Shopify Tells Employees To Just Say No To Meetings (bloomberg.com) 60
Shopify spent last year cutting costs. Now, it's cutting meetings. From a report: As employees return from holiday break, the Canadian e-commerce firm said it's conducting a "calendar purge," removing all recurring meetings with more than two people "in perpetuity," while reupping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays. Big meetings of more than 50 people will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit of one a week. The company's leaders will also encourage workers to decline other meetings, and remove themselves from large internal chat groups.
"The best thing founders can do is subtraction," Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke, who co-founded the company, said in an emailed statement. "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." Large, long and unproductive meetings have become a scourge of today's hybrid workplace, prompting companies to try and curtail them. Facebook parent Meta Platforms, household product maker Clorox and tech firm Twilio are among those that have instituted no-meeting days.
"The best thing founders can do is subtraction," Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke, who co-founded the company, said in an emailed statement. "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." Large, long and unproductive meetings have become a scourge of today's hybrid workplace, prompting companies to try and curtail them. Facebook parent Meta Platforms, household product maker Clorox and tech firm Twilio are among those that have instituted no-meeting days.
This is the way. (Score:5, Insightful)
99% of all meetings could have been an email. The longer a meeting, the less gets accomplished.
What about quick status calls that are not really (Score:4, Insightful)
What about quick status calls that are not really meetings?
Some quick daily ones can be good to keep.
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Those can be unstable. If they don't devolve into hour long meetings, they are just peacy.
Re:What about quick status calls that are not real (Score:4, Informative)
Those can be unstable. If they don't devolve into hour long meetings, they are just peacy.
Managing meetings is a skill. And they should all have managers, be it the CEO or their assignee. This is not difficult, and if someone wants to go outside the scope of the meeting, they should be invited to take it off line with whoever they need to take it offline with.
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Yes. My firm instituted two things a few years ago: strict limits to scheduled times, and "take it offline". The rules were followed from the top, and everyone on down did a pretty good job of emulating them, and it made a good impact. Eventually they popped for enough project manglers to cover all the projects, and that helped some more.
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Yes. My firm instituted two things a few years ago: strict limits to scheduled times, and "take it offline". The rules were followed from the top, and everyone on down did a pretty good job of emulating them, and it made a good impact. Eventually they popped for enough project manglers to cover all the projects, and that helped some more.
Excellent! It works, and solves the underlying problems.
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There was a quick meeting every day at the chemical plant so that maintenance, two departments in operations, shipping, and the warehouse (maintenance parts) could all get synchronized. It seldom lasted more than 20 minutes. If two groups needed to talk more they stayed late and everyone else left.
It was an effective system. Few cell phones are rated for Class 1, Division 2 environments, so communications during the day were a bit limited.
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What about quick status calls that are not really meetings? Some quick daily ones can be good to keep.
Of course. The problem is managing the meetings, not the prevalent concept that Meeting = Bad.
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Status calls can inevitably be broken down into a series of "Yes it's complete" vs. "No it's not complete and here's why/help needed." I can't wrap my head around why it's better to interrupt the entire team's workflow for that, when in all reality there may be a reason once every two to three weeks to come together to discuss the pegs that haven't moved over the course of the last couple weeks.
Then again, some departments in our building get together twice a day to scream the company name and do a big chee
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there may be a reason once every two to three weeks to come together to discuss the pegs that haven't moved over the course of the last couple weeks.
If you're doing a release every two weeks (or continuously as soon as features are done), you don't want to wait two weeks to find out there's a problem and a task is blocked.
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If you've got a release every 2 weeks then something is wrong. Or maybe using Agile, but I repeat myself.
A problem is that many people have been trained to never admit that there is a problem of that they're blocked. Other people have phobias about using the word "no" so they say "yes" they undstand what was asked when they didn't. Some of this is cultural, but some I think may be experience is seeing that yes men don't get fired as often. I should be allowed, socially, to say "sorry, I didn't get this
Re: What about quick status calls that are not rea (Score:1)
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That is where you set up a mailing list. Meetings with more than 20 people are not meetings, they are lectures. Usually, a small group of people lecture to the rest of the. Just set up a mailing list and everyone communicates using it. I believe the current term for it is a distributed list.
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I heard a suggestion that online meetings should have a cancel button, and if everyone presses it the meeting ends. That wouldn't solve the problem of one taskmaster who wants the meeting and everyone else who doesn't but I still thought it was brilliant.
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What about quick status calls that are not really meetings?
Some quick daily ones can be good to keep.
