Shopify eliminates all unnecessary meetings in a sweeping “calendar purge” for remote work
With a slew of new changes announced at the company this week, e-commerce giant Shopify may just have heralded the next phase of its work-from-home revolution.
Two years after CEO and founder Tobi Lutke announced The end of “office-centricity” as Shopify embraced remote work, another sweeping shift at the company is on the horizon for employees returning from vacations this week.
Shopify will eliminate all recurring meetings of more than two people to give employees more time for other tasks, Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s vice president of product and chief operating officer, told employees in an email Tuesday shared by was viewed wealth.
The changes, which take effect immediately, also stipulate that no events will take place at all on Wednesdays, while all large meetings of more than 50 people can only take place between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursdays. Large meetings are limited to one per week.
No more meetings
The changes to Shopify’s operational structure will eliminate 10,000 corporate events, or the equivalent of more than 76,500 hours of meetings, a company spokesman said wealth.
Nejatian called the policy change a “useful subtraction” that would free employees from inordinate amounts of time currently spent in meetings. In his email to staff on Tuesday, he urged employees not to put meetings back on their calendars for at least two weeks and to be “really critical” about whether they even put a meeting back on their schedule .
Shopify CEO Lutke described the process in a statement as a “calendar cleanup.” wealth.
“The best thing founders can do is subtract. It’s much easier to add things than to remove things. When you say yes to one thing, you’re actually saying no to everything else you could have done during that time. As people add things, the amount of things that can be done gets smaller. Then it ends up with more and more people just perpetuating the status quo,” he said.
Remote work is changing
As a large part of the workforce continues to log in from the home office, the changes in modern working life are coming quickly and comprehensively.
Between 2019 and 2021, the proportion of U.S. employees working from home rose from 5.7% to nearly 18%, according to census data, as the pandemic forced companies to change their operational structure to accommodate remote work. And while some companies continue to push for their employees to come into the office at least some days of the week, others are embracing the change wholeheartedly.
Several tech companies, including Coinbase, Atlassian, and Airbnb, have announced that they will continue to prioritize remote or hybrid work even after the pandemic has passed. In 2020, Lutke announced that Shopify would launch a “Digital by default company‘ and that most workers would be allowed to continue working from home post-pandemic.
The perpetual shift to remote or hybrid work in some sectors has prompted many organizations to take a less-is-more approach to virtual meetings, which many remote workers have criticized as unproductive and interfering with their other work. “Zoom fatigue” became a well-known phenomenon early in the pandemic, as employees reported feeling burned out and exhausted from virtual meetings.
According to a 2022 Microsoft study, companies compensated for the lack of in-person interactions by spending more time in virtual meetings early in the pandemic, with time spent in meetings tripling in the first two years of the pandemic. But not all of these meetings were strictly necessary, and many may have resulted in sunk costs for businesses.
According to a 2022 study by transcription service Otter.ai, up to a third of all meetings could be entirely unnecessary. The study found that eliminating pointless meetings could save companies with more than 100 employees more than $2 million a year. For large companies with more than 5,000 employees, the savings add up to $100 million per year.
But while many unnecessary meetings have contributed to lost productivity in companies, some employees have defended the role of virtual meetings in the remote workplace. A 2021 study by virtual assistant app Polly found that 93% of workers valued well-structured virtual meetings as an effective use of their time, largely because they allowed employees to connect and engage more with their colleagues to employ the company.
In his email to Shopify employees, Nejatian said moving away from recurring meetings also meant breaking away from unproductive schedules and giving employees more time to focus on their work.
“We can either proceed slowly and deliberately or quickly and chaotically. We’re going to be fast and chaotic,” he wrote. “While we know this is going to feel messy, that’s the point. Intentional chaos is more than okay and part of working and thriving at Shopify.”
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