#Time zone difference scheduler how to
#Time zone difference scheduler free

Respecting each team member’s scheduling concerns is essential for relationship building. You can do a quick survey to generate interest and see what time slots your collaborators prefer. Attendance is important, definitely, but keeping your team members happy is just as important. We’ve touched upon this subject briefly before but ultimately, when you plan meetings across different time zones, you have to be considerate and not be one of those pushy leaders that think only of themselves. Employees who were not online, sleeping or attending another business would easily be able to go through it when they are back online and catch up with everything. Take the post-meeting discussion to Slack after the video-conference is over. 📷 Utilize messaging apps, such as Slack.

#Time zone difference scheduler free

If you need help with creating your agenda, use our free meeting minutes templates. This way, those who can’t attend the meeting would still be able to get answers to what’s been bothering them or participate in the discussion with their opinions and votes. Send out the meeting agenda at least one business day prior to the meeting and ask people to reply with questions and talking points in advance. 📷 Set a meeting agenda and ask for questions before the meeting. If you have to consider time zones, schedules, vacation times and other factors, you will never find a common ground no matter how hard you’re looking for it. Recording the meeting is a great rule to establish for larger-scale team meetings. You can’t expect people to join a meeting at 2AM especially if something urgent has happened and you need to conduct the team meeting as soon as possible. That means that you can later on distribute it to the entire team, including those who were not able to attend. Business meeting tools nowadays give you the opportunity to record any video-conference with just one click. When time zones don’t align and there’s just nothing you can do about it, you should record the meeting.

Participants of the meeting will know when the meeting will start and end in their own time zone. World Clock Meeting Planner is another cloud-based meeting time zone tool that offers features that can help meeting leaders cope with multiple time zones. The tool can sync up and create a meeting invitation on iCalendar, Google Calendar and Outlook. You can also invite team members to the meeting with just a couple of clicks. You can add cities and it will show you what time it is in every relevant time zone at the same time. It’s called World Time Buddy and it’s offered for free. There are great tools out there that will help everyone who schedules international meetings. 📷 Utilize international meeting scheduling tools. One team member in Dublin doesn’t have to be the only one to have a late meeting every week, right?

The rotation principle we’ve just mentioned will allow everyone to sacrifice a little but at least once.

As mentioned, organizing meetings across different time zones will certainly require some flexibility and understanding from the team members. If you’re struggling and feeling overwhelmed with calculating hours, use a free time zone converter. This means that everyone has an equal opportunity for the most and least convenient times to meet. That’s why managers should establish a rotation schedule. Ultimately, someone will always have to sacrifice their convenience for the meeting to take place with all parties involved. 📷 What if one team member lives in Seoul, one lives in Dublin and another one in Boston? What if the meeting is across three time zones? Finding a common meeting time surely sounds impossible. Compare hours and time zones and see if you can find one hour when everyone will be working – that’s it, one “common” hour is all you need! Gather information from all of the employees and start comparing. By doing so, you are showing that you respect their flexibility and schedule. What you can do is reach out to your team members and ask them to provide the hours they plan on working in the upcoming days, for example. As a manager, you can’t deprive them of that freedom or request that they change it. Team members who are working remotely usually have the freedom to set their own schedule. If you have to pick a date and a time for a meeting with employees who live in different cities or countries that don’t share the same time zone or they simply have different work shifts or schedules, you have to find the common ground. 📷 Check everyone’s schedule and see when your teammates’ work schedules overlap.

#Time zone difference scheduler how to

How to effectively organize meetings across different time zones?