Why we spend so much time in meetings

Few features of modern work are as widely criticised as meetings. Using data from over 9,000 workers in Norway, this column examines how meetings are organised and their effects on firm outcomes. The average worker in our survey spends 4.7 hours per week in meetings, with managers and professionals spending substantially more time in them than other workers. Meetings are substantially more common at firms with higher wage premia and higher revenue, while workers who spend more time in meetings experience faster wage growth, suggesting that meetings provide opportunities to exchange information and knowledge that may benefit not only the firm, but also the workers who participate in them.

Few features of modern work are as widely criticised as meetings. Surveys routinely find that workers and managers view many meetings as unproductive, and a growing management literature has focused on ‘meeting overload’ and how firms can reduce it (Whillans et al. 2021). At the same time, modern production increasingly relies on teams of workers with specialised knowledge and skills. The gains from specialisation therefore come with a growing need for workers to communicate, exchange information, and coordinate their activities.

Meetings sit directly at the intersection of these two forces. They consume the time of several workers at once, making them a potentially expensive way to organise work. But they also provide a natural setting for the coordination that increasingly specialised production requires.

Yet we know surprisingly little about the economics of meetings. Despite being a ubiquitous feature of working life, there is little systematic evidence on how much time workers spend in meetings, what this time costs firms, what meetings are used for, or why some firms rely on them much more heavily than others.

In our recent research (Deming et al. 2026), we provide new evidence on these basic questions. We combine an original survey of more than 9,000 workers with linked employer–employee administrative data from Norway to study how meetings are organised across workers and firms and how meeting intensity relates to firm and worker outcomes.

Measuring meetings

Our survey was conducted in 2025 on approximately 9,000 workers in Norway and asks how often they attend meetings, how much time they spend in them, what those meetings are used for, and how productive they perceive them to be. Linking these responses to administrative data allows us to compare meeting practices across workers and firms and relate them to firm wage premia, revenue, and workers’ subsequent wage growth.

Three views of meetings

There are at least three ways to think about what we might find. The first takes seriously the popular scepticism about meetings. Meetings consume the time of several workers simultaneously, interrupt concentrated work, and can generate fatigue and costly task switching (Luong and Rogelberg 2005, Mark et al. 2008, Leroy 2009). If these costs dominate, firms that rely heavily on meetings may simply be less efficient.

A second possibility is that meetings matter because they help build organisational culture. Bringing workers together may create trust, shared responsibility, voice, and psychological safety (Edmondson 1999, Guiso et al. 2015). In this view, meeting-intensive firms should also tend to be workplaces with stronger teams, clearer roles, and better workplace climates.

A third view starts from the coordination problem created by specialisation. When production draws on knowledge distributed across many workers, firms need ways to combine that knowledge. Meetings may be one such technology: a costly investment in the information flows, relationships, and problem-solving structures that allow specialised workers to produce together. This view does not imply that every meeting is useful. It implies that some of what looks like a cost of meetings may instead be an investment in organisational capital. Related evidence from remote workplaces points in a similar direction: even a single coordinated office day a month has been shown to raise productivity and cut attrition in otherwise fully remote teams, largely by improving communication among colleagues (Aksoy et al. 2026).

Taken together, the patterns we document are most consistent with the third view.

What meetings look like inside firms

The first thing to note about meetings is their scale. The average worker in our survey spends 4.7 hours per week in meetings, or about 12% of a standard working week. Valuing that time at workers’ wages implies that firms devote roughly 14% of their wage bill to meetings. These figures capture only the direct cost of workers’ time and exclude preparation, follow-up, travel, and the costs of switching attention between meetings and other tasks, and likely underestimate the true cost of meetings. Meetings are therefore not a peripheral feature of work: firms allocate a substantial share of one of their most expensive inputs, employee time, to them.

Figure 1 Meeting prevalence and cost

Notes: Panel (a) shows how many hours per week the respondents report spending in meetings as a per cent of total respondents. Weekly meeting hours are reported in seven categories (no meetings; less than 1 hour; 1–3 hours; 4–7 hours; 8–11 hours; 12–15 hours; more than 15 hours), which we convert to hours at each category’s midpoint, with the top category set to 20 hours. Panel (b) shows the labour cost of meeting time as a percent of the firm’s wage bill. The unit of observation is the firm (enterprise). For each firm, meeting cost is the sum over its workers of the worker’s hourly wage times weekly meeting hours, divided by the firm’s annual wage bill. Meeting hours are the weekly hours workers report spending in meetings; for workers who did not take the survey, meeting hours are imputed from cell means defined by sector (the 21 NACE sections) and two-digit STYRK-08 occupation, so the measure covers the firm’s full workforce.

Who spends that time is also informative. Managers and professionals spend substantially more time in meetings than other workers, while differences by age, gender, and other demographic characteristics are comparatively modest. Meetings therefore appear especially common among workers whose roles involve greater responsibility, coordination, and information exchange, rather than being strongly associated with workers’ demographic characteristics.

What workers do in meetings provides a clearer indication of why firms devote so much time to them. The most common activities are planning and strategy, collaboration and problem solving, project updