Continuous Communication - extending communication windows for different time zones

As I've introduced Continuous Communication framework in my previous post, one of the aspects I've talked about was importance to maximally mobilize communication channels. This means extending personal communication availability window beyond one's work place - so that quick chat/voice/video session may occur when one or several of team members are out of their typical office hours.
This helps to implement flexible working hours strategy and also to address a challenge of a restricted communication window for teams in different time zones.

Now, here's two practical ways to implement this advice:

1. Invest into conference calling system and make it standard tool for cross-geography voice meetings.
As people are engaging into communication beyond their office hours, making VoIP calls is not always a good option - for some parts of your geographically distributed team high bandwidth connection may be not available or not reliable, which means utilizing "standard" VoIP tools like Skype of Google Hangout for multi-participant conferencing leads to unreliable and low-quality communication. Conference calling systems like OnConference help hugely in this situation - as they allow every participant to have really high-quality voice conference experience through simply dialing some local number (specified for each country) and then providing 7-digit participant code. In most of cases such dial-in calls are toll-free for participant's private mobile accounts, which removes yet another friction point to use the service. 

2. Utilize commute time for voice conferencing with your team members.
I've learned that regardless of location, for many people home-office commute oftentimes may take 30-120 min per day. It is indeed an excellent opportunity to extend one's voice communication window. If good 4G/LTE coverage is available during commute time, VoIP conferencing may be used. But, especially for conferencing with many participants, conference calling system is an ideal option at this point - one has to simply call their local number and enjoy high-quality multi-participant meeting. Also, having free-hands voice meeting during commute does not lead to driver distraction issues and is legal in most countries.

So, two simple rules: usage of conference calling system and utilization of one's commute time for voice meetings - may give up to two hours of extended communication window every day - a huge opportunity to improve communications in a project!