Techopia Live: Fellow’s new tools help fight ‘useless meetings’

Ottawa Business Journal

Fellow is joining the war on useless and inefficient meetings. Earlier this year, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees to purge their work calendars of all recurring meetings with more than two people. Lutke suggested that too much time was being wasted in ineffective meetings, resulting in lower productivity for Shopify. Aydin Mirzaee, a co-founder of Fellow and business colleague of Lukte, is responding to the rally call against useless meetings. This fall, Fellow unveiled a new feature set that helps managers limit inefficient meetings, including a calculator to reveal the true cost of group meetings. The new feature set works with Google Calendar and lets administrators impose guidelines on employees who are setting meetings. For example, it can restrict the number of employees invited to a meeting. It can also recommend excluding an employee who has too many meetings in a given period of time. Mirzaee says new data suggests that, in a post-pandemic business world, managers are now spending 14.5 hours, an increase from 9.4 hours in 2019. "While meetings are often cited as a huge source of productivity drain, this isn't about declaring an all-out ban on meetings. It's about proactively redefining an organization's meeting culture and changing the way meetings are conducted to boost productivity and reduce cost waste," says Mirazee. In this episode of Techopia Live, Ottawa Business Journal publisher Michael Curran speaks with Mirzaee to get his insights into how organizations can encourage productive and efficient meetings. Read more about Fellow here: https://obj.ca/company/fellow/