converge · Meeting Management, Planning · 60–65 min · 3-10 people · medium energy

Fair Meeting Scheduling

A distributed team agrees how it schedules meetings so that the inconvenience of time zones is shared fairly. People first brainstorm silently on what is hard about coordinating across zones and how off-hours meetings are handled now. The team then writes norms for calendars, off-hours meetings and conflicts, and assigns owners to put them in place.

When to use Fair Meeting Scheduling

Use when one part of a global team always takes the early or late calls, or when meeting times are quietly causing burnout.

What it solves

The team in headquarters' time zone sets every meeting time, and colleagues elsewhere join at midnight without complaining.

How to run Fair Meeting Scheduling, step by step

  1. Prep: schedule the session at the most inclusive time and send an optional async pre-work board (5 min).
  2. Open with the agenda and norms: curious, honest, blame-free. Explain that fair means within working hours for as many people as possible (5 min).
  3. Silent brainstorm: what is hard about coordinating across zones, which meeting times clash with your availability, how should we handle necessary off-hours meetings? (10 min)
  4. Share and discuss reactions (10 min).
  5. Define norms for calendar hygiene, off-hours protocols, personal conflicts and how you will know it works (20 min).
  6. Action plan: owners, deadlines and calendar reminders (10 min).

Materials needed

  • Video call with screen share
  • Digital whiteboard
  • Team members' calendars
  • Timer

Facilitator tips

  • Before scheduling anything, ask which meetings could become async updates instead.
  • Rotate inconvenient slots instead of fixing them on one region.
  • Revisit the agreement whenever someone joins from a new time zone.

Common pitfalls

  • People in the favoured time zone dominate the discussion. Have remote regions speak first.
  • Norms are written but calendars are never changed.

Variations

  • Run the current-state step fully async over a few days and use the live hour only for norms and actions.

Running it online or hybrid

Run on a video call with a digital whiteboard. For teams spread across many zones, run it twice at different times and merge results.

What it produces

A written set of scheduling norms with owners, deadlines and a review date.

Origin

A play from Atlassian's Team Playbook for distributed teams working across time zones. — source

Build a session around Fair Meeting Scheduling

METODIC places Fair Meeting Scheduling inside a complete, timed session plan — agenda, worksheets, facilitator guide and slides — matched to your group and goal.

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