The Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify revealed that it would execute a “calendar purge” in 2023, requiring employees to cancel recurring appointments with more than three individuals in attendance.
Meetings of any kind are also prohibited on Wednesdays, and any event with a guest list of more than 50 individuals may only be conducted on Thursdays between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET.
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“The best thing founders can do is subtraction”
Rather than increasing the meetings for each employee to “improve productivity”, Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke of Shopify prefers to change this norm: “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, protracted, and ineffective meetings have become a nuisance in today’s hybrid workplace, driving businesses to strive to reduce them. According to Bloomberg, Meta, Facebook’s parent company; Atlassian, a software business; and Clorox all have no-meeting days scheduled.
According to a poll done last year, employees spend almost 18 hours per week in meetings on average, and they only refuse 14% of invites, despite the fact that they would prefer to decline 31% of them.
In line with the research, huge corporations spend around $100 million every year avoiding non-critical meetings.
“Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson, and we are giving our people a ‘no judgment zone’ to subtract, reject meetings, and focus on what is most valuable,” said Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s vice president of product and chief operating officer, in a statement.
Poorly managed meetings hurt
According to Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, psychology, and management at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, poorly managed meetings can harm employee engagement and even increase their desire to resign.
Meeting time more than doubled in the first two years of the pandemic, according to Microsoft data based on thousands of users of its office software, as did the frequency of weekly meetings.
Based on research conducted by France’s NEOMA Business School, no-meeting policies can boost productivity while reducing employee stress. Meetings, on the other hand, are not going away completely at Shopify.
There will be a “two-week cooling down period” before anybody may reschedule a canceled meeting, according to the corporation. It will now solely utilize Slack as an instant messenger, with “big, bulky” chat groups reserved for announcements.
Customize your meetings with ONES
Office management is not an easy task for all time, especially nowadays people expect high flexibility and autonomy in working time and places. An all-in-one smart office system like ONES can help you easily manage your meeting schedule and office resource on your mobile.
Users that have administrator permission can manage the meetings schedule of different parties and departments. Users can even perform actions such as “calendar purge” and “no-meeting days” set-up through customizable booking rules on meeting time span, recurring patterns, business hours, etc.
An all-in-one smart office system can help companies to well organize the meeting schedule and office resources, and eliminate large, protracted, and ineffective meetings that would actually harm the productivity of your office.
Learn more about how hybrid working helps you, and implement your own All-in-one smart office system.