Cross-Time-Zone Meetings: Who Actually Pays for Them

Any team that works across more than one region has a version of the same joke: someone is always on the 7 a.m. call, and it's usually the same person. Microsoft Research looked at this in its own calendars. The study covered 20 million meetings at a company with offices around the world, and it puts real numbers on what that joke costs.

A Third of Meetings Already Cross a Time Zone

The study, Challenging but Connective, was presented at the ACM CHI 2023 conference. Researchers from Microsoft, the University of Toronto, and UC San Diego analyzed meetings scheduled across Microsoft from January to July 2022 and paired that data with a survey of 130 employees.

About one in three meetings (33%) had attendees in different time zones. Those meetings were also bigger, with 36% more attendees on average. That means a typical employee could expect 47% of the events on their calendar to span more than one time zone.

The trend hasn't reversed. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index special report, Breaking down the infinite workday, found 30% of meetings now span multiple time zones. That's 8 percentage points higher than in 2021. Meetings that start after 8 p.m. were up 16% year over year, and Microsoft says cross-time-zone collaboration drove much of the increase.

The Price Is Paid in Odd Hours

The researchers defined an "odd-hours" meeting as one that starts before 8 a.m. or ends after 6 p.m. in the attendee's local time. Across all meetings, 10.6% fell into odd hours. Compared with single-time-zone meetings of the same size, cross-time-zone meetings were 2.6 times more likely to land at odd hours. Once a meeting includes more than five time zones, it falls at an odd hour for more than a third of the people on it.

That clashes directly with what people say they want. In the survey's open-ended answers, 91% said normal working hours are the best time for meetings. Of the 119 respondents who recently worked across time zones, 63% said they often have to meet at odd hours and another 20% said they sometimes do. Only five said they never do, and four of those five were based in the US, near the company's headquarters.

The Burden Isn't Shared Evenly

The most useful finding in the paper is about who pays. The costs fall unevenly in three ways:

• By location. Meetings between the US and India were 6.5 times more likely to fall at odd hours than US-only meetings for the US attendees, and 4.6 times more likely for the India-based attendees. Employees in Japan were 3.1 times more likely to meet at odd hours when collaborating with another country than in Japan-only meetings.
• Within a location. In offices far from the company's Pacific time zone headquarters, a small group of employees took on most of the cross-time-zone meetings. In effect, they became unofficial "time zone brokers" for their teams.
• Between organizer and attendee. The person sending the invite was better placed to pick a time that suited them than the people receiving it.

Respondents noticed this. Fourteen percent brought up fairness without being asked about it. One participant described a common approach: everyone takes a slightly early or late slot, which "feels much better than alternating when one side is hugely inconvenienced and it's normal hours for the other side."

Why the Answer Isn't Fewer Global Meetings

The obvious fix would be to push cross-time-zone work into email and chat. The researchers argue against it. Cross-time-zone meetings brought together people who were further apart in the org chart and worked in more varied contexts than people in same-time-zone meetings. In the survey, 26% of respondents named diversity of perspective as a reason to meet across time zones, and 17% named connection. Cutting these meetings would remove some of the few chances distant colleagues have to work together live.

What's missing is better ways of handling them. Of employees who work across time zones, 86% meet at odd hours at least sometimes, but only 19% block out set hours reserved for distant colleagues. That's one of the cheapest fixes there is, and the people who use it like it because it makes the week predictable. Calendar tools also make it hard: one participant wished their calendar "let me add 5 time zones. I need Japan, Australia, India, England, Dallas, and Seattle."

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What This Means for How Teams Schedule

The cost of a cross-time-zone meeting goes beyond the hour on the calendar. It also includes who had to be up early or online late to attend, and whether that's the same person every time. Teams can act on that cost:

• Pick a regular overlap window for cross-region meetings and protect it, instead of negotiating every invite from scratch.
• Rotate the inconvenient slot, or split the difference so nobody is always the one on at 7 a.m.
• Notice who has become the team's time zone broker, and share that load.
• Use scheduling tools that show each attendee's local time and working hours, not just whether they're free or busy.

Global meetings aren't going away, and the research says they shouldn't. The goal is to stop them landing on the same few people.

Frequently Asked Questions

How common are cross-time-zone meetings? In Microsoft Research's analysis of 20 million meetings in 2022, about one third had attendees in different time zones. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index put the figure at 30%, up 8 percentage points since 2021.

Are cross-time-zone meetings really more likely to happen at bad times? Yes. Compared with single-time-zone meetings of the same size, they were 2.6 times more likely to start before 8 a.m. or end after 6 p.m. local time for at least one attendee.

Who carries most of the burden? It depends on location and role. Employees far from headquarters, and a small group of "broker" employees within those offices, took on a disproportionate share of odd-hours meetings. Organizers were also better able to pick times that suited them than the people they invited.

What is the simplest fix teams can try? Reserve a regular block of overlap hours for cross-region meetings. In the study, 86% of cross-time-zone workers met at odd hours at least sometimes, yet only 19% used blocked overlap hours, and those who did valued the predictability.

Sources: Mok, Sun, Sen & Sarrafzadeh, "Challenging but Connective: Large-Scale Characteristics of Synchronous Collaboration Across Time Zones," CHI 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581141); Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report, "Breaking down the infinite workday," June 2025 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday).