Ever think to yourself, “This meeting could have been an email” as you walk out of what feels like the 30th office conversation of the day?
Turns out, a regular meeting gauntlet could be a sign your company is doing well — and you could personally benefit.
A new working paper examined the relationship between various workday activities and wage growth, such as emails and concentrated individual work. The authors found that “meetings are the single strongest predictor of wage growth” among the activities they looked at.
Harvard economist David Deming, one of the authors of the working paper, told Business Insider that “companies that have more meetings are, in general, more successful, and workers who have more meetings tend to experience greater wage growth and career success.”
Correlation doesn’t equal causation: The results don’t mean joining more meetings will automatically bump your pay, or that your employer should have more people sit in on discussions. Instead, a healthy diet of meetings could indicate high-level, demanding work that tends to bring in more money at both the employee and company levels.
Deming said that if a worker is getting involved in meetings, they’re more essential to the employer’s work, and if their job is more complex, involving specific expertise and specialization, it could mean having to participate in more meetings.
“Measures capturing the intensity of workplace interaction — including meeting hours, meeting time on office days, meeting frequency, and active collaboration — are all positively associated with wage growth,” the authors wrote. “Among these, meeting hours are the strongest predictor.”
Meanwhile, the authors found broader measures, such as team support and shared responsibility, were weakly associated with wage progression. “Workers in environments characterized by more intensive communication experience faster wage growth, whereas workers reporting a generally more positive workplace environment do not,” the authors wrote.
The study was based on a 2025 Norstat survey of thousands of workers, which examined workplace interactions and team organization. This was matched with administrative data from Norway, covering 2022 to 2024. The researchers measured wage growth between 2022 and 2023, because 2023 was the most recent year for wage data.
“Because meeting practices are measured in the 2025 survey, the wage-growth analysis relies on the assumption that workers’ meeting environments are persistent over time,” the authors said.
Despite the association with wage growth, plenty of workers find meetings a drudgery. The researchers found that meetings account for over an hour per workday on average for the 60% of workers who regularly have them. A Resume Now survey of about 1,000 US workers from December found that about 64% said that about half or fewer of their meetings were actually productive.
However, the classic meeting has its advantages as well: Any office worker is likely familiar with being in an endless circular group chat, wishing it would just turn into a quick meeting to get aligned.
“Meetings are the cost you have to pay to organize and coordinate highly specialized, complex production,” Deming said. “Whether it’s producing output for a client or shipping a product or whatever it is, a lot of people have a lot of different assignments and some complicated work stream. And the only way to get them all on the same page is to have meetings.”
Deming said people could simultaneously feel that meetings are a waste and that they’re necessary. He said, as work becomes more complex and more people work in an office, meetings seem like the “broccoli of work: widely disliked, but probably necessary.”
Meetings can be especially helpful learning opportunities for those early in their careers, as they can learn from people who have been at the company longer.
“You pick up on culture, you pick up on routines, and you get to know who knows what and who does what,” Deming said.
