Shopify made a lot of efforts last year to cut costs, and this year it seems they will start reducing meetings.
The e-commerce firm is canceling all regularly scheduled meetings with more than two attendees and advising employees to turn down invitations and withdraw from large internal chat groups.
The Canadian e-commerce company announced it is doing a “calendar purge” as staff members return from the holiday break, by removing all recurring meetings with more than two people “in perpetuity,” while reinstating a rule that no meetings of any kind are permitted on Wednesdays. L large meetings with a maximum of 50 participants will be crammed into a six-hour slot on Thursdays. The company’s leader will also exhort employees to skip additional meetings and withdraw from extensive internal chat groups.
Shopify’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Tobi Lutke said in a statement that the best thing founders could do is subtraction. «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 Harvard Business Review, companies spend a total of $37 billion per year on meetings. According to a report last year, large companies could save as much as $100 million a year by holding fewer unnecessary meetings and cutting down on their invite lists. On average, employees spend about 18 hours per week in meetings only 14% of invitations are turned down despite the fact that 33% of them would be better avoided.
Many companies have recognized that large, long and unproductive meetings have become a scourge of today’s hybrid workplace. A number of firms, including Twilio Inc. and Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc., have implemented no-meeting days.
According to Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, psychology, and management at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, poorly run meetings can also reduce employee engagement and even increase their intention to leave. The data from Microsoft Corp. based on thousands of users of its office software revealed that t he amount of time spent in meetings more than tripled and the frequency of meetings more than doubled in the first two years of the pandemic. A study of 48 million meetings by collaboration analytics firm Vyopta found that the proportion of one-on-one virtual meetings climbed from 17% in 2020 to 42% last year, showing that businesses are attempting to limit participants in meetings.
Shopify announced that a bot will act as the policy’s enforcer and start informing meeting organizers the new rules on January 5.
According to Kaz Nejatian, vice president of product and chief operating officer at Shopify, “Over the years, we’ve seen excess meetings creep back into our day to day”. He added “We know no one joined Shopify to sit in meetings”.
The meeting purge is Shopify’s most recent worker experiment. Soon after the pandemic began in May 2020, Shopify become “digital by design,” enabling all staff to work permanently from any location. Shopify updated its compensation policies to allow staff to choose how much of their pay will be in cash versus equity rather than having management team decide for them. The market volatility last year crushed shares of technological companies, which resulted in a significant value loss in the remuneration of employees who opted to receive a large amount of equity in their pay.
The most recent adjustments align with a corporate-wide effort to minimize costs. Some of the actions in their cost-cutting attempt are offering tools for in-store purchases and allowing merchants to set up websites for online sales, manage inventory, and process payments. During the pandemic, Shopify was one of the hottest stocks as online shopping took up which made the company eventually become Canada’s most valued firm. However, last year, the shares fell 75%. Shopify reduced its 10,000-person workforce by around 1,000 positions over the summer as Lutke admitted that he had misjudged the pandemic’s effect on e-commerce.
According to studies from France’s NEOMA Business School, no-meeting regulations can increase productivity and lower staff stress. At Shopify, however, meetings are still happening occasionally. Before anyone can reschedule a cancelled meeting, the business said that there will be a “two-week cooling off period.”
It announced that going forward, it will only use Slack as an instant messenger and save use of “large, unwieldy” chat groups for announcements.
Self-driving air taxis have long been a tantalizing vision of the future, and now, they’re one step closer to becoming a reality in China. Guangzhou-based Ehang, a leading player in the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) industry, recently achieved a major milestone.
Adobe, the software giant renowned for its creative solutions, has once again pushed the boundaries of innovation with a slew of updates designed to revolutionize the world of digital creativity. Adobe MAX 2023 saw the unveiling of remarkable enhancements, all underpinned by the formidable power of artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, we will delve into the highlights of Adobe’s recent updates, as outlined in their official announcement.
In the world of tech giants, strategic partnerships and negotiations often determine the trajectory of entire industries. A recent revelation in the ongoing US government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google has shed light on some of Apple’s past decisions that could have had a significant impact on the search engine landscape.
TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video platform, is making waves in the digital advertising world with its latest move. Reports from multiple sources have surfaced, pointing to the confirmation of TikTok testing an ad-free subscription service.
TikTok, the wildly popular social media platform, has faced its fair share of challenges in recent years, particularly regarding its ownership and ties to China. However, its ambitions in Southeast Asia are now facing a significant hurdle as Indonesia, its largest market in the region, has imposed a ban on shopping transactions on social media apps.
Google’s Bard AI chatbot is getting a major upgrade, and it’s all about making your life easier. In a recent announcement, Google revealed a series of exciting enhancements to Bard, aiming to provide users with a more powerful and versatile tool for various tasks.
In a bold move to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce and cloud computing, Alibaba Group is embarking on its most ambitious restructuring to date under the leadership of its new CEO, Eddie Wu. As the company faces challenges in a slowing Chinese economy and stiff competition, Wu is determined to revitalize Alibaba’s strategy by placing a strong emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) and promoting younger talents to senior management positions.
TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video app, has been hit with a massive €345 million ($368 million) fine by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for failing to adequately protect children’s privacy on its platform.
China’s economy is displaying hopeful signs of recovery in August, but the real estate sector continues to struggle, posing challenges for the nation’s economic stability.
Arm, the renowned British chip designer under the SoftBank umbrella, is gearing up for a high-stakes $5 billion initial public offering (IPO). While excitement surrounds this significant move, investors are growing increasingly wary of Arm’s business ties to China, particularly amidst escalating tensions between the United States and Beijing over chip technology. Let’s dive into the complexities of Arm’s China dealings and the challenges it faces.
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