TechSmith cancels every meeting for a month to force an async-first culture

TechSmith, the East Lansing, Michigan maker of Snagit and Camtasia, went fully remote during the pandemic and watched meeting fatigue build across its roughly 300 employees. Instead of shaving minutes off the calendar, its leadership decided to reboot the culture by removing meetings altogether for one month.

Do not trim the calendar — cancel every meeting for a month and force async-first work, then keep only the meetings that prove necessary as 'flipped meetings.'

In July 2022 the company ran 'Async-First July' with consultancy Convince & Convert: every meeting was canceled company-wide, and work moved to asynchronous tools such as Snagit recordings and Slack. TechSmith surveyed employees before and after, then codified what worked — teams chose their own schedules, core working hours were removed, and necessary meetings became 'flipped meetings' where the lead shares a short video with context in advance so everyone arrives ready to decide.

Employees who strongly agreed they felt productive rose 15%, the average importance score of remaining meetings climbed nearly 8% (from 3.32 to 3.57), and 85% of staff said they would replace some future meetings with asynchronous communication. A side finding was equity: quieter employees began contributing more once discussions moved off the live-meeting floor.

When TechSmith, the screen-capture software maker behind Snagit and Camtasia, went fully remote during the pandemic, virtual meetings multiplied until employees were suffering the same 'Zoom fatigue' the company's own products were meant to solve. Rather than trimming meeting lengths or counts, the ~300-person company decided to test what work looked like with no meetings at all.

In July 2022 TechSmith ran 'Async-First July' together with consulting firm Convince & Convert: all meetings were canceled for a month and teams communicated asynchronously through recordings, shared documents and chat. The company surveyed employees on satisfaction, productivity and the importance of each synchronous meeting before and after the month, turning the experiment into data rather than opinion.

The results shaped lasting policy. Employees who strongly agreed they felt productive rose 15%, the average rated importance of meetings climbed nearly 8% from 3.32 to 3.57, and 85% of staff said they would replace some future meetings with async communication. TechSmith then removed enforced core hours, let each team decide how it schedules work, and adopted 'flipped meetings': the organizer shares a short video with context ahead of time so live time is spent deciding, not informing.

A total ban made the problem legible: with no meetings as the default, employees discovered which work genuinely needs synchronous time.

Measuring before and after converted a cultural hunch into numbers the company could act on and share.

Async-first discussion gave reserved employees a chance to contribute, an equity benefit the experiment was never designed for.

The flipped-meeting format kept the best of both modes — context arrives in advance on video, and live sessions are shorter and more decisive.

A blanket ban resets the default: only meetings that prove their worth return, while async habits give quieter voices a turn and lift perceived productivity.

TechSmith published the results in January 2023 in 'A Month with No Meetings: An Experiment to Build an Async-First Culture' and kept the practices: team-level scheduling decisions, no enforced core hours, flipped meetings built on its own screen-capture tools, and a digital-first hybrid headquarters outfitted with more than $6 million in meeting technology. VP of HR Amy Casciotti has since written about the experiment for HR Executive and DiversityQ, framing the no-meeting month as a 'soft reboot' that other hybrid employers could adapt.