Shopify will be eliminating all recurring meetings involving more than two people in a bid to give employees more time to work on other tasks, Kaz Nejatian, vice president of product and chief operating officer at Shopify told employees in a Tuesday email viewed by Fortune.
The changes, which are effective immediately, will also see no events at all scheduled on Wednesdays, while any large meetings involving more than 50 people can only be held on Thursdays between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Big meetings are limited to one per week.
The changes to Shopify’s operating structure will eliminate 10,000 company events or the equivalent of more than 76,500 hours of meetings, a company spokesperson told Fortune.
Nejatian called the policy change a “useful subtraction,” which would free employees from excessive amounts of time currently spent in meetings. In his email to employees on Tuesday, he urged them not to add any meetings back to their calendars for at least two weeks, and to be “really critical” when deciding whether to add a meeting back to schedules at all.
Shopify CEO Lütke referred to the approach as a “calendar purge” in a statement to Fortune.
“The best thing founders can do is subtraction,” he in a recent interview with The Knowledge Project Podcast. “It’s much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time.”
"Shopify is axing all meetings involving more than two people in a remote work ‘calendar purge’ that the company itself calls ‘fast and chaotic’," Fortune. Jan. 4, 2023
