24 ms·
Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings
- AntiRemoteWork 4y ago[dead]
- debacle 4y agoWhen a company does this, it's generally a knee jerk reaction to engineering telling product that development pace is slow because of "all the meetings."
- andirk 4y agoI made a shirt that covers this exact issue https://www.customink.com/designs/im-in-meetings-all-day/mjx0-00bg-b59d https://www.customink.com/designs/im-in-meetings-all-day/mjx... It's very straight forward.
- m-p-3 4y agoIMO the better long-term solution is to educate everyone on the concept of preparing and structuring a meeting adequately in advance, to only invite the people who should really attend, and not be afraid to say no when you believe you don't need to attend when justified. IMO the person creating the meeting has that responsibility to prepare and structure the event to minimize the time required. I personally include a document in the meeting invite containing the talking points in advance, which gives the time to those who participate to prepare their content and add more points if relevant. I guide the discussion through those points while also taking notes, and when the meeting is over I share a meeting summary to all those who attended so that we all have that info written down, easy to Ctrl+F if needed. So far I think everyone enjoys the effort I put in these. The rest of the work is documented through our incident management system to keep everyone in the loop, and wr have our group chat for the ad-hoc discussions.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoSame, but seems like we are a rare bunch. If people don’t know the goal output of the meeting then it’s just going to be a waste of time
- brown9-2 4y agoI’ve worked at companies where they’ve done a “spring cleaning” like this, I guess no one thought to turn it into a branding pitch and call up the media though
- worik 4y agoI used to be on the board of a national political organization. We met monthly, on the phone, for two hous once a month. We made our decisions using consensus. We had 30 people, opiniated activists mostly, on the call On the five years I served We went over time twice. Once by five minutes and once by 90. We had a very good facilitator In business I have almost never been in meetings that well run. Good on Shopify. But the problem is not "meetings". The problem is those meetings
- gls2ro 4y agoI think a synchronous meeting should only be scheduled when there is value in being synchronous. Else, every synchronous meeting should be possible to be replaced with other forms of asynchronous communication. Status meetings are the simplest one to replace: just add a bot that asks everybody what are you working on and then sends a summary with all the answers to the team. Don't ask people if they are blocked or if they know what to work on next day. Teach/support/grow/encourage them to announced when they are blocked as soon as that happens and to know to whom to announce that. Teach them to ask for help when help is needed and ping a colleague to discuss the matter. Support people asking their PMs/Business/... about priorities. Don't set the culture of waiting for priorities to be announced at fixed points as priorities should be able to be changes quickly and each team should have info boards where the priorities are cleary expresses. It is very easy to create a culture where everything is fixed by a meeting. Thus everybody belives the meetings are the only answer to communication. You can see this in some comments here where people are asking: if we don't do a daily meeting how can we work as a team? If you ask this you are putting an equal between communication and meeting, but that is not true. A team cannot work without _communication_, but synchronous meetings are only one of the many ways to communicate.
- jmartin2683 4y agoPeople who call meetings should have to pay for the time of everyone present out of an annual budget. This would result in fewer, more useful meetings. The fact that they’re ‘free’ in some minds (usually those whose job largely consists of discussing things) is the problem.
- fronterablog 4y agoA small step in the right direction. When will we see a company forbidding Slack and Teams?
- kayamon 4y agoHow would you prefer people talk to each other?
- justusw 4y agoI don’t know many great alternatives, but usually people will point to email in this case. And great documentation (wiki/FAQ/Readme) to preempt a lot of potential questions. I find those work well for me and it’s what a lot of people like because it reduces the amount of urgent but non-important interruptions in their work.
- chadlavi 4y agoCall me crazy but I would like to occasionally talk to and see the faces of my teammates in real time. We're not robots in factories. We're humans. I love remote work but a workplace is different from, say, an Internet forum.
- wildzzz 4y agoOne thing I've noticed is that people are less prone to personal discussions over a conference call compared to in person meetings. We only rarely do in person meetings now because of how quickly we can get through a meeting. One thing that contributes to this is the fact that you are sitting at your computer with plenty of other things to work on other than the meeting. When you're sitting in a conference room, there's no work distractions so people find other things to talk about, whether it's what they did that weekend or other work discussions that are unrelated to the meeting. One other thing is that since a Teams meeting feels less "official", we can have multiple status meetings a week where it's not mandatory to call in for every one of them. Our in person status meetings were once a week and would go for at least two hours since it was easier to get people together for a long time once a week than a short time multiple times a week. A status meetings once a week was simply not enough because of how quickly things changed throughout the week so by Wednesday, the plans for the week could have changed or someone's progress may have been halted due to a problem. Very inefficient!
