The number of meetings workers are being called into has “increased exponentially” in the remote work reality, according to Lindsay Coffin, associate director of human capital at the Conference Board of Canada.She tells Global News that Shopify is being prudent by encouraging workers to be “intentional” about whether they need to meet as well as “empowering” staff to say no to a meeting they don’t think is right for them.
“Meetings are this thing that is easy to add … and hard to say no to, hard to decline. And so we wanted to make it easier for folks to actually just get all this crud off their calendar,” he said. Similarly, she says meetings that are too loose and don’t have clear objectives in mind can easily end up being a waste of time.
To Coffin, one of the most important ways to run a meeting is to keep them on time: starting and ending meetings as they’re set in the schedule, or even closing up early if you’ve got everything done and giving people their time back.