Working Between Kerala And The UAE: Planning Around A Ninety Minute Gap

Your team in Kochi and your team in Dubai are ninety minutes apart, so you assumed scheduling would be easy. Then a deadline landed on a day one half of the team was not working, and nobody noticed until Monday.

India Standard Time runs ninety minutes ahead of Gulf Standard Time. That means a Kerala morning is a UAE early morning and both sides share almost the whole working day. The trouble comes from weekends and holidays, not from the clock. Plan around the calendar and the gap stops mattering.

The gap itself is not the problem

Ninety minutes is a rounding error compared with most cross border work. A ten in the morning meeting in Kochi is half past eight in Dubai. A four in the afternoon meeting in Dubai is half past five in Kochi. Both are inside normal hours for both places.

Two practical habits are enough:

• Write both times in every invite. "10:00 IST / 08:30 GST" removes the mental arithmetic and the arguments that follow it.
• Put the meeting in a shared calendar rather than in a message. Messages do not adjust for anything.

That is the whole time zone problem. Everything else in this post is about days, not hours.

The weekend is where plans break

Weekend arrangements differ between the two places, and they also differ between employers within the UAE. The public sector there works a shortened week ending on a half day Friday, with Saturday and Sunday off. Some private companies match that, some do not. In Kerala, Sunday is the common day off and Saturday varies by employer.

So before you plan anything, ask each side to write down the two things they never work. Do not guess from the country. Ask the team.

The failure mode is quiet. Someone in Dubai sends a review request late on Thursday. Someone in Kochi picks it up Friday and replies. The Dubai reviewer is already off, so the reply sits until Monday morning their time, which is Monday afternoon in Kerala. A one day task took four days and nobody did anything wrong. It gets worse again when the same person is split across two products, because each side assumes the other one has them.

Holiday lists do not overlap at all

Kerala and the UAE keep different holiday calendars, and neither is fixed to the same Gregorian dates every year.

• Onam moves with the Malayalam calendar and lands somewhere around August or September. Travel around it is heavy, and availability drops before and after the official days.
• Eid dates follow the lunar calendar, shift earlier each Gregorian year, and are often confirmed close to the date.
• National days, state holidays and bank holidays are separate lists again.

Confirm the current year's dates locally rather than assuming last year's pattern. The dates move.

Rules that hold up

Four rules cover most of it.

• No handover on the last working day. If a piece of work needs the other side to respond before it can move, hand it over with at least one full shared working day left in the week.
• Book decisions in the overlap, not the edges. Both teams are awake together for most of the day. Use the middle of it for anything that needs a decision.
• Write the decision down, not just the discussion. The person who was off reads the record, not the thread.
• Never make one country's Monday the deadline. Pick a day both sides are working and both sides know they are working.

Build the calendar once, then keep it

Put both holiday lists into one shared calendar at the start of the year and mark the weeks either side of the big ones. Availability drops before Onam and around Eid in ways that a single day marker does not show. A week marked "low availability" costs you nothing and saves a missed deadline, and it is the same arithmetic as planning capacity when half the team is part time.

At Sicherhaven we work across both places ourselves. EventifyPlus covers events in Kerala, including Onam and temple festivals, and Wealthwise is built for card spending in the UAE. Running both means the holiday calendar is not an afterthought for us, it is the planning input we set up first.

What to write down this week

One page, shared with everyone:

• The working days for each location, as the team actually works them.
• Both holiday lists for the year, with the surrounding weeks marked.
• The hours both sides are reliably online.
• Who to contact when the other side is off.

It takes an hour. It removes the class of problem where everybody followed the plan and the plan was still wrong, and it is the first page a new person should read, since new joiners take longer than expected in remote teams.