January 10, 2023

Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s COO, sent a company-wide memo unveiling a major change designed to give employees back their time and start the new year with a lot less on their calendar.

Shopify stated in the memo that it would cancel all previously scheduled recurring meetings involving three or more people and impose a “two-week cooling off period” before adding any of those meetings back to calendars. Most meetings will be eliminated in the future, and those that remain will have to adhere to strict guidelines in order to remain on workers’ calendars.

“No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings,” said Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s COO, in the memo. The meetings will be reevaluated after the two-week period, but the company suggests employees “be really critical” about putting them back on, per the memo

The company intends to delete 10,000 scheduled events from employee calendars in order to free up more than 76,000 hours of combined productivity.

The memo, written by the company’s chief operating officer and obtained by CNN, instructs employees to “be really critical” of items added to a calendar and to cancel scheduled meetings.

The sources for this piece include an article in TechTalent.