Shopify discourages meetings by shaming employees with cost calculator(financialpost.com) |
Shopify discourages meetings by shaming employees with cost calculator(financialpost.com) |
I’m curious as to how that came about.
And, kudos to him, he does.
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...
Meetings shouldn't be social for the sake of being social. I agree that there's a social aspect to work, but don't use meetings as an excuse for social engagement.
Instead, a company should embrace that social-ness of doing in-person work and just let people socialize without a penalty. I'd argue that a company that promotes social activities and connectedness between workers is one that performs better anyway.
And for those who don't want to socialize and work better in isolation, let them. Meetings, by definition, probably feel like a "waste of time" for at least one or more attendees. People should feel like they are empowered to choose which meetings are most beneficial to their work.
I don't chit-chat with my coworkers about music videos or church or the weather. I don't get intimate with my coworkers or try to ask them out for drinks, or tell them how pretty their eyes look. I don't invite them over to hang out at the pool.
It is perhaps unfortunate, but American corporate culture, as a direct result of its diversity and inclusion, has become a culture of non-intimacy and non-engagement. If I attempted to make "friends" at work, I'd risk being nailed for insubordination, loafing, or sexual harassment. It's not worth it, so we find our friends and dates outside the company.
If you can't make friends at work without being "nailed for insubordination, loafing or sexual harassment," you might want to take a good hard look in the mirror at how you behave with your friends.
* 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?
As you said "The cost of a meeting is the last thing I care about"
That's a pretty awful attitude to take in a business. I also think it's a pretty privileged position to take. If you NEED your job, and getting a new job would be difficult for you, you sure as heck should care about the financial health and stability of the business. If you don't care about the business you work at, alright, that's on you... never the less many co-workers likely do care about the health of the business.
This sushi we're having for lunch must also cost a fortune
Jokes aside, this screams of an org that isn't able to judge its employees by what they deliver, so they have to go chase processes
Either Shopify employees are delivering what they're expected to or they're not. It feels like executives aren't able to figure out if they are
It wasn't used to shame people, just useful for awareness... and I don't believe it was official endorsed by the firm.
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.
The unit of work for a manager is a meeting because they need to coordinate.
The IC is more of an execution role which requires sustained concentration.
If managers don’t understand this difference and call for meetings willynilly, they are actually costing the company productivity.
Regular syncs are important so that people are working on the right thing but people also need time to work.
Meetings are also noisy, so it’s hard to contribute if you need quiet to think.
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.
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.
Someone in IR at shopify is doing some good PR. ;)
Show HN: An app that helps engineers fight back against pointless meetings
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 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).
This doesn’t capture the problem. How about:
“Meetings are like cancer — they metastasise, everywhere, unless you’re ruthless.”
Anyway, Shopify stock has taken a SHARP hair cut over the past 2/3 years 160 bucks to 60 bucks is no fun. Sounds to me like their signaling to the market they're getting things under control (as basically every public market business is right now).
Their stock popped pretty hard today. If a meeting cost calculator saves me laying people off, bring on the meeting cost calculators!!
I also have strong, trusting, and healthy relationships with my coworkers. I'm not quite sure what the fuck you're trying to insinuate, friend, but I'm not paid enough to care.
You may be in fact be performing "insubordination, loafing or sexual harassment." while hanging out with friends.
Should you be nailed for those? Maybe. Should you be doing those? Maybe?
Do you even know the definitions of "insubordination" or "loafing"? How could I possibly do those things in my leisure time outside of work with people who don't work with me?
Insubordination: "disobedience to lawful authority; specifically, an employee's failure or refusal to comply with a request or an assignment given by his/her supervisor."
Loaf: "(intransitive) To do nothing, to be idle."
I don't know what you think relationships with friends are like, but you sure have weird ideas if you actually think they would reprimand me for low productivity. Which one of your friends has been appointed lawful authority over you? Or is it a hereditary role, like "King of pests"? Lord of the Flies?
I actually tried to get this implemented at a startup I worked at a long time ago. We were building a new office and I tried to get the cost of meetings in progress implemented on the digital door signs because half the directors and VPs spent all their time in meetings. It got shot down by the COO because I'm sure he would have been embarrassed at the price of our exec groups meetings, but I didn't care.. we spent way to f'ing long in meetings and not enough time building things. Many did, from the kids fresh out of art school to the MBAs running go to market.
As I said, a lot of staff just don't have a sense of how much things actually cost... but I did, I was partly responsible for making sure hundreds and hundreds of people still had a job a year down the line and, myself and the rest of the over paid exec team included.
So yes I do agree with most of your comment but you did skip past the sexual harrassment one.
If a coworker is discussing a task in a meeting with me and I DM her to say she has pretty eyes, that's (1) off-topic (2) unexpected and (3) unprofessional. Now, coworker may welcome the compliment and she may think I was nice to say it, and it was a DM, so others may not find out. Who knows, we could go out for coffee later and begin dating, if she's not my supervisor.
If my friends are hanging out by the pool and I turn to a single friend wearing a bikini and discreetly, sincerely, tell her she has pretty eyes, that's (1) on-topic (2) unsurprising and (3) what good friends do. Perhaps my friend doesn't welcome such a comment or shuns the attention and tells me to stop. If I'm her friend, then I'll respect that boundary. If I'm aggressive, and disrespect her boundaries, then I'm sexually harrassing her, we won't stay friends. In fact I could be ejected from the whole social circle.
But between these two scenarios, the former is something I would never, ever do. Yeah, I notice when a coworker is attractive, but telling them about it is crossing the line. There's no reason for me to go down that road at work.
On the other hands, perhaps I pay too few compliments to my single female friends. I often admire them and they catch me looking, but I think at that point a man needs to say what's on his mind and see whether she's receptive to that kind of attention. And I don't and perhaps I'm regarded as a creep, and that's why I'm single.