Fair Team Meeting Scheduling
Meetings are critical, but so is respecting time zones and personal boundaries. Co-creating norms as a team helps ensure the schedule is fair and inclusive for everyone.
PREP TIME
5m
Run TIME
60m
Persons
3-10
5-second summary
- Determine as a team the best times to schedule meetings and when to avoid them.
- Agree on how to handle meetings that need to happen outside core working hours.
- Review and adjust scheduling agreements as your team and time zones change.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
- Video conferencing with screen sharing or meeting space
- Digital collaboration tool
- Calendar tool, like Google Calendar or Outlook
- Whiteboard
- Markers
- Sticky notes
- Timer
PLAY resources
How to fairly schedule team meetings
Meetings are critical, but so is respecting time zones and personal boundaries. Co-creating norms as a team ensures the schedule is fair and inclusive for everyone.
What makes a meeting time “fair?”
A fair meeting time is one that:
- Is within working hours for as many team members as possible
- Considers the best ways to participate in meetings that occur outside of core working hours (either synchronous or asynchronous participation)
- Takes into account teammates' personal boundaries and scheduling limitations, such as religious and secular holidays, caregiving responsibilities, common periods of time off, etc.
Why run the “Fair Team Meeting Scheduling” Play?
Collaborating with your team to determine the fairest and most inclusive meeting times helps improve collaboration, increase engagement, and drive innovation, while reducing burnout. It’s a win-win for your people and profits.
When should you run this Play?
It’s never a bad time! This Play is especially helpful to run when:
- New employees join the team
- Team members change time zones, either temporarily or permanently
- Personal circumstances change, such as when someone starts taking care of a loved one
- It’s been a while since the team last aligned on meeting times, and it would be helpful to revisit the schedule
4 benefits of fair meeting scheduling
- Empower teamwork: Researchers find that inclusive meetings unlock innovation, engagement and collective efficacy among diverse collaborators.
- Improve collaboration: 93% of executives believe their teams could deliver work twice as fast through more effective collaboration.
- Reduce burnout: 51% of knowledge workers report having to work overtime multiple days a week because of meeting overload.
- Drive innovation: High-performing teams prioritize innovation by spending less time on alignment meetings, status updates, emails, and handoffs.
1. Prep the Play
Est. time: 5 MIN
Schedule a 60-minute meeting with your team, and send a message explaining the purpose of the meeting and the pre-work to complete.
For the pre-work, you can either use a digital whiteboard, like our example, or ask team members to send their ideas via email, chat, or Loom.
tip: Schedule wisely
Since this Play is all about fair and inclusive meeting scheduling, pick a day and time when as many people as possible are available. If your team is distributed around the world, it may be helpful to do two separate sessions at different times of day, and compare findings.
2. Open with the agenda and norms
Est. time: 5 MIN
The facilitator will open the meeting by sharing the agenda, purpose, and norms for the session.
Sample agenda:
1. Share and discuss what’s hard about scheduling meetings across time zones.
2. Think through what fair scheduling could look like for our team, based on our actual challenges.
3. Agree on team norms we can stick to.
4. Capture concrete action items and owners.
Why we’re doing this:
Our team has limited overlap in core working hours, making it hard to find meeting times that work for everyone – and even harder to protect personal time. This exercise will help us build shared norms for when and how to meet, so we can be more respectful of each other’s time and effective as a distributed team.
Norms for today:
1. Listen with curiosity and care.
2. Be honest about what’s not working.
3. Share ideas and concerns without blame.
4. Respect different experiences and boundaries.
5. Focus on practical solutions.
3. Outline the current state and ideas for improvement
Est. time: 20 min
Ask the team to take 10 minutes to silently brainstorm answers to the following questions. They can write each answer or idea on an individual sticky note.
1. What are your biggest pain points when it comes to working across time zones?
2. Do you have conflicts with the current times you’re expected to be available for meetings?
3. How can we more fairly schedule meetings outside our teammates' ideal working times when needed?
Then, spend 10 minutes sharing the answers as a group, discussing reactions, and agreeing on changes to make going forward.
4. Define scheduling norms
Est. time: 20 min
Based on the answers from the previous section, brainstorm ground rules and team norms to make scheduling fairer, more inclusive, and more predictable. Spend about 4-5 minutes discussing the questions below as a group, and write each answer or idea on individual sticky notes. You can adapt or skip any of these questions based on your team’s needs.
1. How do we manage our individual calendars?
2. How do we handle scheduling meetings outside a teammate’s normal working hours?
3. What happens when someone can’t attend due to personal conflicts?
4. What other ground rules can we commit to?
5. How do we evaluate success and know our agreements are working?
5. Set an action plan
Est. time: 10 min
What specific changes will we commit to? Who will own each action item? When does it need to be done?
Document these next steps clearly, and if helpful, create calendar reminders or work items in your project management system, like Jira.
Wrap up by reviewing the action plan. Make sure each person knows their action items and deadlines, such as adjusting meeting times or blocking out preferred work hours on their calendars.
tip: Consider how to reduce meeting time
Some meetings could easily be replaced with an email, message, or video. If your team is feeling overloaded by meetings and finding it hard to get work done, consider how you could free up schedules while still moving word forward by doing more async work with a tool like Loom.
Follow-up
Review and adjust
Regularly revisit scheduling agreements as your team and time zones change.
Still have questions?
Start a conversation with other Atlassian Team Playbook users, get support, or provide feedback.
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