Everyone talks about having too many meetings, but enterprises and individual employees have struggled to actually do something about it. Companies have tried, with varying levels of success, to designate particular days of the week as "no-meetings" days; despite the best intentions, these days often seem to get pulled back into the vortex of non-stop meetings.
But now, e-commerce company Shopify has taken the bold step of eliminating all recurring meetings with more than two people, according to BNN Bloomberg, which reported that the company will deploy a bot to issue reminders about the policy to those scheduling meetings.
It's hard to imagine many enterprises going as far as Shopify has to try and deal with the excess of meetings, but companies and end users will certainly continue to struggle with the way that hybrid work — and specifically the technology that enables it — continue to disrupt the rhythms of employees' work lives. For fully remote workers, back-to-back meetings are the big challenge. For those returning to the office, it's the combination and coordination of physical and virtual meetings that's proven difficult to manage in a way that keeps people feeling productive and confident that they're using their time well.
The challenges of hybrid work and return to office continue to morph and remain largely unresolved. That's why I'm excited about a few sessions that we'll be presenting at Enterprise Connect 2023 in March, addressing these challenges. For starters, we've got a General Session, Making Progress on Hybrid Work: The Enterprise View, in which enterprise executives Stacy Foster of Mastercard and Gary LaSasso of Amicus Therapeutics will discuss the challenges they've encountered as their companies have sought to balance the many demands and address the many challenges of hybrid work and return to office.
