Let’s greet, but must we meet?
Tobi Lütke, the founder of Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify has announced that his company is to eliminate internal coordination meetings between more than two people, with very few exceptions, encouraging employees to decline meeting invitations and cancel their presence in large internal communication forums and chats. The exceptions are large briefings, which will be restricted to a maximum of one per week and at a predefined time during a six-hour window on Thursdays.
The company, founded in 2006, has more than ten thousand employees, who work from wherever they want within an indefinite “digital by design” policy launched in May 2020 at the height of the pandemic, and which also allows employees to freely decide how much of their salary they want to receive in the form of cash and how much in company shares. More than 1.7 million companies use Shopify’s platform in 175 countries to sell their products or services: the company benefited from the pandemic, when e-commerce multiplied its activity. But as Lütke explains, after having reached a turnover of $4.6 billion in 2021, it went into crisis last year, when its share price plummeted by 75%, and it had to lay off more than a thousand employees, after overestimating the positive impact of the pandemic. During 2022, Shopify was primarily engaged in cost-cutting and reinventing itself to try to gain efficiencies.
