Shopify is known for taking bold decisions to empower individual selling and redefine corporate culture. The most recent decision that made heads turn was Shopify’s call to “calendar purge,” announced in the new year. Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke first spoke of this change in a Bloomberg interview saying the Canadian e-commerce company is planning to cut recurring meetings and asking its employees to leave large internal chat groups.
While most of the employees at Shopify were on leave for the festive break, Shopify implemented all new changes. They were shocked to see group conversations either deleted or restricted on messaging platform Slack. Initially, most of the employees thought of it as a technical glitch, though Shopify justified the abrupt decision by saying that these “bloated” group chats were harming both productivity and morale.
We tend to walk blindfolded into a new culture without realising. You need to give employees a sense of permission to change habits they’ve got stuck in because these will simply continue otherwise. People can’t unilaterally decide to clear their diaries.
Nick Kemsley, professor, Henley Business School
Calling this unconventional approach “Chaos Monkey“, Shopify neither consulted with its employees nor warned them about deleting their group chats. However, the company’s COO Kaz Nejatian firmly believes that nobody has any complaints about the Chaos Monkey initiative.
“We had such great feedback from Shopify’s Chaos Monkey creating a meeting-free work environment that we decided to ship a new product entirely focused on helping others also become meeting-free,” Nejatian captioned a video posted on Twitter.
Open your calendars & call 555-GOT-CHAOS 📞 https://t.co/pA2vPg748D
— Harley Finkelstein (@harleyf) January 19, 2023
The video shows employees of Shopify getting distressed by “a sense of doom when you see your zoom” and “no-end insights meetings”. The video then shows a fictional product termed “Chaos Monkey”. The product, powered by Shopify, is priced at $19.99 + S&H with 30 days of time-back guarantee.
One of Shopify’s employees can be heard saying: “Waking up on a Wednesday morning to no meetings was amazing. I was able to take so many things off my to-do list. It was brilliant and so satisfying.”
“Having a dedicated chunk of time to execute the work. It is game-changing,” another Shopify employee said.
After two more testimonials by Shopify employees, the video then breaks the myth about Chaos Monkey with a disclaimer saying: “This product is not real. Do not call this number. You don’t need a product to take back your calendar.”
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein retweeted Nejatian’s post, saying: “Open your calendars & call 555-GOT-CHAOS”.
Where did Chaos Monkey come from?
Developed by Netflix, Chaos Monkey is a tool to randomly terminate virtual machine instances and containers running inside a software environment. It helps in testing the resiliency of the system. The purpose of Chaos Monkey is to ensure that the system can withstand failures of individual components and that it is able to recover quickly and automatically from such failures.
Chaos Monkey not only increases the overall reliability and availability of the system but also identifies potential weaknesses and areas for improvement. Shopify used the same term to execute its plan, avoiding a “long, slow burn” to help its employees recover from discomfort quickly.
“We can either go slow and deliberate or go fast and chaotic. We are going fast and chaotic,” COO Nejatian informed Shopify employees in an email as quoted by raconteur.net.
“While we know this will feel chaotic, that’s the point. Intentional chaos is more than OK, and it’s part of working and thriving at Shopify,” he added.
How Shopify is cutting meetings?
While just concluded 2022 saw Shopify cut costs, this year the Canadian e-commerce giant is cutting meetings. In the rule, it states that no recurring meetings are allowed between more than two employees, no meetings at all on Wednesdays and only one meeting of over 50 employees is allowed in a six-hour window on Thursdays.
“The best thing founders can do is subtraction,” CEO Lutke said as quoted by Bloomberg.
“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,” he added.
Psychological effect
However, behavioural scientist Dr. Alexandra Dobra-Kiel believes that sudden changes can pile on stress among employees.
Calling it a risky gambit, Dobra-Kiel said the transition from habitual behaviour like daily chats on Slack might result in acute stress. She added that in such cases, human brains put all their energy into returning back to default habits.
“In this case, because you can’t revert back to those habits, the stress is prolonged. That affects your cognitive capacity and memory, so you become less productive as a consequence,” Dobra-Kiel said as quoted by raconteur.net.
Fern Miller, Executive Strategy Director at R/GA, agreed with Dobra-Kiel, saying: “Research into workplace stress has repeatedly found that the biggest driver is the amount of control that employees feel they have over their day-to-day practice”.
“I can only imagine that the fact that this is all part of a publicity-friendly social experiment won’t make that any easier,” she added.
The other aspect
But there is another side to the coin as well. In corporate companies, long meetings involving too many people hinder productivity and disturb today’s hybrid work culture. Apart from Shopify, companies like Facebook’s Meta Platforms Inc., tech firm Twilio Inc. and food company Clorox Co. have set days for no meetings at all.
