Conference Calls: Don’t be a Time Zone Snob
I’ve been organizing and participating in many international conference calls over the past couple of weeks. I need to call some people out. Are you one of them? Some American business people are selfish when it comes to scheduling calls with other time zones.
My company is based in the US but we have an amazing global footprint. A lot of business development is shifting outside of the US to combat the stale economy. Non-US meeting participants are more likely to attend conference calls during non-typical business hours for them. US meeting participants are more likely to complain about getting up early or dialing in for calls during the evening.
Here’s what gets me irked. I am scheduling a meeting at 11:00EST. That means it’s 8:00AM on the west coast. That also means it’s about five hours later in Europe and twelve hours later in China. West Coast people complain that they have to come into the office at 7:30 while the China attendees call in late without complaining at all.
Takeaway: Be considerate to all meeting participants and recognize their efforts to join you outside of their normal business rhythm. If you have regular meetings with global participants, rotate the schedule so sometimes they are calling in during their regular hours. It will also help you relate to their perspective by knowing what it’s like to join an inconveniently timed meeting.
Tips: I found this time zone calculator tool very handy to know what time it is in any country. You may also consider posting audio recordings of your meetings to secure servers so that meeting participants can review call afterwards without compromising secure discussions. This is a great practice because it allows people who may not speak the primary language of the meeting review the meeting and allow people who missed the call to be informed.
Have other tips on Global Conference Call etiquette. Tell me your suggestions.
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Tags: China, Company, conference calls, IT, tips
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May 16th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Get everyone to hop on Skype for the conference calls. We commonly do this for calls between West coast / PA / Poland. It’s most convenient for the Europeans, as most of them use Skype at home and can conduct the call while at home. Same for Asia, too, typically. I wish more people in the States used Skype…
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May 16th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Cool blog with some really useful info - but hardly any comments.
I hope it increases for you.
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May 16th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Totally and completely agree.
Another vote for Skype… and in terms of being aware of the timezones, if you use Firefox (and everyone should be, in my opinion), check out the FoxClocks plug-in… it embeds multiple clocks/timezones in the bottom bar of your browser so it’s always there at a glance.
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May 21st, 2008 at 6:10 am
Thanks for the tip, Bronwyn! I’m totally going to download FoxClocks!
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May 22nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Great post Jennifer! http://www.timeanddate.com is another great resource that I’ve used for global calls/meetings.