Shopify has instructed its employees to stay away from and stop encouraging large recurring meetings, as the e-commerce platform wipes all of them off employees’ calendars as part of the “cleansing” process.
As I mentioned bloomberg (Opens in a new tab)The move by Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke was accompanied by new rules requiring that meetings not take place on Wednesdays, and that meetings of more than 50 people only take place within a six-hour window on Thursdays.
A move to reduce time spent in meetings, similar to those recently taken at Meta, Clorox, Twilio, Slack and Asana, is likely to be an effort to increase productivity across the company, after, according to bloombergspent the year 2022 cutting costs.
Shopify meeting purge
Shopify appears to be addressing the perceived decline in productivity at the source, with Lutke claiming that participating in large meetings and internal chat groups maintains the “status quo”.
Kaz Ngatian, Shopify’s Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Product, Tell Forbes (Opens in a new tab) that “our most important resource is the time of individual shareholders. Corporations are built incorrectly around the time of the manager rather than the time of the doer.”
Nejatian also discussed “forcing change” within the company, which he aims to do through automation, using a bot to remind meeting organizers of the new policies.
The move comes as tech companies across the board adopt similar policies in order to reclaim time on the calendar, all of which come up with their own term for the phenomenon of time seen as lost in meetings while taking away from things that could be spent doing meaningful performance. The job.
Slack executives reportedly call it “calendar bankruptcy,” while Asana has run its own experiment with a “doomsday meeting” to clear calendars in the past. Like Shopify, I instruct employees to be “wise” about which regular meetings are added to the calendar.