Here’s what’s holding you back

In remote-first work culture, we live, eat and breathe by our calendars. Work trundles along nicely through effective meetings with the whole team — so imagine the mess when a key team member disappears without a trace (for a while, anyway).

In short: plans are thrown off track, information gaps become wider, and work cycles (and your poor nerves) bear the brunt of it all. 

Here’s how we’re clearing the way 

Pause integrates with your Calendar, so everyone knows what they need to know without asking to know.

With this feature, leave days will show up on every team member’s calendar automagically.

You won’t have to manually remove those on leave from meeting invites, either. All meetings scheduled for that period will be auto-declined so that you’re kept informed.

If you’d like to rep organisation-wide transparency, encourage team members to subscribe to other team or team member calendars and have all the deets show up where it matters the most. 

We designed Pause to work where you work. So close that convoluted leave schedule spreadsheet or that clunky HR tool, and get on with making magic.  

Behind the scenes

We pride ourselves on making software obvious. That involves building thoughtfully and doing all the heavy lifting so that, for our users, using Pause is a breeze.

Here’s a glimpse at the principles that guided us and how we made the Calendar Integration feature a no-brainer. 

Design to work where users work 

By integrating Google Calendar with Pause, we want to ensure that leave information reaches users where meetings are scheduled, and stays there. By throwing in the option of subscribing to other users’ calendars, we also ramp up team awareness while keeping notifications unobtrusive. Passive-aggressive leave emails, be gone. 

Make saying ‘no’ normal 

“You’re declining a meeting? Sacrilege!” is the prevalent culture in a lot of organisations, and we want to actively change that. We’re all about being all hands on deck, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of the user’s mental health and wellbeing. We’re also not a big fan of the “always on” hamster wheel, so this feature proactively ensures there’s no nudge to look at a work calendar while on a break. Also, declining a meeting is less rude than not showing up anyways!

Promote a ‘public by default’ mindset

At Pause, we’re huge believers that transparency can change the dynamics of a team. This is why we built in clear visibility into anyone’s leave calendar—a member, a team, or the entire company—keeps everyone in the loop automatically. If a teammate has taken time off at any point in the year, the user will see it.