Shopify discourages meetings by shaming employees with cost calculator | Hacker News Reader

Shopify discourages meetings by shaming employees with cost calculator

financialpost.com

52 pointsrpledge52 comments

The title makes it seem like a bad thing, but it makes total sense to me to want to cut unnecessary meetings down and use "different tactics" of getting there. I work in a company right now where we have 1 meeting at the start of the week and that's it (unless something comes up - it rarely does) It's a game-changer for my output and productivity.

Was this single meeting decision stumbled upon or iterated into or are you following a formalized system like EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) or something similar?

I’m curious as to how that came about.

It's just like how the the new manager at this company likes to work. He said in a lot of his management philosophies he vowed to himself when he was entry level if he becomes a manager he'll do things differently.

And, kudos to him, he does.

How long is the meeting typically?

This is interesting. For a while I had a client who drug their consultants and leadership into endless meetings, so we put a "cost of this meeting" calculation in the invite, notes, and handouts. It changed almost nothing. The problem was that the spending number was viewed as a cost of doing business. The difference between "expensing" a $500 meal and cutting a $500 meeting is that I get to eat the meal. I think for this to work you've got to directly pass on the saving. In many workplaces nobody cares if a canceled meeting makes an executive's bonus bigger...

Final thought - we need to be careful not to cut out all human interactions. COVID showed how isolating life can be without friends you see at work everyday. We shouldn't be using made-up-reason-meetings as an venue for mentorship, connection, and socialization, but sometimes that's exactly what happens. People hate meetings, but people get lonely...

Some people get lonely. But that's not universal.

Meetings shouldn't be social for the sake of being social. I agree that there's a social aspect to work, but don't use meetings as an excuse for social engagement.

Instead, a company should embrace that social-ness of doing in-person work and just let people socialize without a penalty. I'd argue that a company that promotes social activities and connectedness between workers is one that performs better anyway.

And for those who don't want to socialize and work better in isolation, let them. Meetings, by definition, probably feel like a "waste of time" for at least one or more attendees. People should feel like they are empowered to choose which meetings are most beneficial to their work.

My coworkers are not my friends. I don't make friends at work, I maintain professional relationships. I connect with them on LinkedIn, I don't friend them on Facebook. We discuss work-related topics and we solve problems.

I don't chit-chat with my coworkers about music videos or church or the weather. I don't get intimate with my coworkers or try to ask them out for drinks, or tell them how pretty their eyes look. I don't invite them over to hang out at the pool.

It is perhaps unfortunate, but American corporate culture, as a direct result of its diversity and inclusion, has become a culture of non-intimacy and non-engagement. If I attempted to make "friends" at work, I'd risk being nailed for insubordination, loafing, or sexual harassment. It's not worth it, so we find our friends and dates outside the company.

Not sure how you're coming to your conclusion about DEI being responsible for "non-intimacy and non-engagement."

If you can't make friends at work without being "nailed for insubordination, loafing or sexual harassment," you might want to take a good hard look in the mirror at how you behave with your friends.

I chit-chat with my friends about music videos or church or the weather. I get intimate with my friends, and ask them out for drinks, and tell them how pretty their eyes look. I invite them over to hang out at the pool. I have strong, trusting, and healthy relationships with my friends.

I also have strong, trusting, and healthy relationships with my coworkers. I'm not quite sure what the fuck you're trying to insinuate, friend, but I'm not paid enough to care.

My insinuation here is if you get "nailed for insubordination, loafing or sexual harassment" while hanging out with your friends...

You may be in fact be performing "insubordination, loafing or sexual harassment." while hanging out with friends.

Should you be nailed for those? Maybe. Should you be doing those? Maybe?

I do have single female friends with pretty eyes, and they're quite receptive to sincere compliments, so I feel sorry for you if that seems unfair. In fact, it would be unfair to my friends if I didn't flirt with them a little and increase those bonds of trust and intimacy.

