Global Teams are PossibleĪnother trend in the last 18 months is the relocation of people to smaller communities, more affordable cities, and even moves to other countries. Even while many companies are reopening their office spaces, it may look a little different with hybrid events and more people still working from home. This sudden necessary shift to protect people from a spreading virus also helped many people realize that they were able to be productive and get their work done without having to make a daily commute in traffic to an office building.

According to one study, nearly 50 million employees who suddenly began working from home quickly discovered the perks, including being able to have a pet nearby, doing laundry between meetings, and cooking homemade lunches instead of grabbing takeout or heating up a frozen meal in the microwave. With about one-third of all workers working from home in May of 2020, it was clear that the work could still get done and people could be productive even when they were away from their normal desks. With the coronavirus pandemic shutting down many office spaces and sending people into a brand new remote work position practically overnight, it’s safe to say that the idea of the workplace has made a giant shift. This shifts the onus of meet scheduling back onto the participants, taking the pressure off any one individual.Remote Work Has Become More Common During the Pandemic Once all the votes are cast, the results are there for everyone to see. Then each of them gets to cast their votes for whichever slot suits them best. You can make a clutch of pre-selected time slots available to your attendees. With Doodle’s meeting time planner, the survey feature comes in-built. An online poll is the ideal way to do this. Doodle’s online scheduling tool, for example, automates much of the process of scheduling an event, bringing it down to minutes.Ī big part of coming to an agreement on a meeting time is ensuring everyone’s had a chance to pitch for their preferences. However, when trying to coordinate a meeting across time zones, doing it via email or chat isn’t just inefficient, it can also be counterproductive. This often leads to long-winded back-and-forths with attendees trying to push for their preferred times in an email thread. Traditionally, people try to schedule meetings through discussion. Being aware of this overlap will make it easier for you to book a meeting time on everyone’s planners. When you’re meeting across time zones, your participants are likely to have only part of their working day in common. It might seem self-evident at first, but it can be a really neat way to narrow down the scheduling window without causing conflict amongst your attendees. Here are a few pointers that might make your job easier. As a meeting planner, finding a time and date that works for everybody can be almost as time consuming as the meeting itself. Digital nomads are mainstream and companies are much more likely to have an internationally distributed workforce. Since the advent of the pandemic, remote working is quickly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

What’s likely to complicate this even further is trying to schedule the meeting across time zones. If you’re the designated meeting time planner for an event, the others likely don’t envy you your job. In a nutshell, people just aren’t that keen on them. These figures readily explain why it can be such a challenge to quickly schedule meetings. Despite this, executives consider over 67 percent of meetings to be failures and up to 92 percent of respondents admit to multitasking during a meeting. That statistic climbs to 50 percent for upper management.

Recent reports suggest that organizations spend up to 15 percent of their collective time in meetings.

Schedule multiple time zones