A project manager is launching an agile project with team members located in multiple countries. In order to connect the team and improve the overall productivity, what should the project manager do?

While bringing teams together can foster bonding, it's often expensive and not a sustainable or primary way to improve *overall productivity* for ongoing distributed agile work.

Being the *primary point of contact for all* regional meetings centralizes communication too much on the PM and can create a bottleneck, hindering direct team-to-team collaboration and self-organization.

For geographically dispersed teams, especially those in multiple countries, having a structured communication approach is vital. Scheduling regular meetings with a key contact from each region streamlines information flow, allows for regional updates and challenges to be addressed, and centralizes communication points, thereby improving overall coordination and productivity across different time zones without requiring all members to be present at every meeting. This helps in bridging geographical and time zone gaps effectively.

Keeping all meetings at the same time based on one headquarters' time zone is highly impractical and inconsiderate for team members in vastly different time zones, leading to exhaustion and lack of participation.