Do you even know the definitions of "insubordination" or "loafing"? How could I possibly do those things in my leisure time outside of work with people who don't work with me?

Insubordination: "disobedience to lawful authority; specifically, an employee's failure or refusal to comply with a request or an assignment given by his/her supervisor."

Loaf: "(intransitive) To do nothing, to be idle."

I don't know what you think relationships with friends are like, but you sure have weird ideas if you actually think they would reprimand me for low productivity. Which one of your friends has been appointed lawful authority over you? Or is it a hereditary role, like "King of pests"? Lord of the Flies?

I said "Should you be nailed for those? Maybe".

So yes I do agree with most of your comment but you did skip past the sexual harrassment one.

Yes, I did, because that's a different animal. "Sexual harrassment" is of course a crime and a sin, but the same behavior patterns in a different context could be welcomed and pleasurable. Also, I used the term "nailed" to refer to punishment, but of course that's a sexual double-entendre.

If a coworker is discussing a task in a meeting with me and I DM her to say she has pretty eyes, that's (1) off-topic (2) unexpected and (3) unprofessional. Now, coworker may welcome the compliment and she may think I was nice to say it, and it was a DM, so others may not find out. Who knows, we could go out for coffee later and begin dating, if she's not my supervisor.

If my friends are hanging out by the pool and I turn to a single friend wearing a bikini and discreetly, sincerely, tell her she has pretty eyes, that's (1) on-topic (2) unsurprising and (3) what good friends do. Perhaps my friend doesn't welcome such a comment or shuns the attention and tells me to stop. If I'm her friend, then I'll respect that boundary. If I'm aggressive, and disrespect her boundaries, then I'm sexually harrassing her, we won't stay friends. In fact I could be ejected from the whole social circle.

But between these two scenarios, the former is something I would never, ever do. Yeah, I notice when a coworker is attractive, but telling them about it is crossing the line. There's no reason for me to go down that road at work.

On the other hands, perhaps I pay too few compliments to my single female friends. I often admire them and they catch me looking, but I think at that point a man needs to say what's on his mind and see whether she's receptive to that kind of attention. And I don't and perhaps I'm regarded as a creep, and that's why I'm single.

This is pretty terrible, if I cared that much about my employers bank account, why don't we do

* WARNING: 26 weeks parental leave will cost us $xxx,xxx

* WARNING: Buying team lunch this week will cost $x,xxx

* WARNING: Offering laid off workers 20 weeks severance will cost $xx,xxx,xxx

* WARNING: Offering your direct reports raises will cost the company money!

And while we're at it. Should we do performance reviews where a team sees how much income they personally generated vs how much the team costs the company? That would be super fun, that will probably stop most people from asking for a raise

Just ask people to limit meetings to the minimum, no need to flash numbers into a guilt trip for a bank account I do not own. If you asked me my employer should give me $100 for lunch every day, 4 day workweeks at 8 hours a day, 52 weeks parental leave, and other costly things I really don't mind them paying for. The cost of a meeting is the last thing I care about

If I see 2 employees talking about yesterdays football game in the kitchenette, should I report them wasting $1,500 of the companies time to HR?

Oh, and finally, im sure these calculations are based on 40 hour work weeks. Is this a good reason for an employee to tell their boss at Shopify they will not be online or answering any slack/email after 5pm every day?

Thing is, a lot of staff just don't have a sense of how much things actually cost, this is a pretty easy way to get them in the habit of thinking that way. Doesn't have to be forever, just long enough to change the culture.

As you said "The cost of a meeting is the last thing I care about"

That's a pretty awful attitude to take in a business. I also think it's a pretty privileged position to take. If you NEED your job, and getting a new job would be difficult for you, you sure as heck should care about the financial health and stability of the business. If you don't care about the business you work at, alright, that's on you... never the less many co-workers likely do care about the health of the business.

Ah, rules for thee but not for me. Does the CEO receive digital warnings every time they extract bonuses from the company account?

