Principles for Global Online Meetings

Sunday, 26 October 2025

One of the tricker problems for organisations that aspire to be global is scheduling a series of meetings. While the Internet has brought the ability to meet with colleagues and stakeholders all over the world, it hasn’t been able to get everyone on the same daily tempo – the earth is still not flat.

As someone who has participated in such organisations from Australia for nearly two decades, I’ve formed some fairly strong opinions about how their meetings should be arranged. What follows is an attempt to distill those thoughts into a set of principles that’s flexible enough to apply to a variety of situations.

Keep in mind the intended application is to a series of global meetings, not a single one-off event. Also, if the set of people who need to attend a given meeting are in timezones that lead to an agreed-to “good” time, you should use that time – but then I question if your organisation is really global. For the rest, read on.

0. It’s About Equity

For global organisations, meeting scheduling is an equity issue. Arranging a meeting where some people can attend from the convenience of their office in normal business hours while others have to stay up into the middle of the night is not equitable – the former have very low friction for attending, while the latter have to disrupt their lives, families, relationships, and sleep cycles to attend.

When a person does make the extra effort to attend at a less-than-ideal hour, they will not be at their best. Being awake outside your normal hours means that you aren’t thinking as clearly and might react more emotionally than otherwise. Interrupting an evening after a long day can impact your focus. Effective participation is difficult under these conditions.

I cast this as an equity issue because I’ve observed that many don’t perceive it that way. This is often the case if someone’s experience is that most meetings are scheduled at reasonable hours, they don’t have to think about it, and people in other parts of the world staying up late or getting up early to talk to them is normal. It’s only when people realise this privilege and challenge what’s normal that progress can be made. If you want a truly global organisation, people need to be able to participate on equal footing, and that means that some people will need to make what looks like – to them – sacrifices, because they’re used to things being a certain way.

With that framing as an equity issue in mind, it becomes clear what must be done: the ‘pain’ of participating needs to be shared in a way that’s equitable. The focus then becomes characterising what pain is, and how to dole it out in a fair way while still holding functional meetings.

The most common method for scheduling a meeting that involves people from all over the globe involves picking “winners” and “losers”. Mary and Joe in North America get a meeting in their daytime; the Europeans have something in their evening, and Asia/Pacific folks have to get up early. Australians get the hardest service – they’re usually up past midnight, but sometimes get roused at 5am or so, depending on the fluctuations of daylight savings. Often, this will be justified with a poll or survey asking for preferences, but one where all options are reasonable for a priviledged set of participants, and most are unreasonable for others.

This is all wrapped up in very logical explanations: it’s the constraints we work within, the locations of the participants narrow down the options, it doesn’t make sense to inconvenience a large number of people for the benefit of a few. Or the kicker: if we scheduled the meeting at that time, the folks who are used to having meetings at good times for them wouldn’t come.

All of those are poor excuses that should be challenged, but often aren’t because this privilege is so deeply embedded.

What can be done? The primary tool for pain-sharing is rotation. Schedule meetings in rotating time slots so that everyone has approximately the same number of “good”, “ok”, and “bad” time slots. This is how you put people on even footing.

It may even mean intentionally scheduling in a way that people will miss a slot – e.g., two out of three. In this case, you’ll need to build tools to make sure that information is shared between meetings (you should be keeping minutes and, tracking action items, and creating summaries anyway!), that decisions don’t happen in any one meeting, and that people have a chance to see a variety of people, not just the same subset every time.

For example, imagine an organisation that needs to meet weekly, and has three members in different parts of Europe, five across North America, two in China, and one each in Australia and India. If they rotate between three time slots for their meetings, they might end up with:

• UTC: 02:00 / 11:00 / 17:00
• Australia/Eastern: 12:00 / 21:00 / 03:00 (+1d)
• China/Shanghai: 10:00 / 19:00 / 01:00 (+1d)
• US/Eastern: 22:00 (-1d) / 07:00 / 14:00
• Europe/Central: 04:00 / 13:00 / 19:00
• India/Mumbai: 07:30 / 16:30 / 22:30

Notice that everyone has approximately one “good” slot, one “ok” slot, and one “bad” slot – depending on each individual’s preferences, of course.

