Running a follow-the-sun operation from the UAE

At the end of October, European clocks go back an hour and clocks in the UAE stay where they are. If your operation passes work between Dubai and Europe, every European cut-off moves an hour later in Gulf time that weekend, and a rota designed over the summer can end up with handovers to nobody.

That is a small example of the arithmetic a follow-the-sun operation lives with. The UAE is a good place to run one from, for reasons of geography and calendar. The design work is in the seams: the handovers, the overlap between shifts, the documentation that lets someone act on a case they didn't open, and the hours at the edge of the day that nobody wants.

Where Gulf time sits

Gulf Standard Time is UTC+4 all year, with no daylight saving. In winter that puts Dubai four hours ahead of London and three ahead of Frankfurt or Paris; in summer the gaps narrow to three and two. A Dubai team working 08:00 to 17:00 covers the whole European morning, and its own morning overlaps the afternoon in Singapore or Hong Kong. India, an hour and a half ahead, shares almost the entire day.

The calendar helps too. Since 1 January 2022 the UAE federal government has worked a Saturday and Sunday weekend, and most private companies followed. A Dubai team now shares its working week with European partners and sponsor banks, which makes weekday escalation simpler and turns weekend cover into one decision for the whole group.

One workable pattern for a small operation is two UAE shifts, an early one that picks up from Asia and a late one that stays with Europe through its afternoon. Say the early shift runs 07:00 to 16:00 and the late shift 12:00 to 21:00, Gulf time. The late shift then finishes at 17:00 in London in winter and 18:00 in summer, which covers most European end-of-day cut-offs. The four hours when both shifts are on, from 12:00 to 16:00, are where training, case reviews and the harder decisions should go, because there are two people with context in the room.

The arithmetic twice a year

Europe moves its clocks forward in late March and back in late October, and the UAE doesn't, so every European time converts differently from one season to the next. A sponsor bank's 16:00 cut-off in Frankfurt falls at 19:00 in Dubai in winter and 18:00 in summer. A handover call that a London colleague set for 09:00 shows as 12:00 in Dubai calendars until the end of October and 13:00 after it. Scheduled jobs depend on the time zone they were set in: a job scheduled in UTC stays put for Dubai and moves for Europe, while a job scheduled in Central European Time does the opposite.

Someone needs to own this, with a date in the calendar the way a certificate renewal has one. Twice a year they should restate each of these in Gulf time for the season ahead:

• partner and scheme cut-offs, including the settlement file deadlines your reconciliation depends on
• recurring meetings organized from Europe, especially handover calls
• scheduled jobs and file transfers, with the time zone each one was set in
• shift times and the on-call rota, where any of them are defined relative to Europe
• response times in partner agreements, which may run on the partner's local business hours

Handovers that carry decisions

A follow-the-sun model only works if a case can move between people without losing what has been learned about it. In most operations the handover is a short call and a chat message, which is fine as far as it goes. What is usually missing is a written record of open items that someone on the next shift can act on without asking anyone.

A handover note that works gives, for each open item, the current state, the next action and its owner, the deadline in both time zones, and any decision already taken with the reason for it. The last part matters most. If the Dubai shift decided at 15:00 to hold a batch of payouts until the sponsor bank replied, the London shift needs to know why. Otherwise it will either release the batch or ask the sponsor bank the same question again.

The part of a handover note that matters most is the decision already taken, and the reason for it.

Keep the overlap long enough for a real conversation, thirty minutes at the least. Put the handover on the rota as a task with time allowed for it. Procedures need the same care. A team spread across time zones can't lean over and ask the person who knows, so runbooks have to work for someone who has never seen the case before, which is the standard we set out for runbooks people open during an incident.

The night desk

Any follow-the-sun design has hours at the edges that fit no shift well. Some firms cover them with a small night desk in the UAE, working through the Gulf night while Europe sleeps and, if you have customers there, while the Americas are at work.

Night desks tend to go wrong in two ways. They are staffed by the most junior people, without authority to decide anything, so they log everything and wake whoever is on call for the rest. And the people on them get tired and rotate out as soon as they can, taking what they learned with them.

Both have fixes. Write down what the night desk decides and give it the authority to do so: which fraud alerts it can act on, which payouts it can hold, and when it must wake someone. With instant payments some of those decisions can't wait for the morning, as we argued in instant payments leave no overnight window for exceptions. Rotate people through the desk on a fixed pattern with a limit on consecutive nights, so it never becomes one person's permanent job. Then have the early shift review the night's decisions each morning, briefly, so they get the same scrutiny as everyone else's.

Before the end of October, go through the list above and write every time on it in Gulf time for both seasons. It takes an afternoon, and it is much cheaper than finding the gap on the first Monday after the clocks change.

Discuss your operations