Let me start with an easy confession: I hate meetings. And I am pretty sure I am not the only one. There are a few things employees seem to agree on as quickly as meetings. There are too many of them, and they last too long. And how often have you thought that the meeting you are sitting through, bored out of your mind, could absolutely have been an email?

Only now is there some bad news for those of us who like complaining about them: all those meetings might actually be less useless than we think. I hesitated about blogging about this, but I have to be intellectually honest, so here is the story.

In a new working paper, David Deming and colleagues linked a survey of more than 9,000 Norwegian workers to administrative data on wages, firms, revenues, careers and more. It is, for now, an NBER Working Paper, so not yet a peer-reviewed publication.

To begin with, we, or at least the Norwegians, do indeed spend quite a lot of time in meetings. The average worker in their sample spends 4.7 hours per week in meetings. That is about 12 per cent of a 37.5-hour working week. Among workers who regularly attend meetings, this averages around 80 minutes per working day. Yes, that is a lot.

All of this obviously costs companies loads of money. The researchers estimate that meetings account for about 14 per cent of the total wage bill. That works out to roughly $9,000 per employee per year. And even that is probably an underestimate. Because the authors did even not include preparation, follow-up, travel, and the mental cost of constantly switching between tasks in their calculation.

So you might think: if meetings cost that much, perhaps companies that have lots of them are simply badly organised. I would think so, I confess, but no. The companies where more meetings take place are not the weaker companies. Quite the opposite: employees in companies with higher wages and higher revenues tend, on average, to have more meetings. That seems counterintuitive because the opportunity cost of a meeting is actually higher there. An hour spent in a meeting with expensive employees simply costs more than an hour spent in a meeting with cheaper employees. While reading this study, by the way, I kept thinking about that clock that calculates how much a meeting is costing while it is happening.

Nor does this simply mean that these companies are better organised across the board. Clear roles, shared responsibility, team support, and connectedness show much weaker links with wages or revenues. It is the intensity of meeting that stands out.

So what do we actually do in meetings, apart from secretly answering emails? Mainly, activities that are too difficult to accomplish alone: planning, problem-solving, project coordination, and information exchange. Administrative tasks, networking, training, and informal discussion are much less often the main reason for a meeting. Clearly, this does not mean that informal discussions cannot take place at all.

This helps explain the researchers’ interpretation. Perhaps meetings are not just time lost to talking. They may also be an investment in what the researchers call organisational capital. People across an organisation each hold pieces of knowledge. Somehow, those pieces need to come together, and meetings may help do that.

But there is more. The researchers also found that employees who spend more time in meetings tend to move up the wage distribution faster. A one-standard-deviation increase in weekly meeting time is associated with about 0.47 percentile points of extra annual growth in wage rank. In fact, meeting time is the strongest positive predictor of wage growth among all the workplace activities they examined. More meetings, higher wages?

The researchers also found a possible explanation. Employees in meeting-heavy workplaces report learning more on the job. Time with more senior colleagues also shows a particularly strong link with wage growth. Perhaps meetings do more than coordinate work. They may also help transfer knowledge and experience.

But there is an important limitation. And I am not saying that just because I am disappointed by the findings. This study does not show that meetings cause higher productivity or wages. More ambitious employees may simply end up in jobs with more meetings and better career prospects. People with more complex responsibilities may, for exactly the same reason, both attend more meetings and earn more. The researchers explicitly warn about this.

The second interesting challenge concerns timing. The researchers measured meeting habits in 2025, but the wage growth data they used refer to 2022 and 2023. Thus, the researchers need to make certain assumptions about the stability of meeting habits.

The researchers sum it up nicely: meetings may be the broccoli of work. We often hate them. That does not mean they are bad for us.