In a raft of new changes announced at the company this week, e-commerce giant Shopify may have entered the next phase of the work-from-home revolution.
Two years after CEO and founder Tobi Lutke declare The end of “office centricity” as Shopify completes remote work, employees who returned from vacation this week for another change in the company.
Shopify will eliminate all recurring meetings involving more than two people to give employees more time to work on other tasks, Kaz Nejatian, vice president of product and chief operating officer at Shopify told employees in an email Tuesday viewed by fortune.
The changes, which are effective immediately, also mean that there will be no scheduled events on Wednesdays, while large gatherings involving more than 50 people can only be held on Thursdays between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern. Large meetings are limited to one per week.
No more meetings
The change in Shopify’s operating structure will eliminate 10,000 company events or the equivalent of more than 76,500 meeting hours, a company spokesperson said. fortune.
Nejatian called the policy change a “meaningful reduction,” which will free employees from the enormous amount of time they currently spend in meetings. In an email to employees on Tuesday, he urged employees not to add another meeting to the calendar for at least two weeks, and to be “very critical” when deciding whether to add another meeting to the schedule.
Shopify CEO Lutke called the approach “calendar cleansing” in a statement fortune.
“The best thing founders can do is reduce. It’s easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to one thing, you’re actually saying no to all the other things you could be doing at that time. When people add things, the set of things you can do becomes smaller. Then, you end up with more people just maintaining the status quo,” he said.
Remote work changes
With a large portion of the workforce continuing to come from home offices, the changes to the modern workday will be swift and severe.
Between 2019 and 2021, the share of US employees working from home will increase from 5.7% to nearly 18%, according to census data, as the pandemic forces companies to change their operating structures to accommodate remote work. And while some companies continue to force workers to come to the office at least a few days a week, others have embraced the change.
Several tech companies including Coinbase, Atlassian, and Airbnb have announced they will continue to prioritize remote or hybrid work even after the pandemic is over. In 2020, Lutke announced Shopify will be “digital by standard company“and most workers are still allowed to work from home despite the pandemic.
The permanent shift to remote or hybrid work in some sectors has pushed many companies to adopt a more hands-off approach to virtual meetings, which remote workers have criticized as being unproductive and disruptive to other work. “Zoom fatigue” became a well-known phenomenon early in the pandemic as employees reported feeling fatigued and tired from virtual meetings.
Companies compensated for the lack of personal interaction by spending more time in virtual meetings at the beginning of the pandemic, with more time spent in meetings twice during the first two years of the pandemic, according to the Microsoft 2022 study. But not all of these meetings are absolutely necessary, and many can resulting in company costs.
A third of all meetings may be unnecessary, according to a 2022 study from transcription service Otter.ai, which found that cutting unnecessary meetings in companies with more than 100 employees could save the company more than $2 million per year. For large companies with more than 5,000 employees, the savings add up to $100 million annually.
But while too many unnecessary meetings can affect productivity in the company, some employees defend the role of virtual meetings in the remote workplace. A 2021 study by virtual assistant app Polly found that 93% of workers consider well-structured virtual meetings to be an effective use of their time, mainly because they allow employees to connect with colleagues and become more involved with the company.
In an email to Shopify staff, Nejatian said the shift away from constant meetings also means moving away from unproductive schedules and opening up more time for employees to focus on their work.
“We can be slow and deliberate, or fast and chaotic. We will be fast and chaotic,” he wrote. “Although we know this will feel chaotic, that’s why. Intentional chaos is more than OK and is part of working and growing at Shopify.
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