The live hour
The Side That Could Not Attend
Somebody is always absent from an international call, and what happens to the decisions taken in their absence determines whether they ever attend again.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
Our engineering office, Auckland
Working 08:00 to 17:00
The client's technical department, Lisbon
Working 08:00 to 17:00 their time, which is 19:00 to 04:00 here
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
Five working days a week in common and not one working hour. Everything on that contract was going to be written down whether anybody planned for it or not.
To keep remote-work decisions transparent, teams can project time reporting software and discuss the resulting patterns together instead of treating activity as a private managerial score.
For broader context beyond this collection, see the resources published by GOV.UK.
Four parties invited to one call, and who could actually be there
Us, Hamburg, who set the time
The call is at 15:00, which is the middle of our afternoon
The client, Dubai
18:00 for them, an hour after they finish, and they attend anyway
The shop, Taipei
22:00 for them, and they stopped attending after the third week
The forwarder, Chicago
08:00 for them, which is the one comfortable seat at the table
four parties · four days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu
The time was chosen by the party with the least to lose by it, which is the usual way these times get chosen. The party that stopped attending was the one actually making the thing. One team's own job.
On any call across a wide spread, somebody is not there. Either the hour did not exist for them, or it existed at eleven at night and they stopped coming.
What happens to that party afterwards is what determines whether the arrangement works at all.
The failure
Decisions get taken on the call. The minutes, if there are any, record outcomes rather than reasoning. The absent party receives a list of things that have been decided about their work, by people who were talking to each other.
They then either comply, which is bad because they knew something nobody asked, or they object, which is worse because it reopens everything a week later.
Either way, a party who is told what was decided twice stops treating the forum as one they are part of, and the information they hold stops reaching it.
The three things an absent party needs
The reasoning, not only the outcome. A decision with its reasoning can be assessed, and the absent party can say "that will not work because of X". A decision without reasoning can only be accepted or fought.
An explicit window to object. Not an implied one. "If you do not come back by Thursday your time we will proceed on this basis" gives a real opportunity and a real deadline.
Their input beforehand. The strongest of the three. Anything affecting the absent party should have been asked of them before the call, so that their position is in the room even though they are not.
The note that does this
Written immediately after, not the following week.
Decided: we will accept the 0.5 mm tolerance rather than re-machining.
Why: re-machining costs eight days and the client has confirmed the fit is acceptable at 0.5 mm.
Taipei — this affects your Thursday setup. If there is a reason this does not work, tell me before 10:00 your time on Wednesday and we will revisit. Otherwise we will proceed.
Three short blocks. The second is what makes the third meaningful.
Recording the call
A recording is better than nothing and much worse than a written note.
It is forty minutes of somebody else's working day to listen to, in a second language, with poor audio and three people talking over each other. It is not searchable in any practical sense, and the one piece of information that matters to the absent party is somewhere in the middle of it.
Where a recording is made, it should accompany a written summary rather than replace one. Where only one is possible, write.
The better arrangement
Where a party cannot attend a joint call at any reasonable hour, stop inviting them to it and give them their own slot.
Two conversations of twenty-five minutes, each inside both participants' working days, produce better decisions than one hour with somebody attending at eleven at night. The cost is the coordination between the two conversations, which falls on whoever is in the middle, and that is a fair place for it to fall: it is usually the party who chose the structure.
Who chooses the time
In the panel above, the time was set by the party whose afternoon it was. That is almost always how it happens, and it is almost always the customer.
It is worth being aware of, because the party who stops attending is usually the one doing the physical work, and their absence is the expensive one. A schedule that is comfortable for the people with the least to contribute and impossible for the people with the most is not an accident; it is what results when nobody asks.
Asking takes one line: "what time would actually suit you — I would rather move ours than have you join at ten at night." The answer is given honestly and it is remembered for a long time.
Rotating what cannot be shared
Where a joint call genuinely has to exist and no hour suits everybody, the thing to rotate is not the time but the inconvenience.
A call that alternates between a time comfortable for Europe and Asia and a time comfortable for Europe and the Americas gives each distant party a usable seat every other week, and gives the party in the middle a consistent one. That is unequal, and it is visibly less unequal than a fixed time that suits one party permanently.
The thing that makes it work is announcing the pattern rather than letting it drift. A published rota — these weeks at this hour, those weeks at that — lets everybody plan around it, and removes the suspicion that the time was set by whoever happened to be organising it that month.