Bloomberg cited a survey from the last year, claiming that on average, corporate employees spend 18 hours a week in meetings. The sample employees said they declined only 14 percent of meetings while they wanted to avoid 31 percent of them. The survey concluded that unproductive long meetings cost about $100 million a year.
Steven Rogelberg, a management and psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, spoke of how unproductive meetings disappoint employees to the level that they intend to quit. Data based on thousands of Microsoft Corp. employees claim that the time of meetings tripled in two years after the pandemic hit in 2020. Weekly meetings doubled in these two years, the data added.
Talking about teleconferencing between two employees, another research claimed that these meetings rose from 17 percent in 2020 to 42 percent in 2021. This study was based on 48 million meetings and conducted by collaboration analytics firm Vyopta.
For uncomfortable employees
While some employees are happy to get rid of meetings, some didn’t find it comfortable. One employee from Shopify told businessinsider.com that it would take months for people like to adjust to a work environment without a group Slack channel. According to Dobra-Kiel, such factors could lead to paranoia among employees.
“Even if your job isn’t at risk, you’ll feel additional pressure to show your value and perform even better than before,” she said referring to the 10 percent layoffs by Shopify in July. It was July 26 when CEO Lutke announced massive layoffs, thanks to his “overestimated bet” on rising e-commerce during the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point. Still growing steadily, but it wasn’t a meaningful 5-year leap ahead. Our market share in ecommerce is a lot higher than it is in retail, so this matters. Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today and I’m deeply sorry for that,” he said in a blog post.
Legal trouble
Shopify could land in legal trouble if employees take the matter to the court of law, believes lawyer Katie Hodson. She claims that such sudden blanket changes could be based on discrimination claims. “As this policy was implemented across the board, it would potentially affect disabled people or those with mental health issues in a stronger way than anyone else,” Hodson said.
Hodson cited an example of a depressed remote worker, who could face difficulties coping with separation from social communication channels. “This could result in claims of constructive unfair dismissal. Employers have to be careful not to forget their obligation to their employees’ health and safety – and that includes mental health,” she added.
Shopify’s sudden decisions
This is not the first time that Shopify is doing a bold workforce experiment. The Canadian company was one of the first biggest tech companies that announced work from home. CEO Lutke had then called Shopify a “digital by default” company.
“As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over,” reads his tweet from May 21, 2020.
As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
— tobi lutke (@tobi) May 21, 2020
In September, Shopify announced Flex Comp, a flexible compensation to reward talent working for the company. It challenges the norms set by tech companies worldwide. It allows employees to decide if they want to get paid in cash (the conventional way) or in equity.
In December, Shopify abandoned its plan to move to the newly built 254,000-square-foot space at The Well. The Canadian e-commerce giant clarified that the sudden change of plans is not caused by increased expenses but because of its remote-first approach.
“We have a bold vision for the future of work at Shopify, and are no longer a workforce that centres around a physical workplace for day-to-day work,” Shopify spokesperson Alex Lyons told Toronto Star in an email interview.
Later in the same month, Shopify invited extraordinary people from all walks of life by offering VIP Access on its careers page. After the evaluation of submitted profiles, Shopify will make exceptions and create specific jobs beyond the conventional roles.
Supporting Shopify’s Chaos Monkey
Nick Kemsley, a professor at Henley Business School, came in support of Shopify, saying sometimes “managed chaos” result in huge benefits. “We tend to walk blindfolded into a new culture without realising. You need to give employees a sense of permission to change habits they’ve got stuck in because these will simply continue otherwise. People can’t unilaterally decide to clear their diaries,” he explained.
Kemsley’s word echo Shopify’s intention as its employees are still allowed to reconvene a canceled meeting in a “two-week cooling off period”.
“It’s fine to say to certain layers of the organisation: ‘It’s up to you to decide how you work.’ But there are parts of the organisation where that level of ambiguity will create capability or even anxiety issues. Some people just want to be told what they need to do,” Kemsley added.
According to Kemsley, part of the conflict is because there are two types of employees currently working in a hybrid culture. Some want to work from home without intervention and others want to return to the conventional five days-a-week office work culture.
With bold decisions like Shopify’s Chaos Monkey, one could see a positive impact on recruitment and retention. “It’s hard to find any kind of organisation-wide solution that doesn’t have a dark side. Whatever policy an organisation adopts, some people aren’t going to like it and might vote with their feet,” Kemsley said.
What needs to be done?
However, Dobra-Kiel believes that there should be better communication from the employer’s end before implementing big changes in the work environment. If not consultation, a warning should be issued beforehand. She adds that such transparency gives employees a sense of “psychological safety”.
“It’s much easier to implement radical change if you have a good base of psychological safety and trust at a team level. It creates a mindset of being excited about change and embracing it, not dreading it. It is possible to create new habits through fear, but is that the right sort of culture for your company? Probably not,” she said.
