Shopify fuels the meeting purge by shaming employees with a cost calculator

Time is money and Shopify Inc. wants its employees to understand that this maxim also applies to pointless meetings.

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

The new tool is part of the company’s long-standing commitment to reducing unnecessary meetings. Earlier this year, Shopify eliminated all recurring meetings with more than two people and began discouraging meetings on Wednesdays.

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

According to Nejatian, the company is on track to shut down 322,000 hours and 474,000 discrete events by 2023.

“No one at Shopify would cost a $500 dinner,” Nejatian said in an interview. “But a lot of people spend a lot more on meetings without ever making a decision. The purpose of this thing is to show you that time is money. If you have to spend it, think about it.”

Executives and their employees both say they spend hours each week in meetings that could disappear without consequence. Wasting time on activities such as meetings was among the top five causes of inefficiency within an organization, according to a survey of business leaders and knowledge workers from the project management app Wrike.

According to research by Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has studied meetings for 20 years, non-critical meetings waste a total of about $100 million a year in large organizations.

Businesses have battled the scourge of meetings for decades. When Alan Mulally founded Ford Motor Co. took over, he cut unnecessary or unnecessarily long meetings to speed up decision-making. Ten years ago, Bain & Co. that a single weekly meeting of middle managers cost an organization $15 million a year, and that senior executives spent more than two days a week in meetings.

“Meetings are like weeds — they sprout up everywhere unless you’re diligent,” says Brian Elliott, an executive consultant at work.

By itself, the Shopify calculator probably won’t change behavior, Rogelberg said. “It is a very superficial intervention.”

He suggested that the company tie this in with training on best practices, mid-manager feedback, and senior leadership buy-in — all things Shopify is already doing as part of its wider calendar campaign.

Another concern, said Steph Little, a senior consultant at workplace consultancy Bright + Early, is that putting a dollar figure at meetings could discourage junior or marginalized employees from raising an important issue further up the chain, because they think it’s not worth it.

“We have a lot of unnecessary meetings, of course, but we also have people who are left out of the decision making process,” Little said. “Especially when people work remotely, they want the connection and information.”

At Shopify, the average time spent in meetings per employee fell 14% in the first five months of 2023 compared to the same period last year. That contributed to an expected 18% increase in completed projects this year, Nejatian said.

“Most of the modern work environment is broken,” he said. “It’s not just any change that matters.”

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