Shopify discourages meetings by shaming employees with cost calculator (opens in new tab)

The title makes it seem like a bad thing, but it makes total sense to me to want to cut unnecessary meetings down and use "different tactics" of getting there. I work in a company right now where we have 1 meeting at the start of the week and that's it (unless something comes up - it rarely does) It's a game-changer for my output and productivity.

This is interesting. For a while I had a client who drug their consultants and leadership into endless meetings, so we put a "cost of this meeting" calculation in the invite, notes, and handouts. It changed almost nothing. The problem was that the spending number was viewed as a cost of doing business. The difference between "expensing" a $500 meal and cutting a $500 meeting is that I get to eat the meal. I think for this to work you've got to directly pass on the saving. In many workplaces nobody cares if a canceled meeting makes an executive's bonus bigger...

Final thought - we need to be careful not to cut out all human interactions. COVID showed how isolating life can be without friends you see at work everyday. We shouldn't be using made-up-reason-meetings as an venue for mentorship, connection, and socialization, but sometimes that's exactly what happens. People hate meetings, but people get lonely...

This is pretty terrible, if I cared that much about my employers bank account, why don't we do

* WARNING: 26 weeks parental leave will cost us $xxx,xxx

* WARNING: Buying team lunch this week will cost $x,xxx

* WARNING: Offering laid off workers 20 weeks severance will cost $xx,xxx,xxx

* WARNING: Offering your direct reports raises will cost the company money!

And while we're at it. Should we do performance reviews where a team sees how much income they personally generated vs how much the team costs the company? That would be super fun, that will probably stop most people from asking for a raise

Just ask people to limit meetings to the minimum, no need to flash numbers into a guilt trip for a bank account I do not own. If you asked me my employer should give me $100 for lunch every day, 4 day workweeks at 8 hours a day, 52 weeks parental leave, and other costly things I really don't mind them paying for. The cost of a meeting is the last thing I care about

If I see 2 employees talking about yesterdays football game in the kitchenette, should I report them wasting $1,500 of the companies time to HR?

Oh, and finally, im sure these calculations are based on 40 hour work weeks. Is this a good reason for an employee to tell their boss at Shopify they will not be online or answering any slack/email after 5pm every day?

10+ years ago I worked for a major US investment and financial services bank. We had a tool that did exactly this, it was connected to the telephone system and would give you a running cost of the call. On outage calls, we'd often have 30+ people on the call and the numbers were insane.

It wasn't used to shame people, just useful for awareness... and I don't believe it was official endorsed by the firm.

I have always been bewildered by the anti-meeting sentiment in the tech community. There seems to be an assumption that meetings are bad. But obviously, meetings facilitate communication. You can waste a lot more time by not having a meeting and letting misunderstandings abound.

Shopify employees are going to get paid for their time whether they're in a meeting or not, so this calculator should consider the cost savings that result from having a meeting instead of not having a meeting.

"Meetings are a waste" is just such a juvenile perspective. If meetings truly are a waste in your organization, then the problem is your employees.

I.e., it is probably you who is the waste, not the meeting you're in.

I've fought this battle, and it turns out that non-technical staff often have no other recourse.

There is, in many orgs, no analog for the things that technical staff regularly use that make a meeting unnecessary.

PR? GitHub discussion? ADRs? RFCs? Never heard of them.

A big problem with the pivot to WFH is that meeting sizes were no longer bound by the physical size of a room.

The result was that meetings could explode in size to dozens of people as anyone and everyone vaguely related to an issue was pulled in.

Now I've heard some say that that's not a big problem because people can "work" on other things while being present in the meeting waiting until the small moment when they might be needed/relevant/useful, but I cannot believe it is efficient and good to have a bunch of people vaguely distracted and not engaged in either their work or the meeting.

IMO whether wfh or present in the room, people need to be really disciplined about meeting size and keeping at the smallest possible size of totally engaged persons.

While this is an interesting take, it also plays into the meetings are bad mindset without thinking things through. The problem here is in the opportunity cost. The discussion that doesn't happen in the meeting now happens asynchronously, which means more back and forth, and the time spent it now spread over more people. I don't think the cost gets saved.

Why is this story spammed around every many business news site? I feel like it's news from like...years ago?

I'm working on an app to address this issue. While putting a cost calculation is a good way to raise awareness, we take a different approach to a solution.

It's called Meet Robbie (https://meetrobbie.com) and we give you an agenda with timers, minutes, and action items and you can use it directly in Zoom.

It's main use case is for recurring meetings where you have a list of business to get through. It encourages common sense things like having an agenda, being mindful of time, and keeping organized minutes.

We just released our so you can try it out. Would love any feedback and thoughts on our approach!

I kind of agree with this. I used to work for a large enterprise software company and I often made the point that you'd have to jump through hoops to get approval to spend a couple of hundred EUR, but you could call a meeting with 30+ people in it no problem.

I interviewed at Shopify last year, I didn't end up accepting (I stayed at the unnamed software company) but I do agree with a lot of their processes (not so much since the layoffs they've had however).

“Meetings are like weeds — they sprout back up, everywhere, unless you’re diligent”

This doesn’t capture the problem. How about:

“Meetings are like cancer — they metastasise, everywhere, unless you’re ruthless.”

I’m sure Scrum has cost 50 billion or so in process bureaucracy.

Stating it like that is probably a good way to chat with your managers about having less meetings. The idea that a 30 min meeting racks 700-2000$ per meeting is kinda nuts!

Good. Now create a calendar plugin that shows the meeting organizer the costs before they book. And post a leaderboard of meeting creators to show how much they're costing everyone (my experience is there's always a small group of worst offenders, and interestingly it's often not the managers).

Sadly, this does not deter those whose sole way to show they are being productive (or have got something to prove) is through meetings.

A firm threatening people with a good time!