A Five-Step Process to Help Middle Managers Convince Their Colleagues to Reduce Meeting Overload
Lessons from Shopify’s experiment to delete 322,000 hours of meetings
You’re not imagining it — we are in more meetings than ever before.
Microsoft found that the amount of time the average Teams user spent in meetings more than tripled between February 2020 and February 2022 (Microsoft Teams is a virtual meeting platform similar to Zoom and Slack.)
A study by MIT Sloan Management Review recently found that some workers spend as much as 85% of their time in meetings.
Three years since the start of the pandemic many of us are reaching peak meeting misery.
Shopify deleted 322,000 hours of meetings
In January this year, Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s chief operating officer, decided his company needed to make a change.
Shopify released a bot into everyone’s calendars, deleting all recurring meetings of three or more people, deleting needless slack channels, and reinstating “no meeting Wednesdays” asking staff to keep meetings limited to a set window on Thursdays.
Immediately 12,000 events disappeared, equating to 322,000 hours of meetings, or…