You don't have to warn about things that happen rarely, not for things whose costs are already closely tracked. The point of warning about meetings is that they happen too often and go on too long.

My point is on the uncultured lowly employees who don't understand the costs of running a business: indeed, if they only knew who the most expensive employee was (by a long margin).

You're sure reading a lot into my comment.

I actually tried to get this implemented at a startup I worked at a long time ago. We were building a new office and I tried to get the cost of meetings in progress implemented on the digital door signs because half the directors and VPs spent all their time in meetings. It got shot down by the COO because I'm sure he would have been embarrassed at the price of our exec groups meetings, but I didn't care.. we spent way to f'ing long in meetings and not enough time building things. Many did, from the kids fresh out of art school to the MBAs running go to market.

As I said, a lot of staff just don't have a sense of how much things actually cost... but I did, I was partly responsible for making sure hundreds and hundreds of people still had a job a year down the line and, myself and the rest of the over paid exec team included.

Should I ask my boss to shut down the free coffee bar and fire the barista?

This sushi we're having for lunch must also cost a fortune

Jokes aside, this screams of an org that isn't able to judge its employees by what they deliver, so they have to go chase processes

Either Shopify employees are delivering what they're expected to or they're not. It feels like executives aren't able to figure out if they are

Well you're certainly asking the wrong guy that, as I think hiring a barista and serving sushi at any business is unnecessarily, but I can be a little ruthless about that stuff. ;)

Anyway, Shopify stock has taken a SHARP hair cut over the past 2/3 years 160 bucks to 60 bucks is no fun. Sounds to me like their signaling to the market they're getting things under control (as basically every public market business is right now).

Their stock popped pretty hard today. If a meeting cost calculator saves me laying people off, bring on the meeting cost calculators!!

10+ years ago I worked for a major US investment and financial services bank. We had a tool that did exactly this, it was connected to the telephone system and would give you a running cost of the call. On outage calls, we'd often have 30+ people on the call and the numbers were insane.

It wasn't used to shame people, just useful for awareness... and I don't believe it was official endorsed by the firm.

I have always been bewildered by the anti-meeting sentiment in the tech community. There seems to be an assumption that meetings are bad. But obviously, meetings facilitate communication. You can waste a lot more time by not having a meeting and letting misunderstandings abound.

Shopify employees are going to get paid for their time whether they're in a meeting or not, so this calculator should consider the cost savings that result from having a meeting instead of not having a meeting.

"Meetings are a waste" is just such a juvenile perspective. If meetings truly are a waste in your organization, then the problem is your employees.

I.e., it is probably you who is the waste, not the meeting you're in.

I used to feel this way as well. But meetings can spiral out of control. In my previous company, my stand ups were taking 30 min minimum and sometimes up to an hour. At one point, I was looking at 3 hours of meetings a day. As an IC, I felt pretty powerless because it was my EM that was making these decisions.

Meetings are not a waste but they are costly to ICs because they interrupt our context, and recovering from context switch is expensive.

The unit of work for a manager is a meeting because they need to coordinate.

The IC is more of an execution role which requires sustained concentration.

If managers don’t understand this difference and call for meetings willynilly, they are actually costing the company productivity.

Regular syncs are important so that people are working on the right thing but people also need time to work.

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I’ve been to too many meetings where we decide something and then revisit it next year because we literally can’t remember how the meeting went. Sometimes many of the attendees have moved on now. Meetings need an agenda and a recording (video, minutes, whatever) to have value comparable to docs or email threads. Everyone we hire tomorrow will have missed every meeting, but docs are waiting for them.

Meetings are also noisy, so it’s hard to contribute if you need quiet to think.

I've fought this battle, and it turns out that non-technical staff often have no other recourse.

There is, in many orgs, no analog for the things that technical staff regularly use that make a meeting unnecessary.

PR? GitHub discussion? ADRs? RFCs? Never heard of them.

Email threads?

