Shopify’s New Tool Shows How Much Unnecessary Meetings Cost

(CTN News) – For its more than 11,000 employees, Shopify has developed a new tool that assigns a cost to each scheduled meeting as part of its effort to reduce unnecessary gatherings among employees.

This Shopify Meeting Cost Calculator is a Chrome extension that allows you to estimate the cost of any meeting with three or more attendees after it has been set up in the Google Calendar.

It is estimated that the average size of a meeting at Shopify includes three people, and the average length of a meeting is about 30 minutes, according to a statement released by Shopify. There is a typical meeting of this size and length that would cost between $700 and $1600.

If you add more people to the list or if you have a high-level executive attend, then that cost would increase considerably.

In January, the company announced that it had canceled recurring meetings and eliminated meetings on Wednesdays. Shopify said that it saw meeting creep creeping back in recently, and that it needed to take immediate action to stop it.

Kaz Netajian, Shopify’s chief operating officer, demonstrated the tool to CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Mo Rocca in April.

The people have questions: what is the purpose of this meeting? Why are so many people at it? And those questions will put an immense amount of pressure on programmers to organize fewer meetings, leaving the rest of us alone,” he explained.

One report from last year found that large companies waste up to $100 million a year of their time and resources on unnecessary meetings, which is a considerable amount of money. In the report produced for Otter.ai by UNC Charlotte professor Steven G. Rogelberg, a UNC Charlotte professor, it was discovered that employees felt that, by eliminating unnecessary meetings in a company with 100 employees, a company could save $2.5 million annually.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft estimates that the number of meetings has increased by 153%.

In April, Netajian said, “There is no doubt that people who build things, people who create things, require focus.” According to Netajian, “If you are thinking about a problem and you are constantly interrupted, then you are not going to accomplish anything.”

It should be noted that not all meetings are necessary, according to Rogelberg.

There is no doubt that we could do with a little fewer meetings in our schedules, for sure, but the bigger problem is the ineffective meetings that we have,” he told Rocca.

It has been said that if we do our meetings better, there will be a lot of positive outcomes that arise from them.

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