Our remote team shares the time zones, but not the inconvenience

Our team has a slide showing four time zones and a sentence about working asynchronously.

Our recurring meeting schedule tells a different story.

I am on the West Coast. Most of the leadership team is on the East Coast, with two coworkers in Central time and one in Mountain time. The weekly planning meeting begins at 6:30 a.m. for me. The monthly review begins at 6 a.m. A new cross-team meeting was just added at 7 a.m. every other Thursday.

Nobody chose those times to be cruel. The organizers searched for an hour that did not run late for the East Coast and did not conflict with customer calls. “Early Pacific” became the solution because it looked open on the calendar.

What bothers me is that the inconvenience never rotates. I wake before 5:30, try not to wake my partner, and present while the rest of the group is starting an ordinary morning. When I suggested moving the monthly review later once per quarter, a director said consistency helps attendance.

Consistency helps everyone whose day already fits the schedule.

The company does allow flexible hours, so I can log off earlier after an early meeting. In practice, afternoon decisions and client requests still arrive on East Coast time. If I leave at 2:30, I miss the part of the day when people suddenly need answers before their own evening. The flexibility exists in policy but not in the flow of work.

I have tried making the async system real. I send written updates before the meeting, record short explanations, and mark which agenda items need me live. The meetings still proceed as if attendance is the default. Once, I skipped because my section had no decisions. The organizer messaged during the call asking whether I was joining.

I am not asking for every meeting to suit me. A distributed team means somebody will occasionally have a bad hour. I am asking for the bad hour to be treated as a shared cost instead of a permanent feature of one location.

I plan to propose three changes: rotate the monthly review between two times, make written updates sufficient when no live decision involves someone, and track decisions in one place so missing a call does not mean missing the work.

Is that too much process for a small team? How have distributed teams made time-zone fairness practical instead of turning it into a value written on an onboarding slide?