What is the best way to manage meetings in multiple time zones?

All the answers concerning things like Outlook or Google are wrong.  First, you must have a genuine understanding of time zones and what they mean.  You will be surprised how many people just can't do this.  In other words its all about how you think (and not about the minutiae of this or that calendar system).  You have to know what's happening in the overseas office when it's2pm in yours.

Just don't make the call from headquarters at a time only comfortable to you.  I've had too many of these at3am because it was9am at HQ.

Using modern technology Direct means of communication and connectivity

Here are six tips for working with multiple time zones in Google Calendar.

1. Show two time zones

You're in one time zone but work closely with people in another time zone. Google Calendar can show the time in both time zones, side-by-side, in your browser (Figure A).

Go to your Google Calendar in your browser, select the sprocket in the upper right, then click Settings and adjust the settings under "Your current time zone."

Figure A

Display two time-zones, side-by-side, in your browser. 2. Show the current time in multiple time zones

If you work with people in multiple time zones, you can see the current time for multiple places with the help of a World Clock. The clock displays in your browser to the right of your Google Calendar (Figure B).

 

Go to your Google Calendar in your browser, select the sprocket in the upper right, then click Labs. Enable the World Clock lab, then select Save. Follow the Settings link below the World Clock to select the time zones to display. (Google Apps users: if you don't see Labs, check with your Administrator.)

Figure B

Show the current time for places around the world next to Google Calendar on the web. 3. Create a new calendar for a different time zone

If you regularly move between offices to work for extended periods, you can create a Google Calendar for each office. Since you can display multiple calendars, you can see your entire schedule at once, with activity in each office on a dedicated calendar. Each Google Calendar you create can be assigned to a time zone of your choosing (Figure C).

Figure C

Choose a time zone for each Google Calendar you create. 4. Create a multi-time zone event

When you fly from Kansas City to Detroit, your flight starts in one time zone and ends in another. You can enter the flight departure and arrival times correctly for each time zone from Google Calendar in your browser (Figure D).

Create a new Google Calendar event, then select the "Time zone" link to the right of the event end time. Check the "Use separate start and end time zones" box, then choose the time zones. Finally, enter the start and end times.

Figure D

Schedule a multi-time zone event, such as a flight, from your browser. 5. Add an event with your voice

If you use Google Now and talk to your phone, you can use your voice to create a new appointment (Figure E). For example, say "Ok, Google, add a meeting on Thursday at8 am." The meeting will be placed on your main calendar. (As of April2015, Google Now doesn't yet understand time zones; events are created in the time zone of your primary calendar.) You may refer to24-hour clock times, such as16:00 for4 pm and22:00 for10 pm, which Google understands and converts to reflect your clock settings.

Figure E

Speak to create an event on your primary calendar with Google Now. 6. Schedule an event for a different time zone on your phone

If you travel, you can schedule an event for the correct time in another time zone from your phone. That way, when you move to another time zone, events in that time zone will display at the proper time (Figure F).

Install the Google Calendar app for Android or iOS and connect it to your Calendar account. When you create a new event, tap "more options," which appears just below the event end time. Next, tap the time zone that displays, and add the time zone where your event occurs.

Figure F

Add a time zone to an event from the Google Calendar app on Android or Apple devices.

Each of the above Google Calendar tools helps coordinate your schedule and manage travel as you move between time zones. Use the settings properly, and your events will display at the correct time, regardless of your location. Ignore the settings, and you might miss a meeting. Google can't help with that.... yet. Google Calendar helps you manage time zone challenges, not time travel.

How do you keep engagement, organization, and unity across a team spread out over multiple time zones? If you're having a hard time managing a global team, take some tips from an expert.

In Harvard Business Review, Donna Flynn, an executive at office furniture companySteelcase, offers her global company's best practices. "At Steelcase, we all understand that the rhythm of a global team is not a perfect9-5 melody," she writes. "But understanding something can be very different from living it. My team has grown increasingly distributed across multiple time zones and regions of the world over the last couple of years, and we have learned, through experience and experimentation, a few ways to leverage the value of a global team while also minimizing the pain and disruption it can create for us as individuals."

Below, check out Flynn's five tips to manage your global team.

1. Don't try to work24/7

No matter how much you brag that you can work on two hours of sleep, managing a global team is not a competition to see who can work the longest. Flynn advises to "share the burden of24/7" across the company and not favor your time zone. "Time separation on a global team presents one of the biggest physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges. Despite all our 'understanding' of being a global team, we used to always privilege Grand Rapids [U.S. Eastern Time] in our meeting schedule and make our Asia team members stay up late," she says. "Several months ago, we started a rotating meeting schedule. Every month, each team member now has one evening, one midday, and one early-morning meeting, and misses one meeting that falls in the middle of their night. No team member is expected to attend a team meeting between10 p.m. and7 a.m."

2. Create a consistent schedule

It's your job to make sure meeting times are consistent, to help the remote employees connect with the group. "Serendipitous encounters with colleagues around the world are still limited with our current technologies," Flynn writes. "We have learned that having consistent meetings where people can connect in both formal and informal ways is critical for fostering team cohesion. Our team has weekly meetings to provide this structure--and we make them long enough to allow for technology connection hiccups, formal sharing of project work, and some time for catching up on vacations, travel experiences, or life-stage celebrations like engagements or new babies." Steelcase is also working on a virtual social hour where everyone around the world is invited for breakfast, lunch, or cocktails, depending on his or her time zone.

3. Stay abreast of new tools

It's also important to be on the lookout for new collaboration tools. "The tools available to distributed teams today aren't perfect," Flynn says. "There is no one technology that does everything we need, so we use many of them for different purposes--including Google Drive, Dropbox, Spark, and Murally. We have fully adopted Murally [a digital, highly visual sticky-note canvas] as a team in the last year, and it has dramatically improved our team's collaboration." Flynn says. She explains that her team is still hunting for the best videoconference platform--Group Skype and Google Hangout are too unstable, whereas GoToMeeting offers greater stability but allows only six video feeds. With a team of10-plus people, Flynn says, "it takes a lot of patience and flexibility to use these tools effectively, and adaptability in swapping out tools in the moment as needed--such as dropping an unstable video connection and switching to conference call because the bandwidth in Hong Kong is experiencing latency," she says

4. Be aware of those outside the room

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You need to pay extra attention to employees connecting via phone or video. "At Steelcase, we talk a lot about the concept of 'presence disparity,'" Flynn says. "In meetings that bring people together via different communication channels, individual 'presences' don't necessarily have the same weight in the conversation. For example, people in the same room are more likely to talk to each other and forget about the person on the video screen and the person on the speakerphone." So, don't succumb to privileging the physically present. "The most powerful tool for this is awareness--remember the value that your colleagues around the world bring to the table and honor them with consistent inclusion in the conversation. Practice eye contact with people on video, gently pause a passionate conversation in the room and ask the remote participants to chime in, or experiment with equalizing presence by having everyone call in to the videoconference or conference call individually."

5. Invest in airfare

Flynn says cohesion is an important aspect to a global team. "No tool can replace being together in the same room," she writes. "I bring my globally dispersed team together twice a year for workshops, which have proven invaluable for renewing personal ties, building trust, and having unmediated and embodied experiences together. I have three rules for these workshops: We should build something together, we should learn something together, and we should have plenty of informal, social time. I also use these times for us to engage in team strategic discussions or decision making, since it's much more effective to reach alignment around complex issues when we are in the same room."

Outlook only offers support to show 1 additional time-zone next to your own, which makes efficiently scheduling a meeting between locations in3 or more different time zones quite complicated.

Example meeting

For instance, how would you plan a meeting between the following locations?

• San Francisco
• Houston
• London
• Amsterdam

Methodical method

If you like to go methodical (and enjoy doing calculations with time zones…), you could solve it in the following way;

• As San Francisco and Amsterdam are the farthest apart, check which times are available to you.
• Compare if the resulting time span matches with day time in Houston. Cross out the hours which don’t match.
• From the hours that are still available then, compare it with London.

It’s painfully slow and cumbersome (understatement!), but it is solvable in Outlook this way by changing the additional time zone to compare available times.

Note: Don’t try this in a week view or on a day where DST changes is taking place; the time scale of Outlook doesn’t compensate for that!

Easier method with World Clock Meeting Planner

Whenever there are3 or more time-zones involved, I prefer to use the World Clock Meeting Planner website.

Here you can fill out a form containing the day which you’d like to meet and the cities involved (or nearby).

The result to you is presented in a color coded table so you can now more easily see which time slots are available for a meeting at a respectable time for everyone.

If you also have access to their calendars, you can then use Outlook’s scheduling feature to see if they are truly available at that time.

 World Clock Meeting Planner gives you a color coded overview of suitable times for an on-line meeting. In this case,8am for San Francisco seems the best pick for all.

Windows8 World Clock App

The makers of the aforementioned World Clock Meeting Planner website also offer a great (and free!) time zone App for Windows8 called World Clock – Time Zones.

Aside from showing the current time for a configured city and various other information, you can select your pre-configured time zones and press the “Create Meeting” button at the bottom of the App and be directly taken to the above website with the selected cities already configured for you.

 

Agreed to the experts..........................