Too many people at this meeting!
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When employees at Shopify got back from their holiday break Tuesday morning, they started 2023 with some calendar relief. Every recurring meeting with three or more people, they were told, would be automatically cancelled by the end of the day, and they should not add them back for at least two weeks—if at all.
After that initial two-week period, “be really, really critical about what you’re adding back,” Shopify’s chief operating officer and vice president of product Kaz Nejatian instructed workers in an email early Tuesday, urging people to only return truly essential meetings to their calendars. “People join Shopify to build. To make cool sh*t. To see the thing they had their hands on get released so they can say, ‘whoa, I made that.’ Meetings are a bug along that journey.”
The new policy, which also includes re-instating “meeting-free” Wednesdays and mandating that large meetings only be held in a six-hour block on Thursdays, is part of an effort Nejatian described as “refactoring Shopify,” using a software term to describe how the global commerce company plans to become more operationally efficient in the year ahead. The email outlined how Shopify—which among other things, helps merchants set up online shopping sites—plans to ramp up its cadence for things like shipping product updates and move from an annual to a quarterly planning cycle.
“This is in response to the fact that we want to be a better operating company,” says Nejatian, especially as it enters a year when many are predicting a recessionnoting “our customers are incredibly judicious about their use of resources.” Shopify beat analysts’ expectations in its most recent quarterbut the company said in July it was laying off workers and its shares plummeted nearly 75% in 2022 as spending worries grew amid inflation pressure and consumers shifted back to in-person shopping habits.
Shopify’s move to reduce meetings is an approach other companies have been taking as productivity concerns increase, burnout and mental health issues are on the rise and the half-hour Zoom habits of the pandemic have lingered. Software platform GitLab has annual “meeting cleanup” days to reset which recurring meetings are really needed. Asana conducted experiments last spring called “meeting doomsday” where workers delete all meetings and only add back ones deemed valuable. Slack has “Focus Fridays” and executives there have practiced “calendar bankruptcy” to remove and evaluate standing meetings.
Shopify hopes to take the practice further, requiring all large “all-hands” meetings with more than 50 people to take place no more than once a week during a six-hour period on Thursdays, as well as track how well individual managers comply with the policy of not holding meetings on Wednesdays. It also created a bot that will alert anyone who tries to schedule a meeting on Wednesdays to think twice and plans to actively encourage workers to cancel unneeded meetings and leave large Slack groups.
One-on-one meetings will remain on workers’ calendars but also shouldn’t be scheduled on Wednesdays, the company says. In total, Shopify expects the new policies will delete approximately 10,000 calendar events from employees’ calendars.
If people don’t comply—though Nejatian says he believes they will—he has other ideas the company may institute. One is to disburse a “budget” of meeting hours to managers that they can’t exceed; another is to add a counter to the top right corner of workers’ video conferencing screens to remind people what the cost, or dollar value, is of participants’ time while they’re in the meeting.
“We may do some of them if it ends up not sticking, but I’m very, very optimistic about it,” Nejatian says.
“The most important resource we have is the time of individual contributors. Companies are built improperly around the time of the manager rather than the doer,” he says. He adds: “We think it’s important to force change. You build a muscle by doing it.”
