Photo: Getty Images/Drazen_
Companies seek higher productivity via hybrid schedules and fewer meetings
Shopify’s New Year commitment to cut down on the number of meetings it holds for more than two people is being touted as a successful productivity hack by the company.
The e-commerce platform last month instituted a ban on most meetings of more than two people, freed up Wednesdays from all meetings and limited those with 50 or more people to Thursdays between 11 and five. Shopify has also placed limitations on the use of internal messaging apps that may have distracted its employees from more important tasks at hand.
NPR did a follow-up on Shopify’s grand experiment and found that the company and its 10,000 employees, who work remotely, were able to cut 322,000 hours of meetings, according to its chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian.
Mr. Nejatian said the cutback was the equivalent of adding 150 new workers.
Fewer meetings will, as Mr. Nejatian tweeted last month, “give people back their maker time.” The question then becomes how to be more productive with the meetings that companies hold.
Dr. Steven Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was part of a study that found that companies with more than 100 employees could save more than $2 million a year by cutting meetings and those with more than 5,000 employees could save $100 million a year. Even so, he is a big believer in productive meetings, particularly virtual ones, because they offer greater opportunities for everyone to participate through chat functions and because it reduces the “head-of-table” effect that comes with in-person meetings.
Dr. Rogelberg is not alone in making the case for virtual meetings and work. A new Fortune article points to gains in productivity that companies experienced when workers went remote in 2020, with levels remaining high through 2021. Productivity began to decline in the first half of 2022 as more companies required employees to report to their offices. There were modest gains in the second half of the year, but productivity has not climbed back to the same level of 2020/21 since.
Requiring workers to come to the office is often counterproductive, according to Gallup research cited in the Fortune piece, which found that workers are most engaged with their jobs when they work in the office one or two days per week.
- Will others follow Shopify’s lead and cancel recurring meetings? – RetailWire
- Shopify deleted 322,000 hours of meetings. Should the rest of us be jealous? – NPR
- One-third of meetings are unnecessary, costing companies millions (and no one is happy about it) – Otter.ai
- The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it – Fortune
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What do you see as the keys to raising productivity among corporate workers at retail? What role do hybrid work schedules and meetings play in worker productivity?
Poll
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A hybrid work schedule is a great start, as is lowering the number of in-person and death-by-Zoom meetings.
Give workers a fair wage, interesting projects and a career path and you’ll have happy, loyal workers. Treat them like — humans.
“Death-by-Zoom.” Great description. In how many of those Zoom meetings do we read our emails, make notes on what to do next, or simply tune out?
Funny how all of the sudden it’s easy to measure the productivity of knowledge workers and, that said, productivity is higher for remote workers. That aside, meetings and messaging platforms affect employee productivity no matter where they are. However I think than more than just cutting or restricting them, it’s important to find out what’s causing them. Often, companies seem really busy getting nowhere due to a lack of strategic focus with initiatives competing for attention, funding and resources making it almost impossible for anyone to be “productive.” Hybrid work schedules, if implemented and managed properly, could prove effective but two years of data during a pandemic is hardly sufficient evidence to declare them as the secret sauce of corporate success.
This is a great — having less meetings to get more work done. Novel idea.
Hybrid work has become the norm in our new world and is not going away anytime soon.
A hybrid schedule eliminates commuting time and reduces the stress and tiredness induced by commuting to/from work. Establishing meeting start and end times, starting or ending five minutes before or after the hour, enables participants to get to or prepare for the next scheduled activity. Every meeting should have a published agenda. Every meeting should end with one or more action points, dates, and the schedule of the follow-up meeting. Interruptions from phones (calls or messages) should be banned (if it’s not your husband or elderly parent, or your child’s school, you don’t answer). “Meetingless days” are too rigid while we are trying to make businesses more nimble.
I can say from personal experience that hybrid/remote work has significantly improved my productivity as well as my creativity. One never knows when inspiration will strike, and working remotely helps give me the flexibility to capitalize on those “a-ha” moments whenever they occur. Oh, and yeah, fewer and shorter meetings are obviously good, too.
Raising productivity includes limiting distractions and embracing tech to streamline processes. Commutes, meetings and excessive communications can sap workers’ energy, focus and output.
Hybrid models balance our need for social connection with our need to get things done.
Cutting back on meetings is a good start, but only if you develop other mechanisms for sharing information across teams and stakeholders — otherwise you get disconnected silos working in isolation which often leads to more than one team working on the same problem and not being aware of it.
