TechSmith’s Async-First Study Eliminated Meetings and Saw +15% Increase in Employee Productivity

Company-wide Experiment Led by Convince & Convert Tested a Month with No Meetings to Analyze the Impact of a Fully-asynchronous Work Environment

EAST LANSING, Mich., Jan. 11, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — TechSmith Corporation, the market leader in screen capture software and productivity solutions, in collaboration with marketing consulting firm Convince & Convert, today released its ebook A Month with No Meetings: An Experiment to Build an Async-First Culture, documenting the findings from their Async-First study. After shifting to a 100% remote workforce during the pandemic, TechSmith employees were not immune to the virtual meeting fatigue experienced by many during this time. Seeking an effective solution with fewer and better meetings, the company took a radical approach and tested a month with no meetings across its 300 employee base to help build its ideal hybrid work culture of the future.

The month-long experiment during July 2022 aimed to see if solely asynchronous communication would have a positive impact on employee satisfaction, job attitude, productivity, and innovation by offering greater flexibility and more dedicated “think” time. In the experiment, asynchronous communication refers to individuals working together on their own schedules to complete tasks and projects. The key-findings were as follows:

• Over 15% of employees felt more productive: TechSmith surveyed employees on their level of perceived productivity before and after Async-First July, and saw a +15% increase in employees who strongly agreed they felt productive in their work after the experiment. This was encouraging, and reinforced the company’s hypothesis that productivity can be fine-tuned at both an individual and corporate level.
• 8% increase in perceived importance of meetings: TechSmith asked employees to review all synchronous meetings on their calendars and rate each on a scale of one (“Not Important”) to five (“Very Important”). Prior to the experiment, the average meeting score was 3.32 but this increased nearly 8% to an average of 3.57 at the end of July. This finding illustrates employees were generally more thoughtful about making the most of their synchronous time together after the experiment and were more intentional about what could be done asynchronously.
• 85% of employees will consider replacing future meetings after the experiment: Employees agreed that asynchronous communication habits were worth learning and adopting.

“As a 30-year leader in productivity and workplace communication solutions, we feel it is our responsibility to push the envelope and seek new ways for workers to efficiently and effectively connect and collaborate with each other,” said Wendy Hamilton, CEO at TechSmith. “Technology is obviously crucial for companies to function in a hybrid or remote setting, but real change must begin with a cultural reboot to help employees form new habits and workflows that are more conducive to their changing environment. This experiment was a great step towards building our ideal hybrid work culture.”   

To learn more about TechSmith’s findings on the benefits and challenges of an async-first workplace, the complete ebook A Month with No Meetings: An Experiment to Build an Async-First Culture can be downloaded here.

About TechSmith
Founded in 1987, TechSmith is the market leader in screen capture software and productivity solutions for daily in-person, remote or hybrid workplace communication and customer-facing image and video content. The company’s award-winning flagship products, Snagit and Camtasia, empower anyone to create remarkable videos and images that share knowledge for better training, tutorials, and everyday communication. TechSmith creates easy-to-use software and provides expert training resources and unmatched support — making TechSmith the global leader for easily creating effective images and videos. To date, billions of images and videos have been created with TechSmith’s products by more than 73 million people across more than 190 countries. Connect with TechSmith on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. For more information, visit www.techsmith.com.

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