In the new year, Shopify has wiped out more than 76,500 hours of meetings from employee calendars.
In a letter sent to employees and obtained by FOX Business, Shopify Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian said that the year is starting fresh with some useful subtraction, freeing ourselves from an absurd amount of meeting time, and unlocking an incredible amount of maker time.
The company axed all Wednesday meetings and all recurring meetings with three or more people as well as any meetings with at least 50 people outside of Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
A Shopify spokeswoman told FOX Business that this isn't just about the number of meetings.
It's clearing bigger chunks of meeting free time, the spokesperson said. For example, if you have three or four 30 min meetings in a morning, but the space between each of them is less than an hour, then each of those small gaps is near impossible to get work done. Nejatian is asking employees not to add any of the aforementioned meetings back for at least two weeks. After that point, they're told to be really critical about what you're adding back. No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings. What will have a big impact on entrepreneurship? He said that there was a day after day of back-to-back meetings. It's a bug along that journey when people join Shopify to build meetings. The move is part of a chaotic effort by Nejatian to change how and where the company focuses its time and attention, as well as how it communicates.
The company is adding Workplace by Meta, which replaces email as its asynchronous communication platform. Slack will only be used as an instant messenger.
He said as we begin in 2023, we have introduced changes to reimagine how we can make the biggest impact on our mission of making commerce better for everyone. We are giving our people a no judgment zone to subtract, reject meetings and focus on what is most valuable, because time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson. Nejatian said most companies would take six months to implement a change like this, but Shopify is purposefully causing an amount of discomfort and distraction that we move through very quickly so that we can get on with what is most important.