Shopify doubles down on meeting purge by shaming employees with cost calculator

financialpost.com:

Time is money, and Shopify Inc. wants its workers to understand that maxim applies to pointless meetings, too.

The Canadian e-commerce company has rolled out a calculator embedded in employees’ calendar app that estimates the cost of any meeting with three or more people. The tool uses average compensation data across roles and disciplines, along with meeting length and attendee count, to put a price tag on the event. A typical 30 minute endeavour with three employees can run from US$700 up to US$1,600. Adding an executive — like chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian, who built the program during a company-wide hack day — can shoot the cost above US$2,000.

The new tool is part of the company’s yearlong drive to reduce unnecessary gatherings. Earlier this year, Shopify eliminated all recurring meetings with more than two people and started discouraging meetings on Wednesdays.

The goal of these initiatives, said Nejatian, is to “change the default answer from yes to no.”

The company is on pace to cut out 322,000 hours and 474,000 discrete events in 2023, according to Nejatian.

“No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner,” Nejatian said in an interview. “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.”

Executives and their employees both say they spend hours each week in meetings that could disappear without consequence. Time wasted on activities like meetings were among the top five causes of inefficiency within an organization, a survey of business leaders and knowledge workers from project-management app Wrike found.

In total, noncritical meetings waste about US$100