The rise of remote work has fundamentally transformed how teams operate across industries. While it has unlocked flexibility and access to global talent, it has also introduced significant challenges. Misaligned schedules, limited visibility into work patterns, and concerns about team productivity have left many organizations grappling with how to effectively support and measure their remote workforce.
Data sheds light on this issue. According to a Stanford study, 9.5% of software engineers perform at less than 10% of the median engineer’s productivity—a category now referred to as “ghosts.” These workers contribute virtually no meaningful output and, in some cases, even juggle multiple jobs simultaneously. Similarly, insights from industry insiders reveal that engineers at major companies, such as Oracle, SAP, and Adobe, sometimes make as few as two code changes per month while earning six-figure salaries.
While the focus here is on engineering, this phenomenon is not unique to technical roles. Across all functions—whether operations, HR, or customer success—gaps in productivity can arise not because of individual failings but due to systemic inefficiencies. Without visibility into how teams use their time, organizations risk perpetuating these inefficiencies, leading to disengagement and under utilization of talent.
Introducing Sunrize ☀️
At LEAD, we specialize in helping organizations transform collaboration, networking, and knowledge sharing. Our flagship product, LEAD.bot, is a people-first platform trusted by Fortune 500 companies to enhance organizational health, knowledge sharing and cross-team collaboration. From facilitating meaningful cross-functional connections to designing culture-building programs, LEAD.bot empowers teams to work better together—whether they’re remote, hybrid, or in-office.
As a largely remote team spanning multiple timezones ourselves, we understand the complexities of asynchronous work. While LEAD.bot was designed to foster stronger networks and better collaboration, we noticed a gap: the tools we used for day-to-day communication and meeting scheduling often left room for improvement.
We explored various tools to streamline communication and scheduling but found that most solutions prioritized either the organizer’s convenience or the participants’—rarely both. In large organizations, it’s challenging to meet everyone’s needs, and we wanted a clearer, more flexible approach to effective communication across timezones.
That’s why we built Sunrize! Originally developed as an internal tool to help us schedule meetings at times that worked for everyone, Sunrize quickly proved invaluable. After testing it internally, we launched it on the Slack App Store, where it’s now used by hundreds of organizations across six continents and nearly every timezone.
With over a quarter billion data points on team collaboration, we’ve gained unique insights into how teams operate—and we’re excited to share some of what we’ve learned.
Background
First, let’s introduce Sunrize.
Sunrize integrates seamlessly with your organization’s Slack environment to provide valuable insights into team work patterns while respecting employee privacy. It enables organizations to better understand how teams work together across time zones without focusing on individual productivity in a way that feels intrusive.
Here’s an example of the landing page: it offers an overview of the time zones users are currently working in, the overlap in their online hours, and recent changes.
While this feature is less relevant for small teams, it becomes incredibly powerful as organizations scale, providing leadership with the tools to design workflows that align with their teams’ diverse work styles.
For organizations with members who frequently travel—like consultants or globally distributed teams—real-time snapshots of time zones ensure smoother collaboration and help teams schedule meetings at times that work for everyone. Instead of micro-managing hours worked, Sunrize focuses on optimizing teamwide collaboration and supporting employees’ flexibility in how they work best.
Understanding Team and Individual Work Habits
While users may be physically located in regions with specific local times, many organizations allow employees the flexibility to work during their preferred hours outside of any mandatory sessions. The substantial amount of data we’ve collected since 2022 reveals notable differences in work patterns across geographies, organizations, and job functions.
Initially, we analyzed overall overlap across organizations, but Sunrize now provides deeper insights into specific work habits, capturing detailed trends every 15 minutes. These insights enable organizations to understand how teams truly work and identify patterns, such as:
- Overlap in critical collaboration windows.
- Variances in work habits by geography or function.
- Potential signs of overwork due to timezone differences
By surfacing these trends, Sunrize enables organizations to better support their teams without micromanagement, ensuring workflows align with how people work best.
