Post-pandemic meeting culture & the importance of Flow Day Fridays
Why we should all have one meeting-free workday per week — insights from a copy perspective.
Since working in a fully-remote environment during the pandemic and in a hybrid model post-pandemic, our meeting culture has changed noticeably. For the past two+ years, connecting within our Creative team was only possible by setting up meetings or catch-ups via Google, Zoom, or other virtual meeting platforms. During remote work, there was no “bumping into each other” in the hallway, no team lunches or spontaneous desk chats where you could quickly talk about a project, exchange ideas or discuss your work. Everything had to be scheduled. And my calendar filled up steadily.
Fast forward to today, where we have recently started working in a hybrid model — a mix of office and remote work — which means that our meeting culture needs to shift yet again towards a post “new normal” so to say, where we can take the benefits of both in-office and remote work environments. The in-office environment enables collaborative efforts such as brainstorming sessions with colleagues and spontaneous catch-ups at the coffee machine while the remote work environment creates less distraction so you can really focus on your projects. But what does all of this have to do with meeting-free workdays?
The challenge of always being “available”
Well… the answer is easy. In a set-up where you’re constantly available via email, Slack, Google Meets or other channels, whether it’s in an office, hybrid or remote working environment, with the new meeting culture, it can sometimes become challenging to find time to actually sit down, focus and — in my case — write for a longer period. Some days, I get 30 minutes between meetings, but how in depth can you really go in half an hour? Exactly. So, this is where meeting-free flow days come in. But don’t get me wrong, in-person discussions, alignments, kick-offs or feedback meetings are absolutely necessary and important in our day-to-day work life, especially in our creative field. But so are the actual sit-downs, the strategic thought processes and the executions — because at the end of the day, those copybooks and concepts won’t write themselves.
Creative flow time was introduced to our team back in mid-2020 and we tried several different models, from one to two meeting-free afternoons a week to a whole day midweek. But, it wasn’t until the end of 2020, when a department-wide Flow Day Friday was introduced, that made all the difference. An aligned day per week where not only we, as the Creative team, were able to work without the interruption of meetings but also our marketing stakeholders — which meant overall less ad-hoc communication, emails or Slack messages. And Wayfair isn’t the first or only company to follow this approach. There are plenty of other examples and even studies that reinforce the importance of a meeting-free day. And the reason for its success was quite obvious to me. So without further ado, I’d like to share my personal benefits of meeting-free days from a copy perspective.
Reasons of why everyone should have a Flow Day Friday
Flow days allow you to plan your day based on your personal working style. Let’s say you are most productive in the mornings, which is the case for me. Without meetings interfering with my creativity or productivity early in the day, I can sit down and focus on my most important projects in the morning and concentrate on tasks that require less creativity in the afternoon. It’s a real game changer!
With that in mind, I am overall more productive during meeting-free days. When I’m working on a complex or ambiguous project that requires research or when I need to conceptualise new ideas, I use our Flow Day Fridays, because I know I will get things done. A meeting-free day allows me to really take the time to dig deep and focus on one thing at a time, even if it means I’m working on this one project for half a day. Having the ability to block out a chunk of time, rather than just spare minutes between meetings, makes all the difference because creativity isn’t just a tap that can be turned on and off — it can take time to be really creative. And I personally get most creative not only when I really take the time to think about things but also when I know I do have the time for it.
Also, having a flow day on Fridays isn’t just to have a fun alliteration in your calendar. Having a meeting-free day at the end of a week really makes sense and I’ll tell you why: Let’s take the workflow of campaign X as an example here. In a regular working week, we use our Monday through Thursday to gather all the information we need, align internally and cross functionally on all key points, develop a clear direction and set relevant milestones. We collaborate with our peers towards the end of the week and maybe even receive initial feedback. This means that on Friday, we can finally sit down, flesh out all these ideas and execute what we prepared in the days before.
Or maybe it’s the exact opposite. There are also projects or tasks that we all have but have been procrastinating for a while. Flow Day Fridays are the perfect opportunity to finally cross them off of your to-do list!
And last but not least: A meeting-free Friday sets you up for less distraction (set aside your laundry pile at home or your unwashed dishes that you might see in the corner of your eye while concepting on your next campaign). Again, this goes hand-in-hand with my points about productivity. Because everyone else in your team sits in the same boat as you, a team-wide or even department-wide meeting-free day fosters an environment with individual focus time. So, ideally this would not only include no meetings, but also less emails, less slack messages and hence, less interruption and ideally as a result of that: more productivity.
Of course, these benefits are only my own personal opinion — you can’t generalise these advantages for every work environment and every role. Some people might get distracted more easily when their day is not structured by any meetings. Some might end up losing track of their to-do list and start procrastinating.
A meeting-free workday definitely requires time management skills and sometimes a little bit of self discipline and although I am a huge fan of this direction, I acknowledge there are some downsides to it too, such as potential meeting overload on Monday-Thursday. And, of course, it also doesn’t allow you to be “unavailable” to your team — most likely you will still have some touchpoints with your colleagues here and there and there might still be quick alignments, depending on timelines and due dates. But overall, I can only encourage every company to introduce meeting-free days, because it really makes a difference — and I wouldn’t want to go back.
