Zoom terminates its No-Meeting Wednesday Policy

Zoom Video Communications has abandoned its policy prohibiting internal meetings on Wednesdays because it hampered collaboration. This action goes against the wishes of its own employees and goes against the norm. The change was announced last week in a statement to staff by Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan. The memo also included a new office attendance rule requiring people who live within 50 miles of a corporate location to come in twice a week.

The company changed its policy implemented during the early stages of the pandemic. It was implemented after surveying employees who said they wanted to spend less time in meetings to have “more time to think, plan, focus, and execute.” In March 2022, the company said that 84% of employees preferred to continue the policy.

“As we further ramp up on hybrid work, we’ve decided to make another change and end our No Internal Meeting Wednesdays,” Yuan said in the memo. “We move fast, and this effort has become more of a barrier to collaboration than it was intended. And as an increasingly global company, no Internal Meeting Wednesday creates a lack of clarity for Zoomies working across multiple time zones.”

From now on, Zoom employees should instead “set the personal boundaries you need to be successful,”

This decision is going against what other firms are doing to reduce unproductive meetings, which waste $100 million a year at large companies.

“Our no-meeting initiative wasn’t designed to be a make-or-break policy but is instead more about respecting one another’s time and encouraging us to take the mental pause we often forget to schedule,” Zoom said in the March 2022 blog post. The post also outlined a framework to improve meetings which can be done by creating an agenda with specific goals and by limiting the number of attendees.     

As per Yuan, eliminating a full day of meeting becomes a barrier to collaboration.