October 25: A week without meetings
Salesforce encouraged employees to cancel all meetings for a week.
Source: Salesforce
Published: August 2022
A week without meetings
“It was hard to wrap my head around working asynchronously,” said Peter Gaylord, a Salesforce vice president who spends most days in back-to-back meetings. “I was intrigued by the concept but skeptical.”
The goal? Find better ways to work and give employees more control over their workday.
Learnings from Salesforce
Plan: 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 weeks to prepare.
Find new ways: Encourage teams to find new ways of working instead of just deferring existing ones. Don’t just move a meeting from Zoom to a Slack thread. Also, don’t just reschedule a meeting for the following week.
A survey found that 16% of employees strongly agreed that the meeting-free week would change their behavior toward meetings. Salesforce has the next async week scheduled for later this month.
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I find this concept extremely compelling! As a leader of a large team, I suspect based on the culture of our org that our group loses a lot of productivity to meetings. I was curious what I could take away to implement in my own team. I would love to see a follow-up on the next async week at saleforce as to lessons learned and implementation. Thanks for the fact!