At 3 p.m. in Atlanta it is 9 p.m. in Krakow and half past midnight in Bangalore. There is no hour of the working day when all three are at their desks. Shift it earlier and Bangalore is at dinner while Atlanta is at breakfast. Shift it later and Krakow is asleep. I have run teams across exactly those three cities, and I think most of the advice about distributed work quietly assumes a problem one size smaller: two locations, one overlap, a fair fight about who takes the early call.
With three, there is no overlap to fight about. Here is what I think a team needs instead.
Pairs, not a triangle
The first adjustment is to stop designing for the whole team in one room and start designing for pairs. Atlanta and Krakow overlap in the morning on the American side. Krakow and Bangalore overlap in the European morning. Atlanta and Bangalore barely overlap at all. Three pairs, two of them workable.
So the work is organized along the workable pairs. A piece of work that needs two locations to talk gets assigned to a pair that can. Krakow becomes the hinge, because it can talk to both of the others, and that is a real role worth recognizing rather than an accident of geography.
Decisions that do not wait for a meeting
With no all-hands hour, any decision that needs everyone in the room waits days. The only way through is for most decisions not to need the room. That means the team has to be explicit, in advance, about who decides what, and it means a decision made by the people who were awake has to stand when the others wake up. A team where every decision gets relitigated by the next time zone is a team that makes no decisions.
I think this is the hard discipline. It asks each location to trust the others with things it would rather have a say in, and it asks the person who disagrees in the morning to accept what was decided overnight unless it is genuinely wrong.
The record is the meeting
On a two-location team, the written record is a summary of what was said. On a three-location team, there is no conversation for it to summarize, because the conversation never had everyone in it. The record has to be the thing itself.
So the state of every piece of work gets written down at the end of each location's day, in a form the next location can act on without asking. Decisions are recorded with their reasons. Questions are posted where the answer will be waiting. It is more writing than most engineers want to do, and it is the whole mechanism by which the team functions.
Rotate the inconvenience
Some things will still need all three, and someone will be up at an unreasonable hour. The failure mode is that it is always the same location, usually the one furthest from headquarters, and the people there learn that the organization's day is set somewhere else.
I think the inconvenient hours have to rotate, visibly, with headquarters taking its turn at midnight. It costs the home office something, and that is the point. A team can tell whether it is one team or a center with satellites by who is awake at the wrong time.
What the manager carries
The manager of a three-continent team is the person who makes sure the pairs are assigned sensibly, the decision rights are written down, the record is kept, and the rotation is honored. None of that is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a team that happens to be in three places and three teams that happen to share a name. I think the 3 p.m. problem has no solution, and that the job is to build a team that does not need one.
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/bengaluru