If you schedule international live online learning you will be familiar with all the nuances of time zones.
Because live online training is normally no longer than 90 minutes a mistaken hour can mean the difference between having an audience – or wasting a lot of your colleagues’ time. So it is important to know your time zones.
Firstly with attendees joining from all over the world it can be a challenge to find a time which is suitable for everyone. Try creating a meeting which delegates in America and Pakistan can both join in office hours, especially when the US delegates are on west coast time.
Also, at certain times of the year you will be faced with seasonal variances in time zones, sometimes for only short periods.
Here are some of Emailogic’s top tips to ensure that your delegates have a smooth training journey:
Use a time zone converter – it is the easiest way to ensure that your planned webinar will happen in the correct time zone for each attendee location.
If running a large training programme create your own time zone spreadsheet. It will quickly show you what’s possible in terms of sharing courses between time zones (you are welcome to Emailogic’s time zone spreadsheet – just ask!).
Provide low call international numbers for all participating countries – if they are not using VoIP.
If they are using VoIP make sure all the delegates have the bandwidth to support VoIP comfortably.
Make sure that Joining Instructions are sent in the correct language. Set up dummy webinars in local languages and test that they work for each location and time zone.
How many Time Zones are there?
Do remember that there are 24 time zones in the world….
UK has 1
USA has 9 of which only 5 cover mainland states
Russia has 11
China and India both have 1
Beware of midnight zone
And if you ever decide to run a webinar at midnight (e.g. from the UK for Australia or Singapore) make sure you double check the date. Some webinar applications will recognise midnight on 2nd Oct as the very start of the day! So to ensure that you have all the delegates online together we recommend that you schedule the session for 11.55pm on 1st October if you want to meet at “midnight” on 2nd October. A small oversight could easily cost you 24 hours! If you are still confused ask yourself – why do we refer to midnight as 12.00AM? For a simple explanation visit this link.
Did you know?
GMT is the standard time zone in Ireland and the United Kingdom, including England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. All of these countries use BST during part of the year, but under different names.
The only European country which stays on GMT all year round is Iceland!