If cc’ing me, please no. Threads with loads of people includes are one of the more gross big-org features. At least I can not turn up to someone’s stupid meeting.

Most clients allow you to mute threads. You could also send emails from the most egregious offenders straight to trash.

These are perceived to be worse than meetings, again mainly by non-technical teams who have never seen email (tied to a web-based mailing list, specifically) used to drive decisions.

I think this is entirely based on your company and it’s silly to make that broad generalization since we’ve all heard the common mantra: “this could have been an email”.

A big problem with the pivot to WFH is that meeting sizes were no longer bound by the physical size of a room.

The result was that meetings could explode in size to dozens of people as anyone and everyone vaguely related to an issue was pulled in.

Now I've heard some say that that's not a big problem because people can "work" on other things while being present in the meeting waiting until the small moment when they might be needed/relevant/useful, but I cannot believe it is efficient and good to have a bunch of people vaguely distracted and not engaged in either their work or the meeting.

IMO whether wfh or present in the room, people need to be really disciplined about meeting size and keeping at the smallest possible size of totally engaged persons.

My company semi regularly runs a company wide meeting with over 100 people in it to share announcements that aren’t relevant to any employees in my country. The whole thing could be a newsletter and be just as effective without taking an hour from every employee.

While this is an interesting take, it also plays into the meetings are bad mindset without thinking things through. The problem here is in the opportunity cost. The discussion that doesn't happen in the meeting now happens asynchronously, which means more back and forth, and the time spent it now spread over more people. I don't think the cost gets saved.

I think meetings are great if they are optional for everyone attending and it has a clear deliverable at the end of it. That way people who don't think have anything to add can skip it and you always come out of it with action items and clear owners.

Why is this story spammed around every many business news site? I feel like it's news from like...years ago?

Maybe this coming to mind:

Show HN: An app that helps engineers fight back against pointless meetings

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996348

Check out their stock price today.

Someone in IR at shopify is doing some good PR. ;)

They took all that saved $$ and dumped it to pr folks

I'm working on an app to address this issue. While putting a cost calculation is a good way to raise awareness, we take a different approach to a solution.

It's called Meet Robbie (https://meetrobbie.com) and we give you an agenda with timers, minutes, and action items and you can use it directly in Zoom.

It's main use case is for recurring meetings where you have a list of business to get through. It encourages common sense things like having an agenda, being mindful of time, and keeping organized minutes.

We just released our so you can try it out. Would love any feedback and thoughts on our approach!

I kind of agree with this. I used to work for a large enterprise software company and I often made the point that you'd have to jump through hoops to get approval to spend a couple of hundred EUR, but you could call a meeting with 30+ people in it no problem.

I interviewed at Shopify last year, I didn't end up accepting (I stayed at the unnamed software company) but I do agree with a lot of their processes (not so much since the layoffs they've had however).

“Meetings are like weeds — they sprout back up, everywhere, unless you’re diligent”

This doesn’t capture the problem. How about:

“Meetings are like cancer — they metastasise, everywhere, unless you’re ruthless.”

I’m sure Scrum has cost 50 billion or so in process bureaucracy.

How dare you .

Scrum is the symptom, not the problem. If the management doesn’t change you’ll have just as many wasted full meetings under any methodology.

At least in Waterfall, devs are considered powerless drones and don't attend them.

Well, there are some alternative methodologies that are composed of almost 100% meetings until the project runs out of budget and goes nowhere.

Stating it like that is probably a good way to chat with your managers about having less meetings. The idea that a 30 min meeting racks 700-2000$ per meeting is kinda nuts!

Good. Now create a calendar plugin that shows the meeting organizer the costs before they book. And post a leaderboard of meeting creators to show how much they're costing everyone (my experience is there's always a small group of worst offenders, and interestingly it's often not the managers).

Sadly, this does not deter those whose sole way to show they are being productive (or have got something to prove) is through meetings.

A firm threatening people with a good time!

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