- chadlavi 4y agoSorry but that's nuts. Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. Doesn't have to be everyday or anything but this is ridiculous and extreme. It would seem reasonable to me if it were "no meetings with more than 5 people" or something, depending on how their product and development teams are structured. But... three is verboten?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jasonlotito 4y agoOne-on-ones are the reason for that. Two people mean both are actively involved. Either listening to someone speak to them directly, or talking to someone directly. > Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. This doesn't prevent that. It seems that it only prevents you from automating the decision on when to do that. If you need to synchronize, you can. However, if you don't, there is no need to hold a meeting. But people tend to make meetings opt-out rather than opt-in. This seems to enforce an opt-in approach first.
- chadlavi 4y agoTeams work in cycles. This would mean, for example, that a monthly/quarterly retro with the whole team is now not allowed. That's bad.
- tlholaday 4y agoIt's worth experimenting with ... - any team member can propose an ad-hoc whole-team meeting at any time. - any two team members can propose an ad-hoc whole-team meeting at any time. - any team manager can mandate an ad-hoc whole-team meeting up to four times yearly The Shopify rule is "no team member and no manager can mandate a recurring meeting with more than one other person."
- 4y ago
- singron 4y agohttps://archive.ph/LgL96 https://archive.ph/LgL96
- taterbase 4y agoAn excerpt from the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Status Meetings Are About Status A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together. The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirming. And it’s not the status of the work, but the status of the boss. When bosses are particularly needy, the burden of ceremonial status meetings can grow almost without bound. We know of one organization, for example, that runs daily two-hour status meetings. When participants are off-site during a meeting, they are expected to call in and participate by speakerphone for the whole duration. Nonattendance is regarded as a threat and is subject to serious penalties.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoWe have status update meetings that don't even include the manager. I also find them kind of suspect, but what's the explanation for those?
- therealdrag0 4y agoCoordination, mentorship, peer review, banter and camaraderie.
- brailsafe 4y ago"So what time is it where you are? Wow, 6am!? And the weather?"
- therealdrag0 4y agoLOL. Well I'm very against 6am meetings. >10am or bust :) But actually IME it's not uncommon to actually chat about stuff. What'd you do this weekend? Did you see X movie? How did you solve that issue? But that might only work if it's not 6am.
- falcolas 4y agoMeetings are how humans share state. Most people’s writing skills are not up to replacing the back and forth synchronization that happens in meetings. And big meetings have value in avoiding games of management telephone. Canceling all recurring meetings may work for awhile, but I imagine it won’t be long before there’s a permanent action item for every meeting to schedule the next one. And it also won’t be long before senior management is made exempt.
- emodendroket 4y agoI find it is very true that recurring meetings often have low-value content but nevertheless the discussion manages to fill up the time. Given that meetings with an actual agenda are not banned I could see this potentially being an improvement.
- hirundo 4y ago> Meetings are how humans share state. We've just found better ways to share state, like emails and chat apps. They don't require synchronous attendance, they allow more space for thought and correction, and they are naturally part of a record that you can reference and copy. These forms don't share emotional state as well as synchronous presence and so don't completely replace it. But the modern workplace has less use for sharing emotional state than other things.
- zdragnar 4y agoI go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I detest excessive standup meetings and sprint retros. On the other hand, people do tend to pay a little bit better attention during them compared to "everyone post your status in slack at the end of the day".
- andirk 4y agoThe threat of a meeting helps me make sure I get my shit done beforehand. Sounds childish but it works for me. 10 minute standups first thing in the morning ensure that I get to work on time. A couple jobs ago the company said they wanted people to literally stand at the standups to encourage a quicker status share. Everyone did for a couple days, then eventually I was the only one standing and then the fired me.
- shmatt 4y agoThis is just another flavor of the Musk-esque belief that the ratio of delivered production code to man hours is too low. Engineers should be coding, not in meetings. This is a plausible thought for anyone with 1-2 years experience, and a frightening thought from anyone else Yes there might be some fat to cut but this approach just sounds terrible In reality projects will go in random unwanted directions, or TBs that used to be recurring will be manually created one at a time, and things will continue just like before this decision
- emodendroket 4y agoThis is the first time I have heard the suggestion that management is going against engineers’ wishes by scheduling too few meetings.
- andirk 4y agoEngineers enjoy getting updates and then delivering those updates to someone else who, in turn, puts them in some project management application that overflows within days. Software engineers prefer to discuss things rather than doing them. That's why they send a lot of emails with a bunch of people on them and always reply-all to make sure everyone knows they exist. They also use the printer a lot, especially for putting signs around the office about how to handle basic objects like the coffee machine. At least thats what it seems like email job people think.