Here’s a list of sample users in our organization:
When selecting a specific user, we can view their preferred working style:
Sunrize becomes smarter over time, identifying trends as the evaluation window grows. While our default plans offer 30-day data retention, this can be customized, and some organizations retain data for several years. In fact, certain regulations within the European Union require at least five years of retention, which we’ll discuss later.
In this example, after a month of evaluation, we can see that this user works over a longer period than the traditional 9-to-5 in their local timezone, with frequent breaks in between. This pattern is common and often reflects responsibilities such as family needs throughout the day.
While Sunrize provides tools to evaluate the data we collect and continually adds new features, we also support CSV exports of raw data for organizations that need to integrate it into their own tools—whether for compliance purposes or custom visualization needs.
Below is an example of the summary views available for CSV export, along with the raw data:
Administrators
For administrators—those responsible for managing the Sunrize integration in their Slack environment—we offer a range of tools and configurations to help tailor the experience to their organization’s needs. These options include (but aren’t limited to):
- Excluding specific users from participation
- Adding additional administrators who can adjust settings
- Modifying polling frequency, data retention, and user limits
The Power of Sunrize + LEAD.bot
By combining Sunrize and LEAD.bot, organizations can unlock actionable tools to improve collaboration, engagement, and growth:
- Strengthen Culture: LEAD.bot automatically pairs employees across departments or timezones for virtual coffee chats, mentoring, or collaborative projects, fostering a sense of connection no matter where they are.
- Celebrate Milestones: LEAD.bot reminds teams to recognize birthdays, work anniversaries, and other milestones directly in Slack or Microsoft Teams, making celebrations easy and visible.
- Streamline Onboarding: LEAD.bot introduces new hires to colleagues, organizes buddy systems, and facilitates tailored check-ins such as 30,60,90s’ to help them hit the ground running.
- Gather Insights: Sunrize provides anonymized, real-time data on work patterns, while LEAD.bot’s pulse surveys capture employee sentiment, and Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) identifies collaboration gaps or silos.
- Pulse surveys are short, quick surveys sent to employees to gather their feedback on specific topics, like job satisfaction, work challenges, or team dynamics. Think of it as taking the “pulse” of your organization to understand how people are feeling in real time.
- Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) is like mapping out how people within your company actually work together. Instead of just looking at organizational charts, ONA examines real interactions—like who collaborates the most or who gets left out—to identify strengths and gaps in communication.
For example:- If a team feels overworked, a pulse survey can help identify this quickly so leadership can act.
- If some departments aren’t collaborating enough, ONA can reveal those weak points and help you strengthen them.
- Foster Growth: LEAD.bot pairs mentors and mentees based on skills, goals, or roles, creating structured knowledge sharing and growth opportunities for employees.
- Enhance Team Engagement: Both tools analyze collaboration patterns, offering leaders actionable data on team dynamics and connectivity health to ensure teams are thriving.
These two tools integrate seamlessly into Slack and Microsoft Teams, making them easy to adopt and highly effective for distributed teams. Together, Sunrize and LEAD.bot go beyond surface-level insights to offer a comprehensive approach to building stronger, more connected organizations.
For organizations seeking deeper insights, we also offer a premium software service that leverages calendar integrations to analyze meeting patterns. This advanced analytics solution provides data on:
- Meeting Time by Role and Seniority: Understand how much time employees at different levels spend in meetings.
- Focus Time vs. Meeting Overload: Identify how much time teams dedicate to deep, uninterrupted work versus time spent in potentially unnecessary meetings.
- Time Optimization Opportunities: Highlight inefficiencies and recommend adjustments to improve productivity.
By combining this advanced calendar analysis with the insights from Sunrize and LEAD.bot, organizations gain a full-picture understanding of their team dynamics, empowering them to minimize wasted time, support focus work, and create a more productive workforce.
Learn more about LEAD.bot on our website: https://www.lead.app/
Trends in User Work Patterns
As we continue to gather data, insights from over a quarter billion data points provide a clear picture of how teams operate across time zones. The following trends illustrate the dynamics of user activity, shedding light on productivity patterns and opportunities for improvement.
