Shopify’s Meeting Cost Calculator

I have no less than six posts dedicated to meetings on this blog and at least two episodes on the pod where meetings form one of the top three stories of the month. I am not obsessed with meetings but I spend a LOT of time thinking about them and even more time attending them. If you’ve been around for a while, you probably know that I get a lot of my work done via meetings but an equal amount of work risks not getting done because of the same meetings. So, why yet another post on meetings? Because (1) decades of meetings later, we still haven’t figured a way of fixing them and (2) Shopify’s latest move is obvious yet genius.

Everyone has a love-hate relationship with meetings but no one can deny the guilt that is associated with declining or missing a meeting. FOMO is so real that it’s got me up at 9pm every weeknight, including Fridays, attending meetings. Shopify understands all the pain associated with meetings and takes its war on meetings very very seriously. Earlier this year, they banned all meetings on Wednesdays and limited large meetings with over 50 people to a six-hour window on Thursdays. Then they went ahead and banned all recurring meetings involving three or more people. If you work for Shopify and need a weekly meeting that really needs to happen, you would need to set that meeting Every. Single. Week. Now, you & I can debate the effectiveness of the first two moves but their latest move is unquestionably genius.

On 12^th July, Shopify made news again when they launched their Meeting Cost Calculator – a Chrome extension built into Google Calendar that adds a price tag to every huddle. Everyone knows that time is money but this new plug-in tells you just how much money by considering three variables – how long is the meeting, how many people are invited to the meeting and the average pay of the attendees of the meeting. According to Shopify, the average 30-minute meeting with three employees at the company costs between $700-$1600. I can only imagine how costly an all-hands might be. Shopify claims to be on pace to save 322,000 hours by not doing 474,000 meetings this year. By getting rid of even three meetings a week per person, Shopify estimates it will see a 15% reduction in overall costs.

“No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner,” CEO Kaz Nejatian said in an interview. “But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision. The goal of this thing is to show you that time is money. If you have to spend it, you think about it.” 

Shopify’s new tool not only eliminates the guilt of declining meetings but also makes you feel good while doing so. The truth is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. And now that there’s a clear measure of the cost of each meeting, organizers will be far more judicious while sending out invites or so is the hope. One article refers to meetings as sturdy weeds so am not surprised if Shopify comes up with a few more tactics in its hopes to win the war.

An example of Shopify’s Meeting Cost Calculator. Shopify

Now, you may be going up in arms about employees having visibility into pay and being able to calculate how much each person makes by fiddling around with the extension. However, let’s close that argument with two words – salary transparency. Also, if someone really wants to invest that much effort into figuring out the average pay for that role, let them.

Yes, the tool isn’t perfect. It is skewed towards displaying the cost of the meeting but doesn’t quantify the benefit. The cost of the meeting may be $235,000 and may yield an outcome worth $675,000. Maybe in time, the tool will evolve to let organizers quantify the benefit, thereby completing the equation. For now, let’s consider this a fantastic step 1. It may not explicitly mention the benefits but it does force all attendees to make that mental balance in their heads. It may also be a driver of other beneficial consequences such as diligent note taking. Meanwhile, I am going to closely watch Shopify to track what they do next.

Can we also take a moment to talk about how the addition of the simple plug-in could bump the stock of Google if it made it a standard offering to every single organization that uses Google Calendar? Or why aren’t other organizations jumping on the bandwagon sooner? The concept of adding a price tag to meeting can literally be extended to everything in the workplace. Imagine if every single HR initiative had the cost of execution branded right on top of every document and of course, the benefit too. While, not everything can have a price tag attached to it, almost everything can.

What do you think we should attach a price tag to next?