- weitzj 4y agoWhat I found an interesting approach at a company I worked was that I think every quarter everybody has to empty their calendars completely and should schedule meetings not on specific weekdays
- andirk 4y agoMy last gig dropped my contract and then needed me a month later because their engineers weren't able to do anything. I told them I will come back but I will only golf every day. I ignored almost every meeting and had all my email go in to a folder title "C. DUMPSTER BOX". I got dumber by the day but got my 3 wood slice under control.
- gregshap 4y agoBanning recurring 3 person meetings initially sounded overly reactionary and reductive to me. It does sound like proliferation of meetings has become a growing problem and I wonder how much the video-off-zoom-attendance is a contributor. The article implies that they previously had multiple 50+ person meetings per week(!!) "Big meetings of more than 50 people will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit of one a week." As someone who has never worked a company larger than ~300 people, can anyone enlighten me on what kind of meetings would have that many attendees, outside of say a quarterly all-hands?
- andirk 4y agoIf the meeting requires your attendance but you have little to no input and are learning nothing from it, a fun game to play is do the math of how much that meeting just cost the company.
- agd 4y agoMany companies have weekly all-hands. E.g. My previous company had a weekly all-hands for the entire company (150 people).
- JamesSwift 4y agoThat seems incredibly counterproductive to me. If its more for face-time and getting-to-know people fine, but if its supposed to be an actual _thing_ with actual impact then I'm skeptical.
- skeeter2020 4y agoMy previous company (during Covid) had 3 all-hands each week (~300 people). It was a little over the top
- jobs_throwaway 4y agowe have one at my company, and it feels like a bit much. A lot of repeated talking points/useless info because we have an hour to fill every week
- 4y ago
- chadash 4y agoBefore you comment about how idiotic this idea is, the end of the article says: > The company said there will be a “two-week cooling off period” before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting. The company isn't saying no recurring meetings. It is saying, "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think carefully about which ones we really need... and by the way, it's okay to decline a meeting that you don't think you'll gain value from. I personally think that an occasional reset to figure out which meetings are actually necessary is a good idea. Also, sometimes there are personal/political reasons for joining meetings that you aren't going to get much out of. Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings" is a good way to give individual employees cover.
- skeeter2020 4y ago>> Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings"... ... sounds a lot like "make sure you're taking your vacation; we want employees to be recharged and energetic!", aka a feel-good CYA. My pointless, time-wasting, huge audience meetings are all owned by the top-half of management.
- bombcar 4y agoThe vast majority of meetings are scheduled by people "higher on the chain" than you - the number of "peer" meetings I have scheduled is ... zero. And everyone knows that refusing a meeting invite from a boss or boss-peer (or boss's boss) is career limiting.
- 4y ago
- KMnO4 4y agoI guess they don’t use Scrum at Shopify? Otherwise it will be awkward to manually have to schedule: - Daily stand ups - Biweekly (or sprint_length) sprint planning/review/retros Those sort of things are built into scrum to keep your team on track and prevent problems from being withheld until it’s too late.
- ultra_nick 4y agoOr they found Scrum to be unproductive and are looking for alternatives.
- ResearchCode 4y agoScrum is kind of a big red flag these days. One technical status meeting a week is plenty (as you'd have pursuing a PhD).
- rchaud 4y agoA sprint is timeboxed to 2 weeks. A PhD is not.
- rchaud 4y agoA sprint is timeboxed to 2 weeks. Technically a PhD is as well, but with a few more zeros.
- ResearchCode 4y agoBut a project is. Get rid of the sprints.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SpeedilyDamage 4y agoAs a practical matter, this seems like it will only cause meeting makers to spend a bit of extra effort scheduling “non-recurring” meetings periodically. As someone who occasionally does schedule meetings, this really is not that challenging, especially if meeting volume is overall low; no conflicts, it takes seconds. Wouldn’t it be better to measure outcomes and sentiment, and allow teams to adapt to what works for them? “Hey your team isn’t really enjoying all the meetings you call, maybe try having fewer to improve your team’s morale?” vs. “No recurring meetings for anyone!”
- moneywoes 4y agoNo stand ups?
- davidg109 4y agoMeetings absolutely need to be more scrutinized. In every last organization I’ve worked for, I’ve endured countless meetings wasting my time and others time with no agenda, endless fodder about staffs’ kids hockey games, etc. which could have been used for productive time. Kudos to Shopify for recognizing this and hopefully instituting a sea change.