Time Online (in local user timezone)
The data reveals that user activity aligns closely with the typical 9-to-5 workday. However, a significant amount of activity occurs outside these hours, indicating flexibility in work schedules. Interestingly, even during the middle of the night, we observed nearly a quarter of the peak daytime activity, suggesting that asynchronous work is becoming increasingly common in globally distributed teams.
Key Insights:
- Peak activity occurs between 10 AM and 3 PM, with a noticeable dip after 5 PM.
- Early-morning and late-night work, while less frequent, still accounts for a meaningful share of total activity.
This data demonstrates the importance of Sunrize in accommodating nontraditional schedules and ensuring seamless collaboration, regardless of when users choose to work.
Work Patterns by Day of the Week
When we break down activity by both day and hour, clear patterns emerge across the workweek:
- Monday mornings see minimal activity, likely reflecting a slower start as teams ramp up for the week.
- Activity increases significantly from Tuesday through Thursday, with early mornings and late evenings seeing higher-than-expected engagement, especially for teams operating across time zones.
- Fridays show a drop in activity after midday, indicating a shift toward wrapping up tasks before the weekend.
- Saturdays maintain higher activity levels than Sundays, which could reflect extended collaboration in regions like India where work often overlaps with North American time zones.
Additional Observations from the Heatmap:
- Teams with global operations demonstrate overlapping schedules that prioritize collaboration. For example, in regions like India, extended work hours on Saturdays reflect efforts to align with colleagues in North America.
- Sundays show the lowest overall activity, reinforcing traditional rest-day practices despite the rise of remote work.
Time Online, by Geography
Although we are currently sampling a subset of our data, we’ve confirmed that these trends hold across increasingly larger samples. We observe distinct working habits in different geographies.
Tokyo
In Tokyo, work hours are quite consistent throughout the week, though the working day often extends beyond the typical 9-to-5 hours.
Jerusalem
In Jerusalem, we see a significant amount of activity into the late hours, and even on Sunday. However, on Saturday, activity drops, likely due to religious observances of the Sabbath from Friday evening to nightfall on Saturday.
Warsaw
In Warsaw, Poland’s capital, there is a strong preference for a standard working week, with a noticeable break around 1 p.m.
Istanbul
In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, activity extends into the late hours of the evening. However, note that this particular sample has fewer data points for this geography.
Chongqing
In Chongqing, China’s largest city by area, we observe high activity during the standard workday, with a long tail extending well into the early hours of the next morning. This could be due to the desire for greater timezone overlap or simply reflect a strong work ethic among users in our dataset.
New York
New York follows a fairly typical working week, but we notice elevated activity on weekends and late into the night, which may be indicative of the city’s “never sleeps” culture.
Los Angeles
Los Angeles surprised us with an early start to the workday. This may be to maximize overlap with the East Coast, which is three hours ahead. This trend held true even with a larger sample size (not shown).
Chicago
Chicago also has a conventional working week, though we observed that work tends to end earlier on Fridays compared to Monday through Thursday.
Harare
In Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, work hours are less clearly defined. Late into the night, there is about half or a third of the activity seen during peak hours. However, the sample size for this location was smaller, making it harder to draw definitive conclusions.
Kolkata
In Kolkata, India’s third-largest city, we observe what appears to be strong overlap with North American timezones. There is no clear peak activity on the heatmap, suggesting that workers may be working longer hours or that the evening and daytime shifts are similarly active. (Note: Heatmaps show activity but don’t reveal the number of hours worked or the number of users at any given point, which we’ll investigate separately.)
Other Geographies
We can apply the same analysis to hundreds of other cities, and while the data may not always offer a clear explanation for differing patterns across geographic locations, it does provide valuable context. It helps us realize that we can’t always project our own expectations of work culture onto people in different environments.
This is where Sunrize can truly assist organizations in understanding how their teams work and challenge the assumption of a universal 9-to-5 schedule across timezones. Organizations should focus on minimizing burnout, maximizing convenience, and continuously assessing the evolving dynamics of their workforce to better support everyone.
In this particular sample, we analyzed data from a few dozen cities, based on the timezone settings in each user’s Slack profile.
