You should not be in a work meeting, Shopify tells employees

Whether working from the office or remotely, meetings have become a staple of work life for many employees. For Shopify however, the consensus appears to be that excessive and unnecessary meetings are preventing employees from engaging in more productive work.

As employees return from their holiday break, the Canadian multinational e-commerce company has announced a “calendar purge”, where recurring meetings with more than two people are removed “in perpetuity”, and a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays is reinforced.

Additionally, meetings consisting of more than 50 employees can only be held during a six-hour window on Thursdays, while managers are tasked to encourage employees to decline other meetings and remove themselves from large internal chat groups.

Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s Vice-President of Product and Chief Operating Officer, said in an emailed statement, “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. The meeting purge is the latest workforce experiment from Shopify.”

READ: Non-essential meetings place financial burden on organisations

Shopify is not the first company to introduce measures to reduce large, long and unproductive meetings, with Facebook parent company Meta, household product maker Clorox and tech company Twilio among those who have instituted no-meeting days.