Tech giant Shopify announced in a memo sent to employees on Jan. 3 that all staff were to cancel the majority of meetings for at least a two-week period.
“No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings,” wrote Kaz Nejatian, vice president of product and chief operating officer at the company, in the memo Shopify provided to The Epoch Times.
“We’re starting the year fresh with some useful subtraction; freeing ourselves from an absurd amount of meeting time, and unlocking an incredible amount of maker time,” he told employees.
Staff were told to clear their calendars of any recurrent meetings involving three or more people, and to keep Wednesdays “meeting-free,” for at least two weeks.
“Be really, really critical about what you’re adding back,” said Nejatian. He said no one at the company thought entrepreneurship involved “day after day of back to back meetings.”
“People join Shopify to build,” he continued. “Meetings are a bug along that journey. We are a company of builders and crafters. Do not forget this.”
Alex Lyon, spokesperson for Shopify, told The Epoch Times the tech company would delete nearly 10,000 events, equating to approximately 76,500 hours of meetings.
Priorities
“We are starting 2023 with a ruthless internal prioritization effort,” Nejatian said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times. He said supporting entrepreneurship was the priority at the company and the staff had to thrive on change.“Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson, and we are giving our people a ‘no judgment zone’ to subtract, reject meetings, and focus on what is most valuable,” stated Nejatian.
Tobi Lutke, Shopify’s CEO and founder, said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times, “Everyone loves feeling comfortable. But it’s actually completely useless. It’s during that period of discomfort where intense learning and growth happen.
“So what I’m trying to create is an environment where almost everyone around me feels uncomfortable all the time, because I’m dragging them into the next box,” stated Lutke.
He said the best thing founders can do is “subtraction.”
Chaos
Nejatian acknowledged this might feel chaotic to staff, “which is kind of the point.” He said, “It means there will be casualties (an important meeting that was clobbered)” and that “intentional chaos is ok ... part of working and thriving at shopify.”Shopify was forced to lay off about 10 percent of staff in July 2022, an estimated 1,000 people, in what the company called a “reduction in workforce” at the time.
Changes Necessary
Lyons said Shopify has shifted to a remote-first “digital by design” company.The internal memo said Shopify was changing how staff communicated internally, dividing up communication between Slack, a messaging app, and Workplace by Meta, and moving away from email, which “hasn’t evolved in the last 30+ years and it still sucks,” said Nejatian.
Shopify said the company would be “super intentional” about how staff communicated going forward, and planning would move to quarterly instead of annually.
Nejatian said the changes would cause “an intense degree of discomfort and distraction” but for a short period of time, which the company determined was preferable to a “long, slow burn that causes distraction and discomfort to simmer” for months on end.
Nejatian concluded by stating he expected the company would be figuring things out “on the fly” and that the memo might be the last email employees would receive from him, as his future communications would take place on Workplace, a Facebook-designed, all-in-one business communication platform, with online group work, instant messaging, video conferencing, and news sharing capabilities.