And sorted by timezone offset (in seconds from UTC)
User Mobility
While many users on the Sunrize platform appear to have reported multiple timezones, much of this is due to daylight savings time changes, which occur at different times in various locations and often cause confusion for cross-timezone meetings (as the number of hours between timezones fluctuates during these transitions).
In our data, about one-third of users have been in multiple timezones while using the platform, while the remaining two-thirds have stayed in a single location. A significant portion of this one-third is attributed to daylight savings time, but we also have users who have been polled from completely different timezones, indicating travel or relocation.
Work Habit Changes
As we’ve been collecting data for several years, we were interested in assessing whether there have been any significant shifts in work habits over time. To explore this, we broke the data down by quarter.
We can mostly ignore 2022Q3 data, as it comes from the pilot phase of our product and represents a very small sample. Overall, we observe that trends have remained consistent. While we didn’t have the benefit of tracking changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work, it’s noteworthy that since 2022, organizations have shifted policies regarding remote work versus returning to the office. Despite these changes, our data shows very little movement in work patterns, which should reassure employers that workers can adapt effectively to different circumstances.
Similarly, we analyzed the average number of online data points per user, per day of the week, over a two-year period and found very few changes. (Note that the first two months are from our pilot program, with limited data, and the last month in the sample is truncated as it reflects the period during which this data was collected.)
Of course, there were some changes observed on specific days. As expected, the Mondays that Christmas and New Year’s Day fell on saw only slightly more people online than the preceding weekends. However, the Monday before and after those holidays had standard attendance.
With December approaching, we’re excited to re-run the analysis and see what has changed this year.
What This Means for Organizations and Next Steps
- Adapt to Asynchronous Work: Teams increasingly work outside traditional hours, as seen in Chongqing and New York. Sunrize helps organizations support flexible schedules without sacrificing collaboration.
- Prevent Overwork: Late-night and weekend activity in regions like Istanbul and Los Angeles may signal overwork. Sunrize identifies these trends, enabling leaders to rebalance workloads and promote healthier habits.
- Optimize Meetings: Data reveals optimal meeting times by region, such as avoiding midday in Warsaw or leveraging mornings in Los Angeles for better overlap with East Coast teams.
- Tailor Regional Policies: Insights from Tokyo, Jerusalem, and other regions highlight cultural and geographical differences in work habits. Sunrize enables customized policies that align with local norms.
- Monitor Long-Term Trends: Tracking work patterns over time allows organizations to identify challenges, measure policy impacts, and stay ahead of shifting workforce dynamics.
Next Steps
Workplace dynamics are constantly evolving, and we’re expanding Sunrize with new insights and features to meet these changes. Sunrize is your go-to online time tracking system, available on Slack and designed to integrate seamlessly into your workflow. It provides real-time visibility into employee work patterns and flexibility for both remote and in-office teams. Whether you need an automatic employee time clock, a digital employee attendance tracker, or a cloud-based time and attendance solution, Sunrize delivers the data-driven tools your organization needs to improve flexibility, productivity, and connectivity.
We recommend pairing Sunrize with LEAD.bot to implement actionable programs that foster collaboration, strengthen engagement, and enhance team connectivity health.
What Sunrize Customers are saying
A financial firm recently completed a POC using Sunrize and shared the following feedback after one month:
“The one-month POC was great. It was for a management discussion about working from the office vs. remote. I had a theory that developers (maybe other teams too, just less my forté) actually work more when remote. So, I used Sunrize to successfully show this”
As companies increasingly focus on operational efficiency, these types of discussions are common among our customers, and we’re excited to help them access the data they need.
What LEAD.Bot Customers are saying
“Choosing LEAD was an easy decision for us. As a rapidly growing company, aligning our knowledge management with business goals is crucial. LEAD enables us to streamline knowledge sharing and collaboration, ensuring our teams stay connected and our culture thrives.”
— Adam Traidman, Director at Coinbase, Formerly CEO of BRD
With Sunrize and LEAD.bot, your organization will have the tools to create a thriving, flexible, and well-connected workforce.
- Try Sunrize today: Visit the Slack App Store.
- Learn more about LEAD.bot: Find us on the Slack and Microsoft Teams App Stores.
