In today’s global communities that interface and communicate with other global communities, it can be a challenge to figure out what time that virtual meeting will be! Many of us are unfamiliar with most of the three letter country codes around the world, then there are other countries and places that don’t have their own country codes and use UTC offsets. Then there are some huge countries that have only one time zone or consolidated some of their time zones into each other! This isn’t even scratching the surface of places that have unusual time offsets.
To cut to the “short version” first, the best practice for publishing the time for your global meeting is using “UTC” in many cases.
When scheduling meetings, it’s a handy shortcut to let all the participants know what the UTC time the meeting will be held at. If you have your calendars set up to use GMT, that will work too even though it’s not the time standard itself. Just remember that some places in the GMT time zone do use daylight savings time in the summer months! With that information everyone can calculate exactly when the meeting will take place where they will be physically located. In many cases most of the current scheduling applications in use today will automatically calculate and display the local time for the meeting if the UTC or GMT is entered. If you expect most of the meeting’s participants to be from a few specific locations, by all means list it in the time zones for your target audiences, but don’t forget UTC/GMT for those further around the globe.
Special thanks to @AdamGT for the encouragement to write this post. If you have any personal experiences or funny stories to tell about time zone confusion, please leave a reply and your story. I’d especially like to hear from anyone that lives in places that have virtual horizontal time zones during parts of the year, like parts of Australia that use - or don’t use - daylight savings time during the year causing them to change time zones by just by driving north or south during different seasons of the year 