For example, you need to provide tools for asynchronous collaboration and encourage their use. You also need to document more (which can be a “new habit” for those used to “just talking”).
There is no quick fix to getting hybrid right. It takes continuous monitoring and improvement, but overall it provides much better work/life balance and way more opportunities to focus on solving hard problems.
Putting guardrails on meetings is a smart idea because your calendar can get out of control quickly, and then all of the sudden you’re in meeting jail, which can be a real productivity killer. I’ve tried to block times during the day for specific activities and topics. For example, one hour in the morning for writing/blogging, two hours in the late morning for customer issues, you get the picture. And don’t forget to include breaks/downtime! There is nothing more important than to frequently take a break from the action to let your mind recover. This could be as little as 10 minutes here and there throughout the day. In terms of hybrid situations, I do believe this will be part of our routine for the foreseeable future. IMHO, there’s no substitute for in-person meetings/ideations, but a hybrid schedule can offer huge benefits for associates, mentally and physically.
I have been in business for 40 years and in academia for 10. With the pandemic, I have experienced virtual meetings. I fully agree, “there’s no substitute for in-person meetings/ideations.”
The pandemic accelerated the adoption and improvement of collaboration tools used by businesses of all sizes. Hybrid work is here to stay. As someone who has been working remotely since before the pandemic, I can say that the tools have dramatically improved and productivity has increased as a result. That said, there is a balance needed for determining how many meeting are too many. It’s easy to fall into a “meeting bloat” scenario where too many meetings cause people to have too little time left in their work day to be creative and productive. Yes, some things can be done via chat interfaces, but very often you just have to be “face to face” (even if virtually) to engage in a brainstorming conversation. Is there value in doing these in-person? Sometimes, yes, and that is why I believe most companies will embrace a hybrid approach, but there will always be employees that are fully remote and contributing just as much as those that come in to an office once or twice a week.
Meetings. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. I’m not clear on how hybrid work reduced meetings. During the pandemic, it felt like I was in virtual meetings for hours and hours on end. My ear callouses from headphones were a testimony to that. Every company has its own culture regarding meetings and sharing information. Empowering employees to make decisions and improving communication channels can provide better engagement and help to gain corporate alignment while reducing non-value-added meeting time.
Work from home and being smarter about how you do business (especially meetings) is the silver lining of the pandemic and to me, the only true disruptor since 2020. Everything else was an accelerator that we’re now seeing return to a “before days” modus operandi. As my daughter once said while driving to the office with me as an intern in 2018, “so, you do this EVERY day?” It made me realize how that old way of operating was indeed, kind of, um, rote.
Whenever I read these productivity studies, I wonder what is being measured. When you spend all afternoon in a meeting that is 90 percent B.S., but 10 percent leads you to a million-dollar solution, is the meeting 100 percent productive?
I’m a big fan of a “less is more” work culture. Autonomy and trust are the most motivating values a company can tout. Having people registering their presence at the office, forcing so many meetings, connecting on multiple chat apps all send a message that opposes trust. I hope these efforts set the tone for other businesses to start thinking this way.
Regarding hybrid, I just commented on Walmart’s forced “back to the office” policy. If we’re referring to forced hybrid, I have the same thoughts about weak management.
The meeting idea sounds cool, but this is a flawed implementation. There are definitely over-invites and people that can’t say no to a meeting, but having to bend rules to get three or six people in a meeting when they are truly needed causes too many alternate emails/IMs, such as “I met with Bob earlier and … what do you think about it? And ask Jane what she thinks?”
Hire intelligent, motivated people, give them some guidelines about minimizing meetings and then step back. That’s secure and effective management that will breed productivity.
Many meetings, especially in larger companies, are poorly run and a waste of time, so eliminating/reducing them is a generally good thing for productivity. Personally, I am not convinced that the hybrid = higher productivity formula “works” — although I do believe it supports a happier, less stressful work routine for most workers, ergo if happiness = I am doing more, then great!
I always prioritized 1) the Team, making sure they are happy and effective, 2) that resulted in great Products that customers highly anticipated, and 3) everything else.
We set up a hybrid model, 2 days a week in office for face time collaborative meetings (with Covid adjustments which were easy because of the existing model), and rest was remote/as needed on Zoom. The team performed and delivered beyond expectations.