Why the “calendar purge” is not the answer to corporate inefficiency
Shopify is the latest company that announced a “calendar purge”, deleting all recurring meetings from employees’ calendars. But the number of meetings is a poor metric for organisational efficiency.
Shopify made headlines last week as the e-commerce company announced a “calendar purge” where it cancelled all recurring meetings forever and introduced a meeting-free Wednesday.
And Shopify is not alone: Asana, Zapier and – yes – also my employer Dropbox have at one time removed all recurring meetings from their calendars. So is the “calendar purge” the first work trend of 2023 as Hans Rusinek suggested?
Don’t get me wrong: There are many good reasons why you should clean up your meeting schedule, but I am nevertheless skeptical that "meeting purges" are a silver bullet for organisational productivity.
Shopify is a remote first company and in this context, a study by Microsoft is frequently quoted which showed that there was a surge of meetings during the the pandemic.
Yet, it should not be surprising that time spend in meetings increases in remote organisations, nor is it necessarily a sign for ineffective organisations. In a remote world, the number of meetings should be expected to go up because every casual encounter that would previously have happened at the watercooler or at the coffee machine now looks like a "meeting" in our calendars because we need technology to facilitate it.
At Dropbox, we ditched our meeting-free Wednesdays since we became a “virtual first” company in 2020. Instead, we reduce meetings by working asynchronously and only convene meetings when we want to make a decision, hold a debate over an important strategic topic or have a discussion like a performance review (we call this the "3d's test").
Our metric to measure organisational efficiency is not how often (or rather how infrequently) we meet but whether we manage to hold these meetings within our "core collaboration hours", a daily block of time that we reserve for real-time collaboration.
Or to put it in a different way: companies should not only look at how much time is "wasted" in meetings (because some meetings are actually important) but monitor how much time their employees have for deep work that drives the company forward.
Photo: Parabol / Unsplash