Team call with team members in APAC and recording it
We've added several team members in APAC timezones recently, and expect to continue to add more. The team call is currently scheduled mon-thu 8:30 am, pacific time. That works out to 3:30 am in New Zealand, as an example, or 11:30 pm in Perth, or 9:30 pm in Bengaluru (if I used google correctly). Not great times for a team call.
Some ideas on how we can deal with this:
- Start having two team calls per day; each still voluntary, both working off the same team agenda, spread apart by 12 hours. Initially participation in the "late" meeting (pacific perspective) would be low, but as the APAC team grows and if people decide to work a "late" day instead of an early day, participation will grow. By maintaining the daily cadence and using the same team agenda, we make knowledge transfer fast and effective. Functional group updates will be harder to do this way.
- Have just one team call per day, but move the hour in the day when it is held in e.g. 6 hr increments per day, so over the course of a week most people can participate easily in two calls, and everyone has a chance. Seems like it would make for tough scheduling, and also seems similar to reducing the team meeting frequency to twice a week in each timezone "group".
- Relevant article from HBR, point 1 of 5 argues for "rotating the burden of the timezone".