Canva, a design software maker, has 3,500 employees across eight offices worldwide. If someone tries to schedule a meeting on Wednesday, the company’s designated no-meeting day, an auto decline comes “with a note that says that we are trying to adopt this policy for mental health and productivity,” said Jennie Rogerson, Canva’s global head of people, who is based in Sydney, Australia.
The company cherishes this policy so much — “I use Wednesdays to get through my emails,” Ms. Rogerson said, adding that “there is nothing better than inbox zero” — it is experimenting with entire weeks, called focus weeks, when nonessential meetings are canceled.
It’s not easy to carry out something like this, Ms. Rogerson said. For example, employees are in different time zones.
“Having meeting-free Wednesday means one more day that Australia and the U.S. don’t get to meet, and with the time zone shifting, the amount of hours people can meet is already minimal,” she said. “We’re trying to think through this.”
Another problem is that other workdays can be busier than they otherwise would. “You know when you have a game of Tetris and things get wild?” Ms. Rogerson asked. “That is what my calendar looks like with the exception of no-meeting Wednesday.”
At the beginning of 2023, Shopify, the global commerce company, reinstated its meeting-free Wednesday, which it had tried in the past, and meetings that day dropped 44 percent.
To free up more time, Shopify also automatically deleted recurring meetings with three people or more and asked people to hold off on rescheduling them for two weeks (a cooling-off period) so they could think about what needed to be added back in. The company also created one specific time slot when companywide meetings could be held.
Alyson Krueger
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