I’ve written about how important it is to be deliberate about your company’s meeting culture, and how debilitating it can be to your staff when you aren’t.
One of the ways I like to “reset” a company’s meeting culture is to institute a company-wide meeting-free week every six months or so.
It’s like a vacation to actually get work done
A meeting-free week is like a vacation. Not from work,  but from the relentless pressure of the calendar, the pull from one meeting to the next, the back to back face-time and statuses and brainstorming. A meeting-free week provides actual space to think, reflect, analyze, get caught up, and to do deep work. These things simply don’t happen when your staff is booked all day in meetings, which is sadly, a common way of life for many people.
How to do it
It’s so easy. Just rip the bandaid off and schedule it. Block the entire company’s calendar by sending out an invitation to everyone for your upcoming “meeting-free week”. Schedule it at least one month in advance so that no one has a fire drill of cancelling important meetings that were already on the calendar.
Ask everyone who runs a recurring meeting to cancel those meetings for the week and pull them off the calendar. If you have a team addicted to meetings, this will seem senseless to them. They won’t understand it. They may resent it and see it as getting in the way of their work. Do it anyway. It’s for the good of your company, your culture, your staff’s well being, and their work product.
It’s important the calendar be wide open, other than your “meeting-free week” invitation. For the meeting-free week to be effective, everyone needs to feel the mental relief of opening up their calendar and seeing it entirely clear.
Note: If you have customer-facing employees who have scheduled meetings with customers, ask them to just side-step scheduling anything that week. A customer-facing employee may struggle with this initially, because it always feels as though you have to meet with a customer whenever they ask to. But customers accommodate changes to schedules, vacations and the like all the time.  If a customer suggests a time during the meeting-free week, simply state, “I’m not available then” and offer alternatives. No need to make a big deal about it, or to explain what your company is doing. If pressed, you can simply say, “We have a company-wide event scheduled during that week.” Your customers won’t make a big deal about it if you don’t. And this only applies to scheduled meetings, in a meeting-free week there is nothing prevent an ad-hoc, on-the-fly call with a customer, as needed.
The meeting-free week ground rules

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The key to a successful meeting-free week is for it to be inclusive of all scheduled meetings, so everything has to get pulled off the calendar that week.  EVERYTHING.

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Mandate (if you must) that there be no scheduled meetings that week.

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Encourage spontaneous collaboration. It’s not that getting together with colleagues or customers is forbidden in a meeting-free week, it’s that they aren’t pre-scheduled. If people need to get together to discuss something, encourage that, but insist it happen organically and not at a pre-arranged time.

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Lead by example. It is pointless to implement this and then to make exceptions for yourself, because you have something pressing you need to schedule. If you expect your staff to abide by the meeting-free week, you need to expect yourself to as well.

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Make reasonable exceptions when you must. Your biggest customer calls an account manager and says, “I need to meet with you the day after tomorrow or I am cancelling”? By all means, send the account manager to the customer (but also ask yourself what’s wrong with this situation,