Scheduling a meeting at a convenient time for your team is challenging, even when everyone works in the same city. However, if you’re collaborating with members of your team or with clients who work remotely in different countries and time zones, scheduling a meeting can become a complicated lesson in time zones and geography.
If your team is distributed across several state and national borders. That means your reporting, your creative assets, and your support mechanisms are produced in several time zones. Things only get worse when you’re on the move or if someone’s observing daylight-saving time.
I was recently on Zoom here in Portland with a colleague in China when this came up. We’d decided we needed to schedule a call with another colleague in New York.
I then found myself looking at Outlook on one screen while toggling between WorldTimeBuddy.com to see when the best upcoming common awake times could accommodate all of us. It is, of course, easy to do the math between two time zones if you know the delta between the two.
The issue was toggling between three views including the time-zone management website, our Zoom meeting and Outlook was causing more cognitive load than seemed necessary.
“There must be a better way,” I remarked.
In fact, there is.
Technology is ever evolving, and Outlook now has a native way to see multiple time zones at once.
Multiple time zones displayed simultaneously.
I’ve also learned several other time-saving time zone scheduling tips that I’ll share below.
Best Practices to Schedule Meetings Across Locations and Time Zones
Anchor your time zone by using a common vernacular
One of the most common sentences you’ll overhear when listening to two far-apart people trying to schedule is, “Do you mean such-and-such time, my time or your time?”
For ease, one location should dominate in terms of speaking about your time. For much of the world, it’s Greenwich, UK. For you, it could be the time zone of your headquarters. This eliminates the confusion of always having to clarify whether you’re talking about lunchtime in New York or Delhi.
At Prialto, we avoid this time-wasting exchange by having our assistants always speak in terms of where their member’s home office is based.
We may be speaking from Portland, Guatemala, or Manila, but if we are scheduling with someone in New York, we’ll express that time in EST.
Always include the Time Zone
When meeting with people who are new to scheduling across time zones, help bring them up to speed by communicating the zone clearly. Omitting time zone detail is a common error among schedulers.
Often, it’s assumed that the meeting will be set in the scheduler’s time zone or some have a practice of always scheduling in the client’s time zone. However, setting a conference call for “9 a.m.” in our global marketplace is no longer acceptable.
When attendees are all located within the U.S., always include the time standard (such as 9 a.m. Pacific). You may want to state the time in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for international meetings and allow each participant to convert it to their local standard time. For example, 9 a.m. PST is 17:00 UTC.
Use a scheduling assistant
If you schedule a lot, delegating the scheduling headache probably makes the most sense. Hiring a virtual assistant who understands the different time zones and will take on the burden of the back and forth will free you up to focus on what you do best.
Your assistant can ask meeting attendees what time slots they prefer and how to minimize any inconvenience. Respecting individual scheduling concerns builds rapport and increases cooperation, making scheduling less of a hassle.
Read More: How Virtual Assistants Optimize Your Time
Choose an effective meeting planning app.
Calendaring apps have significantly improved in recent year. Outlook now includes the option to display up to 3 different time zones at once. (See below for a step by step tutorial.)
In addition, there are a number of cloud-based meeting scheduling tools and scheduling apps that can help meeting coordinators schedule across multiple time zones.
When working from a computer, we’ve become fans of World Time Buddy. It has a simple slider mechanism that allows you to see all potential future times in a single glance.
Doodle is an online scheduling survey that allows participants to select a few times, in their own time zone, that work best for them.
World Clock helps meeting organizers gain a global snapshot of comparative times and surveys for attendee preferences. You can link to that detailed listing using its URL and generate a .ics file to send to participants’ calendars. There’s also a World Clock add-on for Google Calendar under “Settings > Labs.”
Every Time Zone is a visual reference for the current time in major cities worldwide. A URL captures the selected time, allowing you to share the meeting time in various time zones with all participants.
Stick to your process.
You always have to set up your own processes to make your tools effective. Commit to a time zone management system that works for you.
It is easy to compare availability across your invitation list when you’re all using the same desktop calendar tool such as Microsoft Office or Google Calendar and effectively communicating a shared time zone vernacular.