- notpachet 4y agoFormer Shopify dev. For what it's worth, this isn't the first time they've purged all recurring group meetings. It happened several years ago as well. Surprised the article doesn't make mention of that; maybe their source hasn't been at the company long enough to know. I won't comment on the merits of this at large, but it was annoying for me at the time because I had several recurring calls with external partners, which were all summarily axed. The bot didn't discriminate between meetings with 3+ Shopify employees, or 1 Shopify employee and 2+ external contacts. Hopefully they fixed that this time, because it was embarrassing having to explain to partners why all of our recurring meetings had gotten deleted.
- KyeRussell 4y agoEven if my meetings were entirely internal, I’d literally quit my job if this sort of techno-micromanagement was trust upon me because someone at the top of the pyramid had a brain fart. How utterly absurd, and a great way to ensure that your employee pool is stacked with cult followers.
- SergeAx 4y agoMy current company uses MS Exchange with Outlook as client, and there's a cap on a recurring meeting occurrences. First I thought it is annoying, but now I believe it is actually a good product decision to force people to re-evaluate the need for those meetings.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> all recurring group meetings What about when you are working on something but you also message somebody on Slack/Teams a question and they instantly hit you back with "hey, instead of talking through it on chat, let's both stop everything we're doing and join a call"? By all means, I get it that sometimes (not sure how to measure it/what the answer is) it's quicker to "bite the bullet", hop on a call, screenshare, etc. but it does seem almost like a communication style preference. some people are super quick to want to jump on a call no matter what. and then the question becomes does it "impede" those whose communication style is not to jump on a call. it's like "rude" to say "i'd prefer not to jump on a call with you", forcing them to go from "call communication style" -> "type communication style" it really makes me wonder if some people are on 1 on 1 or small group calls basically 4+ hours out of the day (by choice. not scheduled meetings or on call incidents)
- EamonnMR 4y agoAre they still reeling from the layoff last year or something?
- JTbane 4y agoI wish the company I'm at would do this, I have a mandatory daily morning meeting that gets longer and longer, now 45-90 minutes with tangential discussion.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoMy last company had a similar daily meeting that often went over an hour . Any actually useful workers were just working through it while having it in the background and the useless would talk and talk about minutia probably feeling very productive. The most common reply to a question was “I’m sorry I wasn’t listening”
- blisterpeanuts 4y agoI recently quit a company where we were having daily morning meetings of 30 minutes or longer, plus weekly sprint check-ins and weekly sprint reviews, and quarterly PI planning events that were several days of 6-8 hrs/day. I like technical work, design and coding and interaction with customers to understand their needs. I'm okay with approximately weekly status updates and ad-hoc quickie get-togethers to figure something out, but I hate stand-ups (so-called) that feel more like justifying one's job or trying to sound productive (I knew for a fact some of those fancy updates people were giving were just covering for watching Netflix and Youtube 4 hrs/day) :) It seems to me Shopify's approach might have some merit, even if it seems heavy-handed and clumsy.
- andirk 4y agoStandups first thing in the morning are a great way to get the day going with some hot coffee. Each status should be 5-30 seconds. Keeps people honest. The shittier employees always go on and on about what they're doing and start asking questions about their personal tasks and if the bossman/bosswoman allows it, the meeting can take up valuable time. I always have a sheet in front of me where I start drawing and the more the drawing progresses, the more the project is digressing.
- blisterpeanuts 4y ago
- bretthopper 4y agoThis is an editorialized title. Bloomberg's is "Shopify Tells Employees to Just Say No to Meetings"
- xal 4y agoHey, "in perpetuity" isn't right. We have done this multiple times before and it's part of the culture. One culture value is "Thriving on change" and the recurring meeting GC run is one opportunity for people to discover if they do! Historically we did this event in `rand(600)+300` days anniversary of the previous run (to make it somewhat unpredictable) but we had enough chaos during COVID so that we queued this run to get a fresh new start this year.
- dfee 4y agoI had a product manager at my last job, who took the feedback from a retro, “we have too many meetings, we have no time to focus”, and created a new recurring meeting, “how to effectively manage your time” (30m, weekly).
- coffeebeqn 4y agoBeautifully absurd
- thehappypm 4y agoAs a PM, I’m sorry. It’s odd. My entire career my calendar has never been as full as my peers’ in PM-land. And yet.. I don’t seem to be less productive.
