact vendors based in other time zones (I’m on the east coast) and we would sometimes have to wait an hour or two for them to open up for the day. So I’d have to wait until noon or something to get ahold of someone in California who was just getting in to their office. It was mildly inconvenient sometimes but not a huge deal.

14. I work for a company that employees people across the country. Sometimes we can’t talk to each other because the office is already closed or hasn’t opened yet.

15. Everything is localized. There’s only a few jobs that require you to wake up according to a time zone you don’t live in. If there’s a difference in timezones you just deal with it. A one hour difference isn’t that big of a deal, and is pretty easy to deal with if your company also works with companies around the world. There’s like a 2 hour overlap between the start of my work day and the end of the work day for my European colleagues.

16. They would go to work when their job requires them to be at work, but office hours are generally 9-6 LOCAL time (or similar)

    The entire country does not operate on one specific time zone, else, why have them in the first place?

17. Everybody’s schedules are roughly the same nationwide. There may be some time shifting if working heavily with people in other time zones, but more typically it just means scheduling calls/meetings more middle of the day. My company has employees in 100’s of locations in all time zones, and regional offices in 3 of 4 time zones (including both costs), so calls tend to be between noon and 4 Eastern (11-3 Central, 9-1 Pacific). Sometimes companies in on East Coast might work more 9-6 or companies further west might work more 8-5. But you don’t see 3 hour time shifts office-wide typically.

18. I don’t know how it is for everyone else but I’m on west coast and the distributors on the east coast I worked with had shifts that lined up with west coast time

19. For the most part, people who work on opposite coasts aren’t going to interact with each other much. They all just go by their own time.

    When you do have to interact with someone in another time zone, you try to schedule calls at times that will work in both zones. So the people in NYC might have a Zoom meeting scheduled at 2-3 pm , and their colleagues in LA will have it from 11-noon.

20. It doesn’t.

    The US is a timeless void where clocks run backwards.

    Joking aside, most companies don’t end up having teams work synchronously together across time zones. For the companies that do (ex. Remote working companies), they usually just pick core hours where the time zones overlap and let people work solo either before or after as desired.

21. Standard business day is 9am-5pm for the time zone you are in. If you need to call or interact with someone in a different time zone you adjust your call to be at a time that your business hours overlap.

22. If you’re asking what’s the standard work day, people who live on the west coast will typically start at 9am in his time (in a stereotypical 9-5 job) IF his work is generally based locally to his time zone. So no you don’t have an entire time zone worth of people adjusting to (their) 6am-2pm, if that’s what you mean.

    However for some people, the growth of remote work recently has muddied some of this, including in my case. My company which is based in Washington DC (Eastern Time) has gone fully remote, giving the employees the freedom to move anywhere in the country.

    We keep to the 9am-5pm workday in Eastern Time. So I have a co-worker in Illinois and another in Wisconsin (each Central Time), they stick to our ET working hours, meaning from their POV they work 8am-4pm. And I have another in California, and she works from her POV 6am-2pm so we’re all in sync.

    I do think our boss would be willing to let them adjust hours if they asked, but they seem to prefer staying in sync.

23. People just go to work at their local time. Companies that have locations in multiple time zones that need to communicate and up arranging meetings at times that work for everyone.

    I take it you’re from a country that’s just in one time zone?

24. I might be an exception here but I’m expected to work on ET, as my job’s east coast based and certain needs require me to operate within those hours. My day starts at 6:30am MT and ends 3pm MT.

25. Most people where I am work 8-5 local time. There are those who deal a lot with government offices in DC, so those people tend to come in at 6 or 7 to line up better with he time difference.

26. When did we lose two time zones?

    And your time zone is the time where you live. Someone in California doesn’t go by Eastern Time. They go by Pacific Time.