Over $1000 for 30 minutes
Shopify puts a price tag on meetings
By Diana Dittmer
7/13/2023, 7:22 p.m
Meetings are an integral part of everyday work. The only question is: How effective are they and how expensive? Shopify says: Many meetings not only eat up too much time, but also too much money. A new computer should help to minimize costs and increase productivity.
Meetings, meetings and more meetings – they have become a daily ritual in many companies. But are all these meetings really effective and productive? Research by Canadian e-commerce company Shopify found that they not only cost businesses a lot of time, but also a significant amount of money.
The German founder of Shopify, Tobi Lütke, trims his company for more efficiency.
(Photo: picture alliance / empics)
How much, exactly, is revealed within the company itself now by a new tool Shopify launched this week: a meeting time cost calculator. According to the company, the aim is to promote an efficient culture of meetings and to encourage all employees to make optimal use of the company’s time and money resources.
According to the US finance agency Bloomberg, the new tool is a Google Chrome extension in the calendar that shows Shopify’s more than 11,000 employees worldwide the estimated costs for their respective appointments. Every appointment made with three or more people gets a price tag. The costs result from the duration of the meeting, the number of participants and an average hourly rate for the participants, depending on the function.
“Time is money”
According to Shopify’s internal calculations, a half-hour meeting for three employees costs the company between $700 and $1,600. If an executive is involved, the costs rise to over $2,000. The company estimates the savings from just eliminating three appointments per week per employee at 15 percent.
“No one at Shopify would pay $500 for dinner,” Bloomberg quotes Kaz Nejatian, who developed the cost calculator. “Yet a lot of people spend a lot more money in meetings without ever making a decision.” time is money If you spend it, you should think about it.
Studies have long indicated that inefficiency is a problem in many organizations. Wasting time on activities like meetings is among the top five causes of inefficiency within an organization, according to a survey of executives and knowledge workers from the project management app Wrike.
The financial impact is enormous: billions of dollars are thrown out the window worldwide every year. According to a 2019 survey by the appointment scheduling company Doodle, the German economy loses around 65 billion euros a year through 4.7 billion hours of wasted time. 38 percent of all employees in Germany saw the time wasted by meetings as the biggest unresolved cost factor in their company.
Concentration put to the test
At the beginning of the year, Shopify – under enormous cost pressure – took action and issued radical rules for arranging appointments. All recurring staff meetings of more than two people were canceled, deleting a total of 12,000 calendar events. Wednesday was declared a non-meeting day and larger groups of more than 50 people were only allowed on Thursdays. The bottom line was 322,000 hours that employees were suddenly able to use more effectively. In the best case, the time gained would motivate them, so the assumption.
Because according to studies, unproductive meetings are not only a waste of money, employee satisfaction also suffers. Because marathon sessions are always a distraction from actual work, they can potentially lead to overload. “Having undisturbed time to focus is a valuable resource,” Shopify explained. “So we give our employees the freedom to turn down meetings and focus on what matters.” The new cost calculator is designed to help “rethink the need for meetings and explore more creative ways to collaborate.” It will be interesting to see how other companies react to this.