- andirk 4y agoWhat people don't give enough credit to is that a lot positions, I call them "email jobs", need meetings like how we need meals. Spaced out over each day, constantly. If they don't, then their irrelevance becomes more obvious. Higher ups also do this is well. I made a shirt for all of my friends who do this https://www.customink.com/designs/im-in-meetings-all-day/mjx0-00bg-b59d https://www.customink.com/designs/im-in-meetings-all-day/mjx...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- joegahona 4y agoI hope this is additive and not too much of a tangent, but the folks at 37signals (Basecamp) have a similar philosophy. A couple links below to some good articles on their philosophy. Honestly I've never worked anywhere where 1:1s and synchronous stand-ups aren't the norm, and any attempts at async stand-ups I've had have been really bad ("Slack stand-up today!"). But I'm intrigued by it. https://37signals.com/how-we-communicate/ https://37signals.com/how-we-communicate/ https://37signals.com/group-chat-problems https://37signals.com/group-chat-problems
- prismatix 4y agohttps://www.read.ai/ https://www.read.ai/
- mr_tristan 4y agoThis seems rather extreme, and likely to cause a lot of backlash due to how disruptive calendar manipulation is. At my company, we have started "async weeks", where, basically once a quarter, we try to basically use async communication instead of recurring meetings. First, this is executed without a lot of shock. You know it's coming and plan around it. But two, it does help promote writing - teams experiment with doing one or two things differently. It's a slow roll, but I'm seeing a bit more adoption of written tools, like doing reviews in Google docs instead of just reading them, etc. Importantly, the lame "status update" meetings have become much more tighter and focused. We used to pack things into these generic one hour sessions, and now more meetings are starting to have better focused agendas, people get used to saying "you know, maybe only two of us need to discuss this...", etc. Taking a week 2-3x a year to iterate and experiment with process changes like this feels pretty useful. Teams _should_ be doing this frequently if they're "agile", but I've rarely seen that actually pan out in reality. But it's a lot easier to take than the CEO surprising everyone electronically the first week back after a break.
- hintymad 4y agoSometimes having a lot of meetings is not due to poor process but poor culture. If teams have to seek consensus and buy-in, mostly due to fear of having failures, every step of the way, then they will have tons of meetings. If every single design has to go through a 20-person committee, then there will be tons of meetings. If a company value so-called "coordination" over engineering, then there will be tons of meetings. On the other hand, if a company assigns a huge chunk of responsibility to every engineer and value "show and tell" or "freedom and responsibility" in general instead of "get permission first", then there will be very few meetings, just like Netflix did in the early 2010s, or as AWS did with true 2-pizza teams. The question is, does the leadership in your company has the stomach or means to cultivate the culture of encouraging individuals to carry out big enough tasks?
- ergonaught 4y agoObjections to this appear to reduce to, "I demand to continue wasting time repeating mistakes!" Likely to be one of those great ideas that gets ruined in implementation because that's how humans do things.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoYou're saying this like any and every meeting is a waste of time, it's nonsense. I don't like meetings, I constantly try to remove meetings from my team's process, but that doesn't mean that I think the ones we have are not useful and a waste of time.
- ergonaught 4y agoThere is almost always a better solution available than “recurring group meeting” when the actual value and goal are clearly understood.
- wendyshu 4y agoCan you provide some evidence?
- corytheboyd 4y agoMaybe I just don't work in a toxic workplace, but I love speaking with my colleagues over video. Keeping comms going in slack and speaking face to face are not mutually exclusive. You don't work with avatars, you work with humans.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mgraczyk 4y agoThe comments here seem to misunderstand dynamics at big companies. Engineers often find themselves in meetings with 10s of people where there is no one person who could unilaterally reevaluate the usefulness of the meeting. Everyone in the meeting may be thinking "this is a waste of time", but each person doesn't know that everyone else is thinking that, so there is no natural processes to discuss ending the meeting. Worse, there is sometimes a perverse incentive to keep meetings going to maintain control or power. This change shifts the equilibrium from "default on" to "default off" in a way that probably would not happen organically at a big company.
- andirk 4y agoI made a shirt to cover everything you mention here https://www.customink.com/designs/im-in-meetings-all-day/mjx0-00bg-b59d https://www.customink.com/designs/im-in-meetings-all-day/mjx... People really like it.
- waylandsmithers 4y agoI agree with many here that this is heavy-handed, but my experience suggests that the symptom it's treating is very real- once a recurring meeting is created it never really goes away (in my experience sometimes it does if the meeting owner leaves the company or moves to a different job function). So I like the idea of throwing all meetings into the "konmari" method of tidying, where you completely empty your closets and then decide what should be kept, rather than trying to pick out which things should be discarded.