At my company, we have started "async weeks", where, basically once a quarter, we try to basically use async communication instead of recurring meetings.
First, this is executed without a lot of shock. You know it's coming and plan around it. But two, it does help promote writing - teams experiment with doing one or two things differently. It's a slow roll, but I'm seeing a bit more adoption of written tools, like doing reviews in Google docs instead of just reading them, etc.
Importantly, the lame "status update" meetings have become much more tighter and focused. We used to pack things into these generic one hour sessions, and now more meetings are starting to have better focused agendas, people get used to saying "you know, maybe only two of us need to discuss this...", etc.
Taking a week 2-3x a year to iterate and experiment with process changes like this feels pretty useful. Teams _should_ be doing this frequently if they're "agile", but I've rarely seen that actually pan out in reality. But it's a lot easier to take than the CEO surprising everyone electronically the first week back after a break.