Cancelling meetings is great. But what’s the alternative?

Angela Guedes

January 13, 2023

Hybrid Beats

🚨 Highlight of the week

Cancelling meetings is great. But what’s the alternative?

We all read the news last week that Shopify cancelled all recurring meetings with more than two people. Approximately 10,000 meetings were deleted accordingly to Harley Finkelstein, Shopify President, adding that “we've asked everyone at Shopify to not add the meetings back for two weeks and to be highly critical of what meetings they do add back”.

Of course we agree with him. After all, since the beginning that our moto is “Less Meeting. More Doing”. But the buzz around the announcement felt short in one particular point: how is Shopify supporting their team in this transition? If people can’t book group meetings for two weeks, how can they get feedback on their work, align on decisions, and move forward towards the same goals?

We believe this is key. Without proper guidelines, these initiatives are bound to fail. In fact, they already did. Kevin Indig was a former Director of SEO at Shopify and he mentioned it’s not the first time the company makes this move. The problem? As Kevin said “A couple of weeks after, most meetings came back on the calendar (…) Working async takes an incredible amount of discipline and really good communication (…) it’s a long process that needs deliberate guidelines and clear agreements”.

So if you want to cut down on your meetings but don’t know how, here’s a 3-step framework we share with all claapers: Meetings: When to record, when to miss, when to replace

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