In 2021, Salesforce undertook a bold experiment to uncover new ways of working. Over the course of several weeks, large chunks of the organization, tens of thousands of people, tried to go meeting-free for a full week. It’s been so enlightening and successful that in June, we held our third “async week.”
Several divisions within the company now plan quarterly async weeks in which everyone from senior executives to individual contributors are encouraged to cancel all meetings, with exceptions for critical business issues, training, and customer meetings. The goal? Find better ways to work and give employees more control over their workday.
With millions working remotely, this kind of growth hacking is front of mind for many businesses. An article in Harvard Business Review noted the need to change how we work. “Well meaning band-aid solutions [like logging off at 5 p.m.] achieve little if the toxic norms that rob knowledge workers of autonomy and control remain in place.”
What we’ve learned about going meeting-free
Through employee surveys and with two async weeks under our belt, we’ve learned some best practices for going meeting-free:
- Plan, plan, plan. It’s critical for managers and their teams to set clear expectations around priorities, deadlines, and how best to communicate and engage with each other during the week. Give teams plenty of time (weeks) to prepare.
- Share resources and tips on managing digital overload in the absence of meetings. It may be as simple as pausing notifications.
- Encourage teams to find new ways of working instead of just deferring existing ones. Don’t just move a meeting from Google Meet to Slack, or reschedule a meeting.
- Create enablement materials for employees. Make sure they know they exist, where to find them, and how to use them. These include digital tools for status checks, collaboration and decision making, and will vary depending on what you have at your disposal.
- Align different groups to have the same async week if possible. In the past, participating groups at Salesforce scheduled different async weeks, which some employees viewed as a disadvantage. Starting in late 2022, the groups will be aligned.
If a meeting-free week sounds like heaven to you, read on. You might be surprised by what we learned, and how much planning goes into it.
Before async week
In a meeting-heavy culture, it’s important to create a detailed plan before asking thousands of people to go meeting-free, and to give them enough time to prepare for what can be a strange experience. Salesforce distributed a preparation guide that included goals and expectations. Tips included moving brainstorming meetings to digital channels like Jamboard or Miro, moving regular standup meetings to Slack or Quip updates, and best practices for focusing on heads-down work for long stretches.
“It was hard to wrap my head around working asynchronously,” said Peter Gaylord, vice president of research and content, who spends most days in back-to-back meetings. “I was intrigued by the concept but a little skeptical. Still, I was happy to test the boundaries of how we operate.”
Another important element of this experiment was circulating a frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) document which addressed questions like: What is considered a critical meeting? How do I avoid feeling isolated? How do I keep projects on track? How do I prioritize?
The answer to most of these questions was to rely on collaborative digital tools to, for example, greet the team, share a playlist, and replace standup meetings with integrated workflows for updates.
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During async week
The first few days were a bit jarring for some, particularly those who have a daily stand-up meeting to prioritize workloads and update team members.
“Daily stand-ups are really important for our team, and it was hard to get things moving for the day when you didn’t have everyone’s immediate updates,” said Erika Symczak, senior specialist, project management.
In lieu of the regular meeting, her team put deadlines in place. Everyone updated the team via Slack by 8 a.m., with feedback required by 10 a.m. But that had its drawbacks.
“Two hours is a long time,” she said. “We could have covered the updates and feedback in 15 minutes in our standup, so I felt the inefficiency.”
This was reinforced in an internal survey after the first async week, which showed increased written communication was a friction point during the week. The other downside of relying solely on asynchronous digital communication, some said, is the lack of context and nuance, and the difficulty in staying on top of the increase in digital updates and message streams.
When extra clarity was required, some teams used Slack huddles, an audio tool for connecting with someone inside a channel or direct message. Huddles are helpful when talking through something in a quick call is faster than typing it out.
Slack clips lets people record audio and video clips to share updates and short bursts of information with colleagues. Clippers can share their screen during the recording, and all clips are automatically transcribed. Several teams used clips to share top priorities ahead of a recent on-site meeting.
The best part? Clips can only be up to three minutes long.
Several teams used shared documents to provide updates throughout the week. The takeaway: many realized they should be providing these updates ahead of scheduled meetings in the future, to save time, and to give managers a chance to digest the updates earlier and have responses ready.
“A big benefit was questioning whether you really need a 60-minute meeting,” Gaylord said.
Another big benefit — well-being and having more control over the workday. Employees appreciated having time to make lunch, walk the dog, take long-delayed training, or think deeply without the crunch of preparing for another meeting.
In these circumstances, employees used tools to pause notifications and alerts. At the same time, teams learned to set their status and schedule messages to colleagues based on that colleague’s status.
“It made us more intentional about communications,” said Symszak. “If something was urgent, we said so in the first few words, and consolidated thoughts into one message versus several.”
Today’s collaboration tools are designed to reduce clutter and increase collaboration and productivity, and give the user much more control over how they work. While digital tools can’t — and shouldn’t — replace regular meetings, our experiment forced people to reconsider their cadence, and think twice about scheduling a meeting in the first place.
Meeting-free is great, but change is hard
As much as we might complain about meetings, especially the virtual kind, many people missed the interaction. Indeed, loss of connection was noted as a key friction point in our first async week, but was less so for the second. This can be acute for people working remotely who live alone, or those who work collaboratively across functions.
“There is not a single aspect of the program I run that I do by myself,” said LeeAnn Edmonston, director of customer marketing. “During the week it was just me trying to whiteboard the world by myself.”
More than anything, we’re learning that lasting change is hard to achieve. It will take time, effort, and more bold experimentation to change ingrained work habits, even if new collaborative tools make asynchronous work easier.
Despite some lingering drawbacks — 13% reported working more hours, and 16% reported more digital interruptions – employees are experiencing fewer disadvantages with every async week.
Still, change on this scale is hard: only 15.9% said they strongly agreed that the meeting-free week would change their behavior toward meetings, down from 18% who said so after the first async week.
That doesn’t mean the organization will stop experimenting and refining our approach to find new, bold, better ways to work. Our next async week is scheduled for October.
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