Reading — Whose Morning Is It Anyway?

Working across borders

Whose Morning Is It Anyway?

Every recurring international meeting quietly decides whose day matters. Most companies never notice they decided.

Adapted from guidance on global virtual teams

Look at the weekly call your company has with its offices abroad. Now look at what time it happens. If it is a comfortable mid-morning for head office and half past eight in the evening for the team in Singapore, you have not made a scheduling choice. You have made a statement about whose time is worth more, and it is being received clearly, week after week.

Specialists in distributed teams have a name for this: time zone bias. It is the tendency to set every recurring meeting around the convenience of one region. Nobody decides it maliciously. It simply happens, because the people booking the meeting are in the room where it is convenient. The effect on everyone else is a slow feeling of being peripheral.

Find the golden hours, and protect them

The practical fix is unromantic: map the working hours of everyone involved and find the window — often only one or two hours — where the day genuinely overlaps. Those are your golden hours. Everything that truly needs to be live goes there. Then rotate: if one region always takes the awkward slot, move it around the calendar so the discomfort is shared rather than assigned.

And be honest about how much has to be live at all. The guidance for distributed teams is blunt: keep synchronous meetings to a minimum, and replace status updates with something written or recorded that people can read at eight in the morning their time, not eight at night.

The quiet ones are not agreeing

There is a second bias, harder to see. In a call held in English, the people who speak most are usually the native speakers and the extroverts. Silence from everyone else gets read as agreement. It rarely is. It is more often someone composing a sentence, waiting for a gap that never comes, and eventually deciding it was not that important.

Good chairs design around this. They open more than one channel — chat, a poll, a comment thread after the call — so that contributing does not require winning a race to speak. They rotate who runs the meeting, which quietly redistributes authority. And they summarise visually as they go, because a decision written on a shared screen survives an accent that somebody did not quite catch.

Then comes the part that decides whether any of it mattered: the follow-up. Notes that confirm what was decided, who owns what, and by when. Without them, everyone leaves the call with a slightly different version of what happened — and in four weeks you will discover which version each person took away. With them, the meeting has a paper trail, and the person in the difficult time zone has something to point at.