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Shopify discourages meetings by shaming employees with cost calculator
- dmbche 3y agoStating 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!
- throwawaysleep 3y agoI’m sure Scrum has cost 50 billion or so in process bureaucracy.
- henriquez 3y agoHow dare you .
- acdha 3y agoScrum is the symptom, not the problem. If the management doesn’t change you’ll have just as many wasted full meetings under any methodology.
- throwawaysleep 3y agoAt least in Waterfall, devs are considered powerless drones and don't attend them.
- ElectricalUnion 3y agoWell, there are some alternative methodologies that are composed of almost 100% meetings until the project runs out of budget and goes nowhere.
- mustafabisic1 3y agoThe 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.
- josiahpeters 3y agoWas this single meeting decision stumbled upon or iterated into or are you following a formalized system like EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) or something similar? I’m curious as to how that came about.
- mustafabisic1 3y agoIt's just like how the the new manager at this company likes to work. He said in a lot of his management philosophies he vowed to himself when he was entry level if he becomes a manager he'll do things differently. And, kudos to him, he does.
- worstestes 3y agoHow long is the meeting typically?
- BaseballPhysics 3y agoGood. 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).
- subpixel 3y agoI'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.
- unmole 3y agoEmail threads?
- lostlogin 3y agoIf cc’ing me, please no. Threads with loads of people includes are one of the more gross big-org features. At least I can not turn up to someone’s stupid meeting.
- unmole 3y agoMost clients allow you to mute threads. You could also send emails from the most egregious offenders straight to trash.
- subpixel 3y agoThese are perceived to be worse than meetings, again mainly by non-technical teams who have never seen email (tied to a web-based mailing list, specifically) used to drive decisions.
- addisonl 3y agoI think this is entirely based on your company and it’s silly to make that broad generalization since we’ve all heard the common mantra: “this could have been an email”.
- suction 3y ago[dead]
- lostlogin 3y ago“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.”
- csw-001 3y agoThis 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...
- taftster 3y agoSome people get lonely. But that's not universal. 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.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoMy coworkers are not my friends. I don't make friends at work, I maintain professional relationships. I connect with them on LinkedIn, I don't friend them on Facebook. We discuss work-related topics and we solve problems. 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.
- shmatt 3y agoThis 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?
- neom 3y agoThing is, a lot of staff just don't have a sense of how much things actually cost, this is a pretty easy way to get them in the habit of thinking that way. Doesn't have to be forever, just long enough to change the culture. 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.
- cnity 3y agoAh, rules for thee but not for me. Does the CEO receive digital warnings every time they extract bonuses from the company account?
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoWhile 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.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoI think meetings are great if they are optional for everyone attending and it has a clear deliverable at the end of it. That way people who don't think have anything to add can skip it and you always come out of it with action items and clear owners.
- catboybotnet 3y agoSadly, this does not deter those whose sole way to show they are being productive (or have got something to prove) is through meetings.
- Daviey 3y ago10+ 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.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoWhy is this story spammed around every many business news site? I feel like it's news from like...years ago?
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMaybe this coming to mind: Show HN: An app that helps engineers fight back against pointless meetings https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996348
- neom 3y agoCheck out their stock price today. Someone in IR at shopify is doing some good PR. ;)
- dilyevsky 3y agoThey took all that saved $$ and dumped it to pr folks
- babbledabbler 3y agoI'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 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!
- jononomo 3y agoI 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.
- muh_gradle 3y agoI used to feel this way as well. But meetings can spiral out of control. In my previous company, my stand ups were taking 30 min minimum and sometimes up to an hour. At one point, I was looking at 3 hours of meetings a day. As an IC, I felt pretty powerless because it was my EM that was making these decisions.
- wenc 3y agoMeetings are not a waste but they are costly to ICs because they interrupt our context, and recovering from context switch is expensive. 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. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- erik_seaberg 3y agoI’ve been to too many meetings where we decide something and then revisit it next year because we literally can’t remember how the meeting went. Sometimes many of the attendees have moved on now. Meetings need an agenda and a recording (video, minutes, whatever) to have value comparable to docs or email threads. Everyone we hire tomorrow will have missed every meeting, but docs are waiting for them. Meetings are also noisy, so it’s hard to contribute if you need quiet to think.
- Tiktaalik 3y agoA 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.
- Gigachad 3y agoMy company semi regularly runs a company wide meeting with over 100 people in it to share announcements that aren’t relevant to any employees in my country. The whole thing could be a newsletter and be just as effective without taking an hour from every employee.
- mpalfrey 3y agoI 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).
- foul 3y agoA firm threatening people with a good time!