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Shopify has mandated its employees to stay away from and stop encouraging large recurring meetings, with the ecommerce platform erasing them all from employees’ calendars as part of a “cleanup.”
As reported by Bloomberg (opens in new tab)The move by Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke came with new rules requiring no meetings to be held on Wednesdays and meetings with more than 50 people to only take place within a six-hour time frame on Thursdays.
The move to reduce time spent in meetings, similar to those recently taken at Meta, Clorox, Twilio, Slack, and Asana, is likely an attempt to increase productivity throughout the company, after, according to Bloombergit spent 2022 Reduce costs.
Shopify’s meeting purge
Shopify appears to be addressing a perceived decline in productivity at its source, with Lutke claiming participation in large meetings and internal chat groups “maintains the status quo.”
Kaz Nejatian, Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Product of Shopify, told Forbes (opens in new tab) that “the most important resource we have is the time of individual contributors. Businesses are not built well around the time of the manager rather than the doer.”
Nejatian also discussed “forcing change” within the company, which it wants to do through automation, using a bot to remind meeting organizers of the new policy.
The move comes as tech companies across the board have similar policies to reclaim time on the calendar, and they all come up with their own term for the phenomenon of time seen as wasted time in meetings that take away from take that could are spent on performing meaningful work.
Slack executives are reportedly calling it “calendar bankruptcy,” while Asana has conducted its own “meeting doomsday” experiment to erase calendars in the past. Like Shopify, it instructed employees to be “judicious” about regular meetings being added back to the calendar.