Leaders, your employees probably hate meetings. But teams can measure their true cost

The unspoken truth about workplaces is that many employees find meetings to be a waste of time. We’d rather use that time to get our work done instead of doing yet another check-in on our progress or rehashing details that are already known. Still, most companies fill their employees’ calendars with regularly scheduled weekly meetings.

Except for Shopify. Earlier this year, the company instituted a “No Meeting Wednesday,” removed all recurring meetings from employees’ calendars, and let employees choose to not show up to meetings that they didn’t want to go to. The results were not just beneficial for workplace productivity, but for Shopify’s expenses as well. It found that an average 30-minute meeting with three employees cost the company between $700 and $1,600 each time.

Now Shopify wants to inspire other businesses to see how much pointless meetings are costing them, which is why the company is sharing details about its Shopify Meeting Cost Calculator Chrome extension, an internal tool it rolled out for its employees.

The extension integrates with Google Calendar and reveals the estimated cost of meetings based on who is attending and how long the meeting lasts. As users add members to your Google Calendar event, they can see the estimated cost of the meeting displayed in red numbers based on the average compensation by discipline and subdiscipline of the meeting attendees, as well as the meeting length.

That data, Shopify says, can help teams decide whether the time spent in meetings is worth the cost in lost productivity.

Update: A Shopify spokesperson told us that the Chrome extension is not publicly available, as an earlier version of this story implied. The purpose, rather, is to share details of the tool and “inspire other companies to follow suit.”