Shopify Tells Employees to Just Say No to Meetings

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Shopify Inc. spent last year cutting costs. Now, it's cutting meetings.

As employees return from holiday break, the Canadian e-commerce firm said it's conducting a “calendar purge,” removing all recurring meetings with more than two people “in perpetuity,” while reupping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays. Big meetings of more than 50 people will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit of one a week. The company's leaders will also encourage workers to decline other meetings, and remove themselves from large internal chat groups.

'The best thing founders can do is subtraction,” Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke, who co-founded the company, said in an emailed statement. “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. As people add things, the set of things that can be done becomes smaller. Then, you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo.”

Large, long and unproductive meetings have become a scourge of today's hybrid workplace, prompting companies to try and curtail them. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., household product maker Clorox Co. and tech firm Twilio Inc. are among those that have instituted no-meeting days. Employees spend about 18 hours a week on average in meetings, according to a survey conducted last year, and they only decline 14% of invites even though they'd prefer to back out of 31% of them. Reluctantly going to noncritical meetings wastes about $100 million a year at big organizations, the survey found.

Poorly managed meetings can also hurt employee engagement and even boost their intention to quit,