With the new year starting, the Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Shopify has made an interesting announcement that will work for the best interest of its employees.
In a welcome to new year-like announcement, the company has decided to leave the calendar emptier for its employees, with measures like cancelling recurring meetings taken so that there could be a minimum load of digital fatigue on employees during the new year.
According to a memo sent to employees, Shopify said that it would instill guidelines that would allow employees to cancel meetings and free their time in the meetings they felt took too much of their time and did not add as much value.
The company has also announced to cancel any recurring meetings involving more than two people, along with putting into place a rule that would prevent any meetings from taking place on Wednesdays.
The e-comm giant’s latest guidelines read that any big meetings having more than 50 people can only be conducted on Thursdays, that too only in a designated 6 hour period.
“To start 2023, we’re cancelling all Shopify meetings with more than two people. Let’s give people back their maker time. Companies are for builders. Not managers,” said the COO of the company, Kaz Nejatian, stating that meetings are a bug. “Today, we shipped a fix to this bug at @Shopify,” the executive said.
The company’s employees have also been given the authority to omit themselves from large internal chat groups on Slack, while the company reviews its communication tools.
It believes that the communication channel on Slack can be ‘bloated, noisy, and distracting’ for employees, and it will split the internal communication between Slack and Workplace by Meta, as per a Financial Post report.
“Over the years, we’ve seen excess meetings creep back into our day to day. We know no one joined Shopify to sit in meetings,” said Nejatian.
