Few things in business get complained about more than meetings. Leaders announce meeting-free days, employees joke that the call could have been an email, and productivity advice routinely tells us to trim bloated calendars. So it’s worth paying attention when serious economists look at the data and come back with a different message: meetings may be worth more than we think.
That doesn’t mean every meeting on your calendar deserves to live. It means the question leaders should ask isn’t “How do we have fewer meetings?” It’s “Which meetings actually help people learn, coordinate and speak up, and how do we make more of them work that way?” Here’s what the new research says and how I’d put it to work.
What the new research found
In September, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper titled simply “Meetings”, by Harvard’s David Deming and Katrine V. Løken, Alexander Willén and Yaling Xu of the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). The authors call it the first large-scale economic evidence on workplace meetings. They surveyed more than 9,000 Norwegian workers and linked the answers to government records on wages, occupations, employers and company finances.
The costs are real. The average worker in the study spends 4.7 hours a week in meetings, about 12 percent of a standard workweek. Combining meeting time with wages, the researchers estimate meetings account for about 14 percent of companies’ wage bills, or roughly NOK 88,000 (about $9,000) per employee per year. And they describe that as a lower bound, because it leaves out preparation, travel, follow-up work and the mental cost of switching tasks.
But the benefits showed up too. According to NHH and SHRM, high-paying, high-revenue firms spend more on meetings, not less, even though their employees’ time is more expensive. Workers who spend more time in meetings saw faster wage growth and reported more on-the-job learning, and contact with more experienced colleagues was linked to stronger wage growth over time. Of all the activities the researchers looked at, including email, administration, individual work and training, meetings had the strongest association with later wage growth.
Meetings are not only a coordination technology, they are also an important channel through which firms facilitate learning and develop human capital.
David Deming, as quoted by SHRM
The authors are careful, and we should be too. They can’t prove that meetings cause better performance or higher pay. Successful companies may simply be the kind of places that meet a lot. Still, the pattern is clear enough that, as SHRM put it, the research cautions leaders against treating meeting reduction as a goal in itself. The authors’ own summary is my favorite line: meetings are “the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.”
Not all meetings are the same meeting
The most common meeting activities in the study were planning, problem solving, information sharing and project coordination. That’s a useful way to sort your own calendar, because those four jobs aren’t equally suited to a room full of people.
A meeting that brings together people who know different things and need to make a decision or solve a problem is hard to replace with a memo. A recurring status update where one person reads numbers aloud usually can be replaced. SHRM’s summary makes the same point: the real question is whether a meeting solves problems, coordinates specialized work and develops people, or whether it’s covering for unclear processes and communication gaps.
The study also found that remote and hybrid workers attend more meetings than people who mainly work in the office. Løken suggested one explanation: formal meetings may be replacing the hallway and coffee-machine conversations that used to happen on their own. If your team is spread out, some of those meetings are doing the informal teaching and relationship-building that a shared office once did for free. Cut them carelessly and you may cut the learning with them.
Meetings are also where people decide whether to speak up
Two other studies published this month add an important layer. In the Human Resource Management Journal, researchers analyzing a nationally representative sample of 1,200 UK workers found that effective employee communication was linked to less employee silence, and that the link ran through managers actively asking for employees’ input. In other words, good communication systems help, but people speak up when their own manager invites them to.
A second, smaller study looked at skip-level meetings, where employees talk directly with their boss’s boss. Writing about his research for Phys.org, Samuel Blacher reported that 24 of the 25 software engineering managers he interviewed supported skip-level meetings that bypassed them. But in every case where managers felt negatively about how their company ran these meetings, they described problems such as dismissed feedback, poor follow-through or reluctance to speak openly. It’s an exploratory study and can’t be generalized, but the lesson is familiar: a listening session only works if people see that someone listened.
Put those findings together and you get a practical picture. Meetings are one of the main places where knowledge moves around an organization and where employees decide whether it’s safe and worthwhile to say what they know. A meeting that’s all broadcast and no conversation wastes both opportunities.
How to get more value from the meetings you keep
Here’s where I’d start if I were auditing a leadership team’s calendar this month:
- Sort meetings by purpose, not by habit. Label each recurring meeting as planning, problem solving, coordination, learning or status. Status-only meetings are the first candidates to move to a written update, a dashboard or a short recorded video.
- Protect the meetings that mix experience levels. The study linked contact with more senior colleagues to stronger wage growth. Make sure newer employees are in some of the rooms where decisions get made, not just the ones where tasks get assigned.
- Send the information ahead and use the time to talk. If people can read it, let them read it beforehand. Spend the meeting on questions, disagreement and decisions, which is the part you can’t do asynchronously.
- Ask for input on purpose. End agenda items with a specific question, such as “What are we missing?” or “What would make this fail?” Then wait for an answer. Voice doesn’t happen just because the floor is technically open.
- Close the loop. After a listening session, town hall or skip-level conversation, tell people what you heard and what you’re doing about it, including what you’ve decided not to do and why.
- Count the real cost. Before you schedule a recurring meeting, multiply the attendees by the hours. The researchers’ estimate didn’t include prep and follow-up, so yours shouldn’t ignore them either. If the value isn’t obvious, shrink the invite list or the time.
- Be careful with blanket cuts. Meeting-free days and calendar purges can help, but if they remove the conversations where people learn and raise problems, the time you save may cost you more than it’s worth.
The bottom line
Meetings aren’t the enemy. Bad meetings are. The research suggests that the organizations getting the most from their people are often the ones willing to invest time in bringing them together, and the newest studies on employee voice remind us that how leaders run those conversations decides whether the time pays off. The goal isn’t an empty calendar. It’s a calendar where every meeting has a clear job and people leave knowing more than when they walked in.
If you’d like help rethinking how your leadership team communicates, from meeting structure to town halls to the way managers ask for input, schedule a consultation. I’m happy to help you figure out which conversations are worth the time.