Shopify has ordered its employees to stay away and stop encouraging large recurring meetings, and the e-commerce platform is removing them all from employee calendars as part of a “purge”.
As reported by Bloomberg (opens in a new tab)The move by Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke was accompanied by new rules that require no meetings to be held on Wednesdays and meetings of more than 50 people to only be held within six hours on Thursdays.
A move to reduce the time spent in meetings, similar to those taken recently by Meta, Clorox, Twilio, Slack and Asana, is likely to increase performance across the company, after Bloombergspent 2022 cost cutting.
Shopify Meetings Cleanup
Shopify seems to be dealing with a perceived decline in productivity at the source, with Lutke saying that attending large meetings and internal chat groups maintains the “status quo”.
Kaz Nejatian, Shopify COO and VP of Products, he said Forbes (opens in a new tab) that “the most important resource we have is the time of individual collaborators. Companies are built wrong in the time of the manager, not the contractor.”
Nejatian also discussed “forcing change” in the company, which aims to automate, using a bot to remind meeting organizers of the new rules.
The move comes as tech companies around the world adopt similar policies to roll back time on the calendar, each coining their own term for the phenomenon of time perceived as wasted in meetings receiving a shot that could be spent doing meaningful work.
Slack executives reportedly call it “calendar bankruptcy,” while Asana has run her own “doom encounters” experiment to clear calendars in the past. Like Shopify, it advised employees to take a “sensible” approach to regular appointments being added back to the calendar.