Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

Created with Tess Gouws, who helps teams get unstuck at Goya XD.

In January 2023, Shopify deleted every recurring meeting with three or more people from its staff calendars. A month later, its COO said the company had cleared 322,000 hours of meetings, the equivalent of hiring 150 people. You probably won't go that far, but it's worth knowing where your own team's best hours are going.

Your best hours are booked solid

Microsoft's data shows half of all meetings now land between 9 and 11 am and between 1 and 3 pm, the two windows where most people do their best thinking. So the actual work those meetings create gets pushed somewhere else: before nine, after six, into the gaps that were meant to be lunch.

Why back-to-back meetings cost you

The cost doesn't show up in a wellbeing survey. It shows up in the quality of the work. When people move straight from one meeting into the next, they get no time to process what was decided or start acting on it. A 2022 study on meeting recovery points to people needing a proper transition between a meeting and their next task. Without one, they carry the last conversation into the next, and by the end of the day the instructions start to blur.

A separate Microsoft study put people in EEG caps during back-to-back video calls. Stress built across the meetings and kept climbing. And one in three workers in Microsoft's wider research said the pace of the past five years has made it impossible to keep up.

AI note-takers don't fix this: a transcript is not the same as having had time to think, and the bot won't give back the hour you needed to digest the meeting you just had.

The fix is time, not tools

Part of the problem is what gets rewarded. In a lot of businesses, a full calendar reads as commitment. Nobody gets credit for the meeting they chose not to have, or the thinking time that meant a decision landed properly.

The simplest fix is to build the gap back in. Shorten your default meetings so a half hour becomes 25 minutes and an hour becomes 50, then protect that gap so people can actually think before the next call.

Simon Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Jem, has just spent two weeks in London and San Francisco with the people building AI and the companies putting it to work. He met teams at Salesforce, Amazon, SpaceX AI, Corgi and Ramp, and spoke with investors and founders connected to Anthropic and OpenAI.

He has already taken a small group of South African CEOs through what he saw, in a private session Jem says they rated one of the most valuable of their year. Now he is opening it up: what those teams are doing differently right now, and what a South African business can take from it, from someone running a company that has just raised R136 million to grow its AI-powered platform.

The session is online on 15 October, from 11:30 to 12:30. There are 20 places, by application, and everyone who attends leaves with a practical workbook to take back to their own team.

−13

is where South Africa's consumer confidence index sat in the third quarter, up from −19 but still well below zero. Lower-income households drove the recovery; higher earners won back only about half of what they lost in the second quarter. FNB's chief economist expects caution to hold:

Your customers are heading into the festive season carefully. So are your staff, who are the same households.

Source: FNB/BER Consumer Confidence Index, Q3 2026

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