Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings

Large meetings with more than 50 people will be held over a six-hour period on Thursdays, with a limit of one meeting a week. Company leaders will also encourage workers to turn down other meetings and remove themselves from large internal chat groups.

CEO Tobi Lutke, who co-founded the company, said in an emailed statement: “The best thing founders can do is subtract. you’re literally saying no to everything else you could have done in that period of time. As people add more things, the set of things that can be done becomes smaller. Then you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo. ”

Large, lengthy, and unproductive meetings have become the scourge of today’s hybrid workplace, prompting companies to try to cut them down. The parent company of Facebook Meta Platforms Inc., maker of home products Clorox Co. and technology company Twilio Inc. are among those that have established non-meeting days. According to a survey conducted last year, employees spend an average of 18 hours a week in meetings and they only turn down 14% of invitations even though they want to withdraw out of 31% of them. The survey found that reluctance to attend nonessential meetings wastes about $100 million a year at large organizations.

According to Steven Rogelberg, professor of organizational science, psychology, and management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, poorly managed meetings can also affect employee engagement and even boost employee motivation. their resignation. Data from Microsoft Corp. Based on thousands of users of the software in their workplace, time spent in meetings more than tripled in the first two years of the pandemic, and the number of weekly meetings more than doubled. However, the share of face-to-face virtual meetings has increased from 17% in 2020 to 42% last year, a study of 48 million meetings from collaborative analytics firm Vyopta shows, an indication that companies are trying to restrain participants. . Shopify says a bot will act as a policy enforcer, reminding meeting organizers of the new rules starting January 5.

“Over the years, we’ve seen redundant meetings return on a daily basis,” said Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s vice president of product and chief operating officer, in an email in response to inquiries. “We know no one joins Shopify to sit in meetings.” Meeting purge is Shopify’s latest workforce test.In May 2020, shortly after the pandemic broke out, Shopify launched move to “digital by design”, allowing all employees to work from anywhere indefinitely. Last year, amid industry volatility affecting tech company stocks, Shopify changed its pay method to allow employees to decide if their paycheck would be cash vs. equity, rather than letting management decide to incorporate.

The latest changes come as the company is working to cut costs, allowing sellers to set up websites to sell online, allowing them to manage inventory and process payments, along with tools for in-store purchases. It was one of the hottest pandemic stocks as online shopping boomed and became Canada’s most valuable company, but the stock plummeted 75% last year. Shopify cut about 1,000 jobs from its 10,000-person workforce over the summer when Lutke admitted he had overestimated the impact of the pandemic on e-commerce.

According to research from France’s NEOMA Business School, a no-meeting policy can increase productivity and reduce employee stress. But meetings aren’t completely gone at Shopify. The company says there will be a “two-week break” before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting.From now on, they will only use Slack as an instant messaging app, with “big, unwieldy” chat groups used only for notifications. speak.

This story was published from the wire dealer’s feed without text modification.