The hidden cost of choosing one meeting time for a global team

Count the hours that are actually being used

Microsoft’s June 2025 report on the working day described growing collaboration across time zones in its workplace data. Those observations concern the population and methods in that report; they are not a census of every job or evidence about your particular team. The useful prompt is simpler: look at your own calendar and see where the inconvenience falls.

Person-hours add another perspective. A thirty-minute meeting with eight attendees occupies four person-hours before preparation or follow-up. That arithmetic does not make the meeting wasteful. A difficult decision can easily justify the time. It does mean that shortening an invitation and reducing unnecessary attendance answer different parts of the same question.

Use the date as well as the city

A time-zone label alone is an incomplete plan when daylight saving changes local offsets. Choose the actual meeting date and the relevant city or regional time zone. For a recurring event, check dates on either side of seasonal clock changes instead of assuming that the difference between two offices stays constant.

Our meeting-overlap tool compares the working windows you enter for a selected day. The result depends on those inputs. A technical overlap between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. is not permission to ignore a colleague’s agreed schedule, lunch break or local holiday. Ask people for usable windows before treating the calculator’s output as the answer.

Suppose one region offers two possible hours and another offers only one. The narrow window may be useful for the people whose decisions are essential, while others could contribute in writing. This is a hypothetical planning example, not a rule that the largest office should always receive the most convenient time.

Decide which part needs a live conversation

Some meetings combine three jobs: distributing information, clarifying questions and making a decision. A written briefing can sometimes handle the first job before the call. Questions can reveal whether there is a genuine disagreement that needs conversation. The live part can then focus on the choice that remains.

An asynchronous process needs a clear owner and an explicit deadline. A document that asks everyone to comment whenever they have time may simply move the uncertainty out of the calendar. State the decision, the options, who has the final call and when responses will be considered. Keep a short record of the result so that an absent colleague can understand what changed.

I would also distinguish optional attendance from optional influence. Someone who cannot join at an inconvenient hour should still have a meaningful route to provide relevant information. Rotating the meeting time can share the inconvenience when no common window exists, although rotation does not make an unreasonable hour pleasant.

Measure whether the change helped

Try a small adjustment for one recurring meeting: distribute a brief in advance, reduce the live agenda or rotate the slot. Then ask whether decisions became clearer, follow-up decreased and participation remained useful. A shorter event that creates several confusing messages may not save much time overall.

The aim is a working arrangement people can explain and sustain. A calendar is not merely a place to put a decision after it has been made. For a global team, choosing the hour is already part of the decision.