One company is taking drastic steps to cut down on the amount of time its employees spend in meetings.
Shopify, which provides commerce tools to businesses, has slashed thousands of meetings in an effort to free up its workers to be more productive.
A Shopify executive called it a “ruthless internal prioritization effort.”
“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,” Kaz Nejatian, the company’s vice president of product and its chief operating officer, said in a statement.
Shopify says it has eliminated about 95,000 hours worth of meetings for its roughly 10,000 employees.
The company did away with recurring meetings involving three or more people, instituted a full-day blackout period on Wednesdays, and is confining large staff meetings to a six-hour period on Thursdays.
The changes are intended to clear not only more time, but bigger chunks of time for uninterrupted and productive work.
A Shopify spokesperson says the changes are working well so far.
Endless meetings can be the bane of many employees.
And meetings are on the rise.
Microsoft analysis shows meeting time shot up 252% for the average Teams user since the start of the pandemic.
The number of meetings increased by 153%, and overlapping meetings increased by 46%, Microsoft says.
A recent survey found around 30% of meetings are deemed unnecessary by workers.
That survey, from software company Otter.ai and organizational science professor Steven Rogelberg, found over 80% of employees said their productivity would improve if they could skip unnecessary meetings. And 70% said their job satisfaction would improve if they could skip those meetings.
They also estimated that the productivity being eaten up by meetings could be costing businesses millions in wasted wages.
“I think it’s very easy to hold people’s calendars hostage,” Rogelberg told TND in October.
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