I have two of these per day.
One goes really quickly as the attendees simply state what needs to be said then get back to work. The other meanders along because it's populated by the people who don't do much work, so they want to fill the time telling us a Grandpa Simpson story about how they dealt with their one ticket today that would have taken most semi-retarded people 10 minutes... tops.
The problem isn't the concept of meetings, it's unrestricted and unrestrained meetings where time vampires thri
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99% of all meetings could have been an email. The longer a meeting, the less gets accomplished.
That also helps to prevent employees to form friendships, and to network.
All bad things according to Slashdot. 8^/
The problem I see here is that rather than acknowledge and train people to better compartmentalize and organize meetings, they have adopted the meeting as the problem, the meeting is a bad thing and the meeting is the enemy.
I've come into 3 places so far, and changed the whole meeting structure. The first was the worst. I'm sure this will sound familiar..
Meetings always ran late. Some
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Are meetings the way to make friends?
We had those recurring meetings at my last job and I got to the stage where I scheduled phone calls for that time slot so I had a reason to escape. The biggest one was a complete accident though, one of the systems went down and about half of the people in the meeting had to break away and fix the problem.
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Are meetings the way to make friends?
It is part of the interaction process. The meeting doesn't do that by itself.
The personal interactions are a lot more important than they get credit for.
So I meet some people at the meeting. We chat in the hallway, and decide each other is okay. Next up might be the gathering at the local watering hole.
Now the happy hour crew is where the real friendships are formed and the networking happens. Or else there are evening banquets where similar activities happen.
The thorn in all of that was the #metoo
Re: This is the way. (Score:3)
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The fact that you draw a line between corporate mixers and metoo, which should not even be in the same ballpark, says bad things either about you or your corporate culture.
I figured I would trigger some people. And here you are.
Of course it is in the same ballpark, and if you can't see that, you should.
#metoo ended up being a real shitshow, with women noting about some really awful men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and whoever that dick was that worked at NBC. And hell, they were some pretty awful people.
But where it turned into that shitshow was determining that all men were the same as those guys. And a number of men lost their careers, and even their familes . An
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You bring up an interesting point with networking. Interpersonal networking is essential is some positions. Especially the IT world where you need to integrate with engineering, maintenance, plant folks, customer relations, sales, etc. But it's often difficult for IT folks to gauge what it is they actually need to communicate, with who, and how to keep that communication on target. We do tend to be loners, since so much of our time is spent head-down coding or bug-fixing.
But there's a big difference between
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And the truly sad thing is we all know exactly who is responsible for it, and can't seem to do much more than sometimes pull the person aside and say, "You really need to get a grip on that mouth sometimes. None of us needed a three hour lecture on the better points of customer relations and communicating with the field. You were in a meeting with engineering and IT, neither of which is qualified, nor desires, to speak with the customers."
Hah! That first place I was talking about had a new person come in right after me, and pulled that sort of thing. He might take an hour pontificating about various idealistic things at the start, and had more incredibly long winded soliloquies during the meetings as he saw fit. All my efficiency was undone, and I had some begging me to come back. Fortunately I wasn't there and had no plans to come back.
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The problem is, most people don't read their emails, especially if they contain more than 5 lines of tex.
Whoa, slow down (Score:2)
what will the PHB do now? (Score:4, Funny)
what will the PHB do now?
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Same as they always did: Fuck all.
Only that now they don't spread their uselessness to others by keeping them from working.
Taking it too far? (Score:5, Interesting)
Without these status meetings, I tend to lose focus a bit.
Those of you who are super productive and laser focused all the time maybe don't need any meetings at all.
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One of the bits that most folks forget that came out of Brook's Mythical Man Month is that keeping everyone on the team informed is key to keeping the project on track.
Short daily, or in your case every other day, standups are great. So long as the person running the meeting understands that their purpose is to identify and remove blocks, and help with team cohesiveness. Not to browbeat, castigate, and berate folks for things not getting done.
I work for a Fortune 10 organization with 450K employees. We
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Get a whiteboard. If someone feels like updating someone, write it down. If you feel like seeing what everyone else does, go read it.
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I don't get it. In general, if I can trust you, I don't need to know what you're working on. Also, suppose you get stuck just after a such a meeting. Are you really going to just sit there and remain stuck until the next meeting 24 hours later? Or will you just get help immediately? Hoping you'd choose the latter, then reporting that you're stuck at s
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There's nothing too far about a purge in meetings. If the meeting is important and valuable then re-book it. By running a purge you have the opportunity to think just how important that meeting really was rather than just accept that we need to have a meeting because we always have a meeting.
good idea (Score:2)
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Most of the meetings I had to endure were more about some PHB patting themselves on the back.
