Amazon is trying to kill the meeting before the meeting
Large organisations waste an estimated US$100 million a year on needless gatherings
AMAZON.COM employees will soon have to schlep to the office all week, but they might have fewer boring meetings when they get there.
Chief executive officer Andy Jassy’s memo targeting corporate bloat promised a purge of “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings”, which he deemed “artefacts that we’d like to change”. In doing so, the technology giant that employs 1.5 million people became the latest big company to try and reduce corporate bureaucracy, a scourge of the workplace that became more pronounced during a pandemic-induced hiring binge.
Large organisations waste an estimated US$100 million a year on needless gatherings. Executives have said that nearly half those meetings could disappear without any negative impact.
Jassy pledged changes that would flatten the organisation, saying he wanted employees “feeling like they can move fast without unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms, and layers that create overhead and waste valuable time”.
Some workplace experts cheered his attack on red tape, which also included a promised reduction in management layers and the creation of a “bureaucracy mailbox”, where staff can identify processes and rules that “should be called out and extinguished”.
Other management gurus said there can be value in the pre-meetings that Jassy wants to cull.
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“I think pre-meetings have upsides and downsides,” said Andy Molinsky, a professor of management and organisational behaviour at the Brandeis International Business School. While they eat up time and can be exclusionary, they also help shape and vet ideas, which can increase buy-in and ultimately improve execution, he said.
“Perhaps Amazon feels things have just got too bogged down. The question is whether what they gain outweighs what they might potentially lose,” he said.
Organisational psychologist Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said pre-meetings can be “a critical part” of some decisions. Even if many are unnecessary, a top-down edict to eliminate them all is misguided, he said.
Cultural red flag
Still, a calendar chock-full of pre-meetings is a cultural red flag, a sign that employees fear the repercussions of not having all the answers, said Jennifer Nahrgang, a management professor at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa.
Tactics for limiting meetings vary: Twice a quarter, for example, Salesforce-owned Slack cancels all internal meetings for an entire week, and eliminates them on Fridays. Shopify created a tool embedded in employees’ calendars that estimates the cost of each meeting. They can add up: A decade ago, Bain & Co found that a single weekly meeting of mid-level managers cost one organisation US$15 million a year.
Cutting bureaucracy could add US$4.8 trillion to US economic output, said a new analysis by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, the authors of Humanocracy and co-founders of the Management Lab, a research and advisory firm. But initiatives to reduce bureaucracy often fail.
“Every few years, a company will go to war with bureaucracy. But like grass in the rain, it grows back, and all you’ve done is given it a trim,” Hamel said. “Like ageing, this creeping bureau-sclerosis is inevitable.”
“World’s largest startup”
Amazon’s drive to get leaner follows that of Meta Platforms, where chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last year cut thousands of jobs and reportedly railed against “managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work”.
Bayer chief Bill Anderson has taken a unique approach – modelled in part on Chinese appliance maker Haier – by grouping staffers into small teams that work together for 90 days on a project, then disperse, in a model called “dynamic shared ownership”.
In Amazon’s case, Jassy said he wants to foster a cultural transformation, so the 30-year-old company will “operate like the world’s largest startup”.
But Hamel noted that other CEOs have made similar promises, only to fall flat: Carly Fiorina, upon taking control of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, said she would recapture the spirit of the Palo Alto garage where the company was founded. Six years, a failed merger and thousands of layoffs later, she was dramatically ousted by HP’s board.
Will the new guard of storied tech startups be any more successful at rescuing their entrepreneurial roots from red tape? Hamel said that depends on how they approach the problem.
He said: “Bureaucracy is not just excess layers, it’s a way of thinking. There’s great merit in asking if there are too many pointless meetings. But if you really want to recapture the spirit of a startup, that’s a much more radical goal. So my first question for Amazon is: ‘How much are you really willing to change?’”
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