A meeting marked 9 a.m. on the organiser’s calendar can occupy someone else’s dinner or evening care routine. When the same person always absorbs that inconvenience, an apparently neutral schedule becomes a repeated demand on one part of the team.
Start by asking which hours are workable, not by assuming that location tells you everything about availability. Working patterns, caring responsibilities and contractual arrangements can differ within the same city.
Find the overlap for this date
Use the calendar’s time-zone display for the actual meeting date. Seasonal clock changes do not happen everywhere or on identical dates, so a recurring slot can shift relative to another colleague’s local day.
Publish the intended time with the appropriate zone and send a calendar invitation. Avoid relying only on an abbreviation that different readers may interpret differently. Ask participants to flag a mismatch early.
Where no comfortable overlap exists, identify which discussions truly require everyone at once. A written update, a recorded explanation with an accessible alternative, or a document open for comments may handle some work better.
Make rotation visible and predictable
If an inconvenient live session is necessary, agree how the burden will rotate rather than quietly defaulting to headquarters. Share the schedule far enough ahead for people to plan. Rotation should respect individual constraints; fairness is not achieved by forcing everyone through an equally unusable hour.
Give people who cannot attend a clear way to contribute before the decision. State when comments are due, who will read them and how the result will be communicated. A recording posted after a settled decision is not the same as participation.
After a few cycles, review attendance and ask privately whether the arrangement works. Do not interpret silence in an early or late meeting as lack of interest. The schedule itself may be shaping who speaks.
Keep the agreed approach in the team’s working notes. When a new colleague joins or a location changes, revisit it. A good distributed-team routine makes time visible instead of treating one person’s normal working day as the universal default.