Shopify CEO’s U-Turn on Work-Life Balance: Now Endorses Working Even on Weekends

Shopify CEO’s U-Turn on Work-Life Balance: When Silicon Valley is prioritizing efficiency over work-life balance, Lutke seems to have changed his mind, too.

His 2019 tweet, where he said he never worked more than 40 hours a week while growing his $125 billion e-commerce company, is gone. Instead, the Shopify CEO now says he works over 10 hours a day and on weekends too.

“I’ve never worked through a night,” Lutke said in a tweet around 5 years ago. “The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week were when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not.”

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Now the CEO of Shopify is singing a different tune.

“Yea, but this is commonly misunderstood. I’m at home for dinner but I work at least 10 or so hours a day and a lot of the weekend. I don’t want people to get misguided by this meme,” he said earlier this month on X.

Lutke’s tune seems to have changed at a time when Silicon Valley employees are being pushed to perform more. Meta is cutting 4,000 employees, targeting those who are “underperforming.”

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Microsoft, once the gold standard for corporate culture, is going through a transformation too. The company has replaced its longtime HR chief and has laid off 2,000 employees this year already, based on performance.

Earlier this week, a report by Genius Consultants revealed that only 36 per cent of the surveyed employees were satisfied with their current work-life balance. Around 79 per cent of employees admitted that work-related stress negatively affected their personal life.

In a time when multimillionaire CEOs and founders with stock options and stakes in firms want employees with salaries to put in more hours at work, companies have to toe the line carefully to bring about changes to cultivate a more satisfied workforce with work-life balance in the forefront.

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