News analysis
Time is money – Shopify introduces a cost calculator for pointless meetings
Shopify want to ‘shame’ employees for attending ‘pointless’ meetings by inserting a calculator in their calendars that counts the cost of the event.
The company’s new internal tool is part of increasing efficiency by eliminating 322,000 hours of meetings in one year.
For example, a 30-minute meeting with just a few employees can cost $1,600.
Most meetings just cost money
The application, a plug-in incorporated into employees’ Google calendar app, combines compensation data and salary to assign a cost to the upcoming event.
Individual wages, while meticulously calculated, will not be displayed with the meeting’s overall alleged cost, according to the plug-in’s inventor.
The calculator, released in July 2023, discovered that a typical 30-minute meeting with three employees can cost between $700 and $1600.
Meetings with higher paid executives can cost a fortune
That cost of meetings can swiftly balloon when high-paid C-Suite executives attend, chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian cautioned.
‘The goal of this thing is to show you that time is money,’ Nejatian told Bloomberg in an interview.
‘If you have to spend it, you think about it.’
‘No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner. But many people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision.’
Eliminate unnecessary gatherings
The new tool, Nejatian continued, is part of the company’s yearlong effort to eliminate unnecessary gatherings after eliminating all regular meetings with more than two individuals earlier this year.
Since then, the firm has gone further by prohibiting all meetings on Wednesdays.
The COO noted that the purpose of these activities is to ‘transform the default answer [when asked to a meeting] from yes to no.’
Less meetings = more work
In another interview with tech journalist Peter Wang, Nejatian described his deep suspicion of meetings.
‘A meeting is a bug that some other process didn’t work out.’
‘Imagine if Van Gogh had to paint Starry Night while perpetually being interrupted every 20 minutes.’
‘No matter how many meeting rooms are available, there never seems to be enough.’
