Shopify gets ruthless on calendar invites by posting the price of employees’ time, with a 30-minute meeting ‘costing’ up to $2,000

• Shopify is trying to discourage useless meetings with a tool that estimates the cost of employees’ time.
• The calendar tool calculates meeting costs based on employee pay data, meeting duration, and attendees.
• The strategy is part of Shopify’s push to purge thousands of unnecessary meetings.

How much are useless work meetings costing you? Shopify has introduced a new tool to help employees find out — and encourage them to cut back on non-crucial meetings.

The tool, which is integrated into employees’ calendars, slaps a rough price tag on meetings with three or more people, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The calculation is based on average pay data, the duration of the meeting, and the number of people involved.

A Shopify employee told Insider the tool is a Google Chrome extension that rolled out Wednesday, and while it shows how costly some meetings can be, there are no repercussions for scheduling “expensive” meetings.

“No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner,” Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian, who built the program, told Bloomberg. “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.”

A half-hour meeting with three employees can cost anywhere from $700 to $1,600, but with an exec like Nejatian in the room, the cost can exceed $2,000, according to Bloomberg.

The cost calculator is the latest in Shopify’s broader initiative to cull unnecessary meetings.

CEO Tobi Lütke said in 2021 that he occasionally goes into what he calls “god mode” on employees’ calendars to eliminate recurring meetings.

Earlier this year, the company canceled all employee meetings with more than two people and all meetings scheduled for Wednesdays as part of a series of changes it called “Chaos Monkey 2023” internally. Nejatian said the move resulted in the elimination of more than 12,000 calendar events, many of them recurring meetings, freeing up more than 322,000 hours of time given back to employees to “get shit done.”