In its pursuit to put an end to unnecessary meetings, Shopify has introduced a calculator in the calendar app of employees. The calculator will evaluate the estimated cost of meetings held between three or more people. The program has been built by Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian during a company-wide hack day. He said that the calculator makes use of employee pay data across various roles and disciplines, duration of the meeting and attendee count to decide the cost of the meet-up. The meeting calculator is Shopify’s initiative to make its employees understand that time is money.
As per a report published on Bloomberg News, 30 minutes of meeting with three employees can cost between the range of $700 to $1,600. Nejatian added that the cost can even go above $2,000. He explained that the main motto of this initiative is to bring a change in the default answer for a meeting, from yes to no. The COO added that the company plans to eliminate 322,000 hours and 474,000 discrete events this year.
No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner. But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision. The goal of this thing is to show you that time is money. If you have to spend it, you think about it.
Kaz Nejatian, COO, Shopify
Shopify’s Calendar Purge
In January this year, Shopify cancelled all recurring meetings with more than two employees. Even all the meetings scheduled to be held on Wednesday were eliminated. Shopify asked its employees to leave large internal chat groups and only one meeting of over 50 employees is allowed in a six-hour window on Thursdays.
Calling it “calendar purge”, CEO Lutke said, “The best thing founders can do is subtraction”. As quoted by Bloomberg, he said, “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”.
According to Nejatian, the move helped in removing over 12,000 calendar events including recurring meetings, thus freeing up over 322,000 hours from unnecessary meet-ups. Within five months of its implementation, Shopify witnessed a 14 per cent decrease in average time spent by an employee in meetings as compared to the same period last year. However, its initial effort wasn’t enough, said Shopify according to CNN Business.
ALSO READ: Shopify Cuts Meetings, Asks Employees to Leave Internal Chat Groups
Time Is Money: Kaz Nejatian
“[W]e have seen meeting creep seep back in and we needed to take immediate action. Time is money, and it should be spent on helping our merchants succeed or having fun – meetings frequently do neither. The Meeting Cost Calculator is here to challenge the status quo, nudging us to reconsider meeting necessity and explore more creative collaboration methods,” the company wrote in the internal note this week.
In the interview with Bloomberg, Nejatian said that no one at Shopify would go for dinner costing $500, however, people spend way more in meetings without giving it a second thought. “No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner. But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision. The goal of this thing is to show you that time is money. If you have to spend it, you think about it,” he said.
I guarantee you sat in a meeting this week that was a waste of time & money.
— Harley Finkelstein (@harleyf) July 13, 2023
Time is money and meetings…. are expensive.
We just released the Shopify Meeting Cost Calculator – a Shopify-built Chrome Extension that shows just how expensive mtgs are.https://t.co/76moYvE7TC
Chaos Monkey
Earlier this year, as part of a series of changes called “Choas Monkey 2023“, Shopify implemented new changes while its employees were on festive break. After they resumed work, 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.
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 initiative, instead, he added that it got overwhelming feedback. “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.
Chaos Monkey: Its Origin
Developed by Netflix, Chaos Monkey is a tool to randomly terminate virtual machine instances and containers running inside a software environment. Used it testing the resiliency of the system, the main task 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.
Besides increasing the overall reliability and availability, it 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. 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,” COO Nejatian informed Shopify employees in an email as quoted by raconteur.net.
Meetings: Survey And Research
Citing a survey of business leaders and knowledge workers from Wrike, a project-management app, Bloomberg wrote that both executives and their employees agree that they spend hours in meetings held every week. Companies can do away with these meetings without any consequence. Time spent on meetings among other activities was among the top five reasons behind efficiency within a company. After studying meetings for two decades, Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina, in his research, wrote that unnecessary meetings cost around $100 million annually at big organizations.
Besides Shopify, reportedly GitLab has annual “meeting cleanup” days to decide which meetings are of utmost importance. Asana, an American software company, conducted experiments last year called “meeting doomsday”. In this, workers deleted all meetings and only kept the ones which were valuable. Slack has “Focus Fridays” and its executives practice “calendar bankruptcy” to eliminate and evaluate standing meetings.
Shopify’s Second Quarter Results
Meanwhile, Shopify plans to announce its second-quarter financial results on August 2, 2023. The second quarter ended on June 30, 2023. The management team of Shopify will discuss second-quarter results at a conference call at 5:00 p.m. ET.
Shopify’s gross profit dollars increased 12 percent to $717 million in the first quarter, compared to 2022. For the first quarter, gross margin was 47.5 percent as compared to 53.0 percent in the same period of 2022. Shopify’s total revenue also saw a rise of 25 percent to $1.5 billion in comparison to the last year during the same period. It is up 27 percent on a constant currency basis.
