Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Shopify announced a plan Wednesday to reform the company's management, flatten its organizational structure and reduce the number of middle managers. Under the plan, Shopify will classify employees into individual contributors and managers.

Starting in mid-March, Shopify employees will have the option of becoming full-time managers or experts. Managers will focus on matters such as resource planning and strategy, while experts will focus on developing products.

Shopify said the reason for the change is that companies generally reward people who take on a lot of management responsibilities more, giving them higher salaries and more career opportunities. However, not all employees expect to manage others. The goal of this adjustment is to better reward employees who continue their career development without becoming managers. In Shopify, manager status will no longer have an impact on pay.

Shopify chief human resources officer Tia Silas said in an email: "Most employees want their main job to be development, which is the number one reason they join Shopify. Therefore, we introduced the concept of job scope and skill level, so that experts can spend most of their time on product development, continuously improve the level of professional skills, and earn higher salaries. "

Shopify expects the number of managers overall to decline, resulting in a "flattening" of the organizational structure, she added. "With the new system, we will clear the way for experts to develop their careers, allowing them to focus on what they do best: building world-class products. "

Shopify isn't the only tech company rethinking its management function. Meta has previously reported that it requires many middle managers to take on new roles as individual contributors to improve overall efficiency in the face of layoffs.

Similar to Meta, Shopify is reprioritizing efficiency in tough economic times. In addition to pushing for a flatter organizational structure, Shopify has made a series of other adjustments over the past few months.

In January, Shopify launched what it internally calls Chaos Monkey 2023. When employees returned from vacation, they found that all meetings with more than two people had been cancelled. Shopify also canceled Wednesday's all-hands meeting and limited large team events to Thursday's specific hours.

Shopify said at the time that the changes would reduce 320,000 hours of meeting time this year. After a two-week pause, employees have the option to add the meeting back to their calendar. But before rescheduling meetings, they were asked to think about the actual value of those meetings.

As part of Operation Chaos Monkey, Shopify also removed all employees from each of the company's public channels and deleted the message history of those channels, while limiting members to a maximum of 150 per channel. At Shopify, Slack will be transformed into a one-to-one chat only platform, and all other office messages will be transferred to Meta's Workplace.

An internal filing about Chaos Monkey shows: "These adjustments will help focus our time and attention, drive faster shipments, and optimize our operational capabilities. "

Shopify also overhauled its compensation structure in 2022, providing greater flexibility in the cash and stock components of employee compensation packages. The new compensation system is called Flex Comp. Shopify previously faced employee lawsuits over equity-based compensation as its stock price plummeted.

In October, Silas also announced in an email that the employee appraisal process would also be adjusted. A spokesperson for the company said at the time: "Like Flex Comp, we are exploring ways to reinvent the field to deliver performance management products based on better data entry, simplicity and clarity. This is in line with our values as a product first company. "

These new changes come with changes to Shopify's management. In April 2022, Silas joined Shopify from Wells Fargo. Kaz Nejatian was promoted to chief operating officer in January, replacing Toby Shannan, who previously served as chief operating officer for a long time. Shopify also named a new chief financial officer, Jeff Hoffmeister. Allen Leinwand, chief technology officer, left in January after more than a year.

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