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DEI is the PHB of Academia post-2005ish.
Several SCAM sites use Shopify here... (Score:1)
An email is not enough. (Score:2)
I need an inspiring movie with all my cartoon stars and a catchy motivating song!
"Perfection is achieved (Score:3)
...not when there is no longer any employee to add to a meeting, but when there is no longer any employee to remove." --Antoine de Saint Exupery
Glad to see management finally asking how much this meeting will cost us! Now, can we talk about this thing called "technical debt"?
Technical debt - just say SouthWestern airlines (Score:2)
Their meltdown over the Christmas period seems to have been because of that...
Smaller meetings are great (Score:2)
I'm not sure I 100% agree with this. I don't participate in meetings I don't need, but I still have hours of meetings a week because I honestly just need to talk to people. Granted, I would say 50% of my meetings are 3 people or fewer, and I only have a few team-ish meetings a week. But the meeting where just the programmers come to talk and share info is great; it's my favourite meeting of the week. I learn stuff for real, and get to remotely socialize.
The bigger meetings are the ones where everyone turns
Re:Smaller meetings are great (Score:4, Interesting)
The pandemic was the best thing to ever happen in my entire working life, as it forced the higher-ups to adopt work from home. All of my socialization needs are met by my wife and kids, and going to a company office building is a form of abuse that should be illegal in any civilized country.
Re: Smaller meetings are great (Score:1)
Agreed. Fines should be applied back to the beginning of office-based working patterns.
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Agreed. Though you might not want to be *too* vocal about it, or you'll find yourself assigned to "Special Projects".
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Yeah, can't argue. I mean, I moved to a smaller city that I love, and I never would've been able to do that pre-pandemic.
This sounds like (Score:2)
Online meetings already solved the biggest problem (Score:4, Interesting)
That is, that some narcissist loves to hear himself drone and on on about how clever and awesome he is. With online meetings, you could go to those meetings, the narcissist could hear himself drone and you could get actual work done.
Why do you think there was a huge leap in productivity when people went into home office?
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As the guy doing a lot of talking in meetings (call me a narcissist if you want), I couldn’t agree more.
Back in the Before Times, I’d get some of my best dev work done while seated across a conference table from a client in an all-day meeting. Given that 6 out of the 8 hours were irrelevant to me, it was a gloriously uninterrupted block of time to knock out big work. When the client found out that’s what I was doing, they actually thanked me because it meant their money wasn’t going
Meetings are not going away (Score:2)
There are people in every organization that do nothing but attend meetings. The bigger the company the more of them you will find. In my experience, many of the people in meetings are there simply as a courtesy. They should be Optional attendees but often are invited as Mandatory.
Decide what this item should be first. (Score:2)
The biggest help would be commitment from leadership to enforce a rule that you decide what form something needs to take before scheduling a meeting.
Is this a presentation or delivering information, where other than questions the entire thing is expected to be a one-way transfer of information? Then send an email with the information instead. People can respond with questions.
Is this a non-priority interaction, it can wait until the recipient(s) have time? Send it via a Slack or Teams channel or something w
Stand all the time (Score:2)
Helps get things done. It works for the British Privy Council; perhaps Congress should have the same rule!
\o/ (Score:1)
Meetings of fifty people !?
Surely twenty is enough to ensure that no progress is made ?
There are downsides... (Score:3)
... depending on your position in the company "food chain", you could find yourself not having a clue how or where decisions are made and therefore not being actively involved in any decision making.
If you skip multiple meetings, on your head be it - just don't complain and say "heck, nobody told me we were going to be doing _that_ - it sucks, I have a much better idea!" ... too late.
Looking for that promotion?
Best be visible - it's the only way it's going to happen. If nobody knows you are there or hears you speak, you won't even be in the running.
Yep, easily 80% of meetings are either pointless or have people in them that shouldn't be there.
But there's 20% of meetings you really should make an effort to attend - its a judgement call, right?
So now what will managers do all day? (Score:1)
"Not a meeting" meetings (Score:2)
Remember Elon Musk's "Not a Flamethrower" that's really a flamethrower?
This is what will happen when meetings are decreed out of existence. People still need to communicate, and emails often just don't cut it. People will have "informal discussions" or other similar meetings, they just won't call it a meeting.
wow (Score:2)
That's actually brilliant.
The people who invented Scrum (Score:2)