One objection I’ve heard to this approach is that it would lead to a state where most of the people go to just one or two of the meetings, and the others are poorly attended. That kind of fragmentation is certainly possible, but in my opinion it says more about the diversity of your organisation and the commitment of the people attending the meeting – both factors that should be separately addressed, not loaded onto some of the participants as meeting pain. Doing so is saying that some people won’t attend if they’re exposed to the conditions that they ask of others.

2. Pain is Individual

A common approach to scheduling weighs decisions by how many people are in each timezone. For example, if you’ve got ten people in North America, three in Europe, and one in Asia, you should obviously arrange things to inconvenience the fewest number of people, right?

The problem is, each of those people experiences the pain individually – it is not a collective phenomenon. The person in Asia doesn’t experience 1/14th of the pain if they need to get up at 4:30am for a call. Making things slightly inconvenient for the North Americans doesn’t magnify the pain they experience times ten.

So, don’t weigh your decisions by how many people are in a particular timezone or region. Of course there are limits to this principle – if it’s 100:1 you need to be able to function as a group (e.g., be quorate). But again, I’m questioning whether you’re really a global organisation here; you’re effectively gaslighting the people who are trying to participate from elsewhere by calling yourself one.

3. Pain is Specific

It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone’s circumstances are the same – that if a 7am meeting is painful for you, it’s equally painful for someone else.

In reality, some people are morning people, while others don’t mind staying up until 2am. Some people might have a family dinner every Thursday night that would be disrupted by your meeting, while others are happy to use that time because that’s when they have the house to themselves.

This means you need to ask what people’s preferences and conflicts are, rather than (for example) assume that 7am-9am is ok, 9am-5pm is good, 5pm-10pm is ok, and everything else is bad. The mechanics of how that information is gathered depends upon the nature of your group, but it needs to be sensitive to privacy and resistant to gaming.

4. Pain is Relative

One of the complications of scheduling meetings across timezones is balancing the various kinds of conflicts and inconveniences that they bring up for a proposed time slot. John has to pick up the kids in that timeslot; Hiro is eating breakfast. Marissa needs to have dinner with her family. And Mark just wants a good night’s sleep for once.

I propose a hierarchy of inconvenience and pain, from most to least impactful:

1. Rearranging your life - changing your sleep schedule, working on weekends (remember, Friday in North America is Saturday in other parts of the world)
2. Rearranging family life - shifting meals, changing child or elderly care arrangements
3. Moving other meetings - managing conflicts with other professional commitments

When asking for conflicts for a given time slot, the higher items should always override the lower forms of pain. I’m sure this could be elaborated upon and extended, but it’s a good starting point.

I sometimes also hear about another kind of pain: that rotating meetings makes it hard for some people to keep their calendars. To me, this isn’t #4; it’s #100.

5. Circumstances Change

People aren’t static. Their lives change, their families change, their health changes. If your meetings are scheduled over long periods of time, that means you need to be responsive to these changes, periodically checking to see if their preferences need updating.

I used to be a night person. I’d be up until at least midnight, sometimes two or three, and mornings would be a real struggle. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’m finding that many mornings I wake naturally at five or so, and I’m ready to sleep at around 10pm unless I’m out of the house. That change has fundamentally affected how I attend meetings.

And, of course, if you have participants in the Southern hemisphere (and you should!), you have to account for the differences in daylight savings, due to the differences in seasons. It’s not just a one-hour shift – it’s two, and that can make a big difference to someone’s quality of life.

6. Respect People’s Time

Appreciate that what’s just another meeting in the middle of your workday is a huge effort in the middle of the night for someone else; don’t fritter away a substantial portion on chitchat. Have an agenda and be prepared to make the meeting valuable. Use offline, asynchronous tools when they’re more appropriate.

Likewise, don’t cancel or re-schedule a meeting at the last minute (or even last day). Setting an alarm for an early meeting and struggling through getting presentable and caffeinated only to find it’s been axed is distinctly unpleasant.