“We can either go slow and deliberate, or fast and chaotic. We are going fast and chaotic.”
Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s chief operating officer, sent that line to staff in an email on a Tuesday in early January 2023, as people came back from the holidays. The rest of the message explained what the chaos would be.
Every recurring meeting with three or more people would come off the calendars. Nobody could put one back for two weeks, a “two-week cooling off period.” Wednesdays would be meeting-free again. Any meeting of more than 50 people would have to fit into a six-hour window on Thursdays, and there could be only one a week.
“No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings,” Nejatian wrote.
Shopify is a software company, so it did the deleting with code. A bot went into everyone’s calendar and purged the recurring group meetings. The company’s own estimate was nearly 10,000 events, more than 76,500 hours. It came after a hard year: Shopify had cut 10 percent of its staff in 2022, after admitting it had made the “wrong” bet on how long the pandemic shopping boom would last.
The reaction online split. Some on LinkedIn called the move “bold” and “brilliant.” Others called it “well-intentioned, but an overcorrection.” Almost everyone, though, agreed that meetings had got out of hand during the pandemic.
A month later, Nejatian gave NPR a number more than four times the company’s January estimate. “We deleted 322,000 hours of meetings,” he said. That, by his math, was the equivalent of hiring 150 people, in a fully remote company of about 10,000. He said 85 percent of employees were keeping Wednesdays free. One engineer had told him that for the first time in a very long time, they got to do what they were hired for: write code all day.
“People have been saying ‘no’ to meetings from me, and I’m the COO of the company,” he said. “And that’s great.”
When he talked to Bloomberg in July, the 322,000 hours had become the pace for all of 2023, along with 474,000 events. And Shopify had a new weapon.
During a company-wide hack day, Nejatian had built a calculator into the calendar app. For any meeting with three or more people, it used average pay across roles, the meeting’s length and the number of people invited to put a price on it. A typical 30-minute meeting with three employees came out between $700 and $1,600. Add an executive like Nejatian, and it could pass $2,000.
“No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner,” he said. “But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision.”
Over the first five months of 2023, the average time each Shopify worker spent in meetings fell 14 percent from the same period a year before. Nejatian said that helped toward a projected 18 percent rise in finished projects. The goal, he said, was to “change the default answer from yes to no.”
Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has studied meetings for two decades, doubted that a price tag alone would change much. “It is a very superficial intervention,” he said.