🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

When teams are dispersed across multiple time zones, when should you schedule meetings? 

💡 Concept

Core meeting hours are periods of time during the workday reserved for essential team meetings. Establishing such designated time frames ensures that team members can be available for synchronous meetings that involve collaboration, discussion, and decision-making. 

Setting core meeting hours also helps to streamline communication, facilitate coordination, and establish and hold boundaries, especially in teams that span multiple time zones or schedules. 

The specific core meeting hours can vary depending on the team and organizational preferences, working culture, and time zones of team members. Use these questions to help your team set core meeting hours: 

• What time zones are we in? 

• What hours of the day do we work? 

• What hours of the day do we have obligations that would keep us from attending or actively participating in synchronous meetings? (Examples include: picking up children from school, meal times) 

Note that core meeting hours are not necessarily the only times you will ever have meetings—depending on business, stakeholder, or customer needs, you may have other meetings scheduled outside these designated hours. But by limiting the time you spend in team meetings, you’ll have greater flexibility outside of those hours to accomplish other types of tasks and obligations.

🎬 Take Action

• Use the questions listed in the previous section to have a discussion with your team about setting core meeting hours. 

• Use a spreadsheet to track your team’s availability and to identify the best times to designate as core meeting hours. (The linked spreadsheet is a Google sheet—you’ll be prompted to make a copy when you click the link.)

• Add your team’s core meeting hours to your team agreements, such as a team working agreement, communication charter, or boundaries agreement.

• Schedule team meetings only during core meeting hours.

• Use time outside of core meetings hours for other tasks, such as deep work. 

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Learn more about how to run effective virtual meetings with Leadplaceless. 

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.