Mistakes are rarely made by one person – in fact they are usually down to EVERYONE, because anyone could have done something to avoid it, but nobody did. This is important, because it means that blame is futile, and unfair.
Here’s a recent example.
We had an important zoom meeting, with people from various countries attending, and the invitation said “3pm GMT” when actually we are on summer time now, so technically it should have said 3pm BST.
(I’ve learned to just say “UK time” because that is always true and correct, though possibly less helpful).
Anyway, several people joined the meeting from other countries at their equivalent of 3pm GMT instead of BST, and BST is an hour ahead, so they arrived just as we were finishing. AAARGGHHH!!
What could we have done to avoid this?
The person arranging the meeting could have
- Known we were in BST and not put GMT on the invite
- Sent a diary invite to each person, which automatically translates the time into their diary correctly
- Reminded each person a day or three hours or an hour beforehand, and of those would do, saying “See you in exactly 24 hours / 3 hours / 1 hour from now”. This may sound over the top, but I often do it when I’m joining foreign meetings because THEY sometimes have summer time, and the US has all these confusing things like Mountain Time and Central Time, so it’s worth checking, I have learned the hard way!
I as the overall manager could have
- checked that at least one of the above was done
- wondered where several of the participants were when they didn’t arrive for the start
- pick up on the fact that one of them said he was just checking in an hour early since he’d been invited for GMT but suspected it should have been BST.
The delegates who missed the session could have
- Asked for a diary invite, just to be safe
- Realised that the UK is on BST (many time converter apps will tell you this) and questioned the invite
- Checked beforehand, saying “See you in exactly 24 hours / 3 hours / 1 hour from now”. This may sound over the top, but I often do it when I’m joining foreign meetings because THEY sometimes have summer time, and the US has all these confusing things like Mountain Time and Central Time, so it’s worth checking, I have learned the hard way!
So any ONE of us could have stopped this from happening, and yet none of us did. Oh well – we’ve all just got to learn from it!!
