This Scheduling Habit Is One Of The Rudest Work Behaviors. Are You Guilty Of It?

Do you schedule meetings without checking for time zones? Do you assume your “first thing in the morning” works for everyone? Each time you schedule a work event, you could be irking every participant with your assumptions of when you expect this meeting to take place.

That’s because you could be guilty of a time zone bias. It’s where you assume that everyone else is operating in the same time zone as you.

As humans, we’re susceptible to “proximity bias” at work, according to researchers at the University of California at Davis. In studies, they found that we favor the people we physically see more, and that employees who appear in person get more career opportunities. And in theory, you may automatically favor the time zones of the people you physically see more ― while forgetting about the remote colleagues you see less of each day.

But in an increasingly global and remote workforce, not acknowledging potential time zone differences is a rude and disrespectful mistake to make. Yet it’s an all-too-common one.

Arianne Young, who runs her virtual assistant business Not Your Average Girl Friday, said this time-zone error is one of her top pet peeves. In her experience, people on the West Coast are the “biggest culprits,” expecting everyone to know they mean Pacific Daylight Time/Pacific Standard Time when scheduling.

“The rudest action I experience is a calendar invite being sent without the sender confirming my or my client’s availability,” she said. “They, more often than not, don’t consider that the time zones may differ… or they think it’s better to just ‘get something in the calendar,’ and then the back and forth begins to find a time that actually works. It is a waste of time, it’s disrespectful, and it’s such an