Setting Up Meetings With Remote Teams Across US Time Zones

For teams spread from Eastern to Pacific, a recurring meeting anchored between 1 PM and 3 PM Eastern generally lands in reasonable business hours for everyone (10 AM–12 PM Pacific). For teams that also include Hawaii or Alaska, consider rotating the meeting time monthly or quarterly so the burden of an early or late call doesn't always fall on the same zone.

Teams that skip this step often end up defaulting to whichever zone the most senior or most vocal members are in, which can quietly become an unfair long-term pattern even if no one intended it that way.

Calendar invitations that store a specific time zone (rather than a fixed UTC offset) automatically adjust for daylight saving on both ends, which avoids the common mistake of a recurring meeting silently shifting an hour relative to one team's local time after a DST transition.

This matters most in the weeks surrounding the March and November transition dates, when a meeting scheduled before the change can display at the wrong local time for participants if the calendar tool doesn't automatically recalculate the offset.

Explicitly stating which zone a deadline or meeting time refers to in written communication — not just relying on a calendar invite — reduces confusion for team members checking a message outside their calendar app.

Teams that standardize on a single reference zone for all internal documentation, regardless of where any individual writer is physically located, tend to see fewer scheduling mix-ups than teams where every document uses the writer's own local time.

A distributed team with even one member in Arizona, Hawaii, or a US territory needs extra care twice a year: those team members' offset relative to everyone else changes when the rest of the country springs forward or falls back, even though their own clock never moves.

The most reliable practice is to re-confirm meeting times with any team member in a non-DST-observing location right around each transition date, rather than assuming a recurring meeting's local time for them stayed the same.