Happy Wednesday to everyone tuning in to today’s episode of the Hirewell update. I’m your host, Ryan Brown, vice president of our corporate functions team, and this is my co host. I’m Emily Goor director on our go to market recruiting team. The Hirewell update covers latest talent insights, monthly placement overviews, talent solutions, and the hottest jobs we’re working on all brought to you by us, your market experts here at Hirewell.
Before we kick off the show, you can find all of our content at talentinsights.Hirewell.com or if you’d like to learn more about Hirewell and our service offerings, you can check out our website, www.hirewell.com. Well, we have another exciting show this week, talking about some talent and say it’s no surprise. I was scrolling on TikTok recently. I love when, I love when it leads to content though, so like always scroll away.
content, news sources, fashion, all the different things. But anyway, recently I was scrolling on TikTok and I came across a creator that was talking about the positive impact of meeting free days. So I really wanted to cover this topic today. I know this is more about like the internal employee life cycle, which is very much a part of challenging plates and how folks can retain great people.
So, , I’m sharing a little bit with you about this before we jumped on and basically came across this creator, a nd we’ll tag him in the comments. His name is Alec. He’s in product management and creates a lot of content centered around startups, career growth, overall professionalism. But this particular that I watched was focused on no meeting days and the impacts that they’re having on productivity and overall employee stress.
Yeah, I’m honestly, I am all for a no meeting day. I think like they’re so hard just to come back especially in sales, like in sales driven or client facing organizations. I’m all for this. Yeah. I mean, me too. I think it can feel really impossible for people to find a day where you’re not in back to back meetings, or if you are in a client facing environment, or if you’re in sales, having a client request come in and just needing to jump on things right away.
In Alex video, he references a study that the Sloan Institute did where they essentially studied
I love data. I know. Love data. What’s the data, Alex? Data. Always data driven storytelling over here, but they surveyed and studied 76 different companies that implemented at least one day of no meetings.
And they found that through their study, basically anywhere between one to three days per week of no meetings, significantly reduced overall employee stress, and then positively impact their productivity. I think that’s incredible. I’m not surprised either. Honestly, I’m curious though. Like what happens to the meetings that were previously taking place?
Say you had this meeting always on Thursdays and now this is a no meeting day. Do they disappear altogether? Just kidding, we’re not having this meeting anymore. Right, I mean that would be great. I’m sure that there’s some redundancies in there and maybe it forces people to kind of take a look at where they’re spending time from a meeting perspective and cleaning things up a little bit but it doesn’t necessarily mean that meetings are going away.
I think it’s just Probably more possible and probable that those meetings were moved to another day, and maybe that means, multiple meetings are happening throughout 1 day, as opposed to being spread out throughout the week. So what they also found in this study, though, is, doing something called meeting stacking, which you’re in like back to back meetings during the day, or most of your meetings that are on particular days during the week is essentially okay.
That might sound jarring to some folks, but it’s okay. As long as employees still have that very protected time without meetings or interruptions so that it allows them to actually focus on doing deep and uninterrupted work. And he actually talked about this concept of deep work that I found really interesting because I think many people struggle with having the opportunity to do deep work, which is basically, if you think about it back in our higher education days, we’re studying, you’re heavily focused on one thing.
You’re eliminating any outside noise and interruptions, and you really get to focus on things and complete them. In today’s modern work society, you don’t really have that. You’re constantly getting pinged for something or you’re jumping on a meeting and most of our day is interrupted. So it’s super challenging to step into that space of like deep work and really accomplish things.
Yeah, this is even making me think do you remember internally as a Hirewell leadership team when we shout out Kim, we do some work with Kim because we’re always trying to be learners and make ourselves better. But. You remember we were like tracking our productivity throughout the day. I love that exercise.
I think we talked about stacking there also of like, how can we maximize our productive time? Like the time where you have the most energy. Like for me, that’s the morning, I know that it’s only 10 o’clock now. So I’m good. , this is 10 o’clock my time, right? Noon for y’all in Chicago.
I’m more productive in the morning. So stacking things and maybe that means I need to avoid meetings during that time. So I can use it as my productive time. I think, it sounds like from what you’re saying, having meetings every day throughout the week actually causes more disruption and, it’d be a lot more productive if they were packed into a few days versus like one here and one there.
And even though those meeting days could be really painful, right? Where you’re like, I am stacking my meetings all. I have a lot on Tuesday, actually, a lot of one on ones, a lot of client weeklies stacked. And my Tuesdays are honestly kind of rough, but I never thought about the impact that it has on the rest of my week’s productivity.
You should look at that Em like, maybe pay attention next week and just see what it does. If you’re feeling like you’re crossing a lot of things off of your list on Wednesdays and Thursdays and able to accomplish a lot of things I think that could be. Really an interesting thing to track for yourself. And I also get it.
It can feel in certain environments. Like it’s not possible to have a no meeting day. I think in our environment, it feels impossible to have that because we have clients that are reaching out. We have people asking for time. It can feel challenging to adopt. This into your culture. But I think it’s in those instances where it’s even more essential and important because you’re constantly turning on and off between meetings and deliverables and deep work really isn’t getting done.
So your productivity is more limited. I think employees absolutely need the time to concentrate on their work, to pay attention to details and to commit to completing work rather than this constant start and stop and start and stop throughout the day. But I hear you. I’m like, I’m in the same boat.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays are absolutely insane meeting days for me, but it does allow me to have a nice start to the week on Monday where I only have, maybe one meeting. And then the rest of my day is really like plan for deliverables and getting things done and same with Thursdays and easing into the weekend on Friday.
So it’s an interesting thing for sure. And I think a lot of organization could benefit from something like this. I think so, you’re making me do some self reflection now, right? Like I’m thinking about my meetings throughout the week. I know I have a Monday meeting at least one.
I know I have a lot of Tuesday meetings. I have a lot of Wednesday meetings. I do have a couple meetings Thursdays. I think Friday is like the only day that I think I try to protect for no meetings. I’m not even sure that’s enough. You know what I mean? I feel like I can maybe use one more day.
That’s completely meeting free, even if it means like a little bit more intense on the meeting side, other days, because I feel like I am the queen of, I’m just like self proclaimed crown right here. I feel like I’m the queen sometimes of start and stop, start and stop, like you’re saying. Even I feel like I was pinging you earlier.
I was like, Hey, can we do this later? I’m like deep into, I’m trying really hard to sort it right now, heads down. And I’m like, I’m actually in a groove where, the second you get interrupted, I wonder if there’s data on that of like how long it actually takes to start being productive again at the same task, when you stop and start it again, for me at least, and maybe I need to work on my focus and productivity, but I do feel like when I’ve stopped the task and restart a new task or even go back to that same task, I can’t just like instantly get into that deep work. It’s almost like sleep where you have
the different stages, like you’ve got REM, you’ve got core, or you’ve got deep, I’ve been tracking my sleep recently. So on the sleep stages, but it takes some time to get into the deep focused uninterrupted work time. Like it absolutely does. Deep work as you’re saying. Absolutely. Maybe that’s our follow up for next week.
I’m curious if people are interested in learning more about that because actually your thought, what you mentioned about like how long it takes to get back into that space, I swear, Kim actually covered this in one of our meetings, and it would be really interesting to bring this kind of like full circle and start to get the data around no meeting days, which we have right now, but then also start to think about like why it’s so essential and important because of how long it might take us to step back into that space.
So maybe that’s our next week topic. We’ll see. I think you’re right. I think Kim did mention this. And I think I know a lot of the times with talent insights, like we’re trying to tie it back to just even like what organizations could be doing, I would encourage organizations to like you and I are saying, we’re taking it upon ourselves to organize our meetings so that, most meetings fall on one day and you have productive days.
I think organizations should make this mandatory. I know we’re always talking about non monetary things that organizations could be doing in order to make their employees happy and hopefully retain their employees and create a positive culture. I think having mandated no meeting days is like a great thing for organizations to look into versus yes, of course, encouraging your employees to set boundaries and make like non meeting days.
Yeah, encouraged to set boundaries, sure. But, why don’t you mandate. Be apart of your culture. It’s interesting. You say that, Em, exactly. And it’s so interesting. You bring that up. Cause in Alex video on TikTok that he was referencing one of these, you’ll be very excited to hear Canva. Is a company that actually implements no meeting days.
If folks that don’t know this, Em, is a Canva guru. She’s been a long time. She loves it. Facebook has used it, as well. I’m not sure if they’re still implementing no meeting days, but I mean, I think it works for some really big organizations and where it’s very necessary to take that approach.
I actually have a client that I work with where. They cap meetings at 25 minutes to give people the leeway that they need instead of going like the hard 30 minutes. Cause as we know, every meeting runs over. It’s never, I know this client because you added me to a meeting and I was confused why we were starting at like 1:05.
I was like, am I right here? That’s a good point. I think it’s so important to protect because like you said, we are constantly being pulled in a thousand different directions. And that’s very much a thing of today, you think 20 years ago you’re not being inundated with, G chats and slack and team, that ringing noise that I just, I hear in my sleep because my husband is on teams and I just, I think this is awesome to protect some days.
I think so too. Exactly. And, overall enhancing the employee experience, allowing people the opportunity to really dig into their work and to feel like they’re accomplishing things in a good amount of time, I think is really important. And this comes from the top down, like you mentioned, mandating things like these, some mandates are really great.
And I think this is the type of mandate that falls in that category. A good mandate, right? I don’t want to contradict us. Usually we’re like, people don’t want mandates, but this is a nice thing. And let us know in the comments, if you have no meeting days, how that’s affected your productivity.
I’m curious and might even do an experiment next week. Ooh, keep us posted Em, can’t wait to hear more. Well, I think that wraps us up this week. Maybe I’ll find some more TikToks for us in the coming weeks to have a new love when you do, but, what do you say Em? You want to take us home. I’d love to. That is a wrap for this week’s episode of The Hirewell Update.
Thank you all so much for joining us. As a reminder, you can find all of our content on our fully revamped, fully revamped. Shoutout Nia. It’s talentinsights.Hirewell.com. Again, talentinsights.Hirewell.com. Fully revamped. It’s gorgeous. If you’d like to learn more also about Hirewell and our service offerings, check out our website.
www.hirewell.com. We’ll be back next Wednesday around noon central. See you then. Have a great week.
