Shopify is actively removing all meetings with more than three people for two weeks, as announced in an internal memo to employees. This is likely in an effort to increase efficiency for the company in the midst of the tech slump. In addition, the company will enforce “no-meeting Wednesdays” and limit meetings with more than 50 people to a certain time frame on Thursdays.
Meetings have had a significant part in business since 600 BCE, when numerous Greek towns included an agora. The root of agora is ageírein, which means to come together. Though today‘s company meetings are totally different from the lively public spaces of olden Greece, where citizens shared vital info and merchants congregated for one–time sales, they are still an integral part of our business life. We don‘t even question them, they just appear on our agendas and we appear for them. For numerous of us, meetings are almost synonymous with work.
A lot of companies are now taking a deeper look into meetins as a time–waster. These standard get–togethers are also a source of stress. As per Zippia, “At least 65% of employees agree that meetings stop them from finishing their own work, and 45% of employees feel weighed down by the number of meetings they attend.”
In an effort to reduce the amount of meetings, Shopify announced that it would eliminate all recurring meetings with three or more people and put a two–week period in place before these meetings can be added back to calendars; COO Kaz Nejatian tells CNN in an interview. He called it a ““two-week cooling off period”. Nejatian referred to the change as a “helpful reduction,” and it is meant to give staff more time. This is after numerous businesses have experienced a huge surge in meetings as a result of the pandemic. With the announcement, Shopify revealed that it would delete almost 10,000 gatherings from their staff’s plans, thus freeing up more than 76,500 hours.
The reason why Shopify takes such radical step
As Bloomberg reported, long gatherings have become a kind of bane in the hybrid work environment. A Microsoft study from 2020 and 2021 indicated that the number of weekly meetings has doubled. Meta and Clorox, for their part, also countering the excessive meetings trend, instituting days when no appointments are allowed, reported the media.
Trimming gatherings could aid in making the organization more productive, while also potentially bettering spirits for certain employees. “No one joined Shopify to participate in conferences,” Nejatian stated. Once the two-week scheduling hiatus is over, Nejatian suggested that staff should “consider carefully” what goes in their timetable. Moreover, Shopify is promoting a “blameless atmosphere,” encouraging personnel to annul meetings as they deem appropriate.
Shopify is also targeting how employees use workplace communication tools. They declared that their employees‘ Slack use can be “cluttered, loud, and disruptive”.
The company’s CEO and co-founder Tobi Lütke told Bloomberg via email that
“the best thing founders can do is subtraction”.
“It’s much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time,” he wrote.
Going ahead, Shopify is aiming to be “mindful“ in how their staff obtain and transmit different kinds of data by dividing internal communication between Slack and Workplace by Meta. Additionally, they are prompting workers to exit sizable, distracting Slack collectives.
A meeting-less future?
Despite Shopify‘s attempt at replacing meetings, it is unlikely that they will be completely go away with. However, it is hoped that the badly managed meetings will be replaced with more efficient and bearable experiences that better fit the modern business world and the tiredness of the working population.
By simplifying meetings and eliminating unnecessary components, the time commitment for synchronous elements can be decreased. People can become accustomed to a more rapid input style and shorter meetings of 15 or 20 minutes, so long as everyone is paying attention and adhering to time limits. This will help alleviate the pressure of a seemingly overwhelming number of meetings.
Author’s Note:
We believe that the root of this problem are mainly outdated video-conferencing tools, having to schedule a meeting for every small virtual communication is a nightmare for employees and managers. There are easy solutions we implement to get rid of this problem, simple and intuitive. No need to restrict meetings, a more natural virtual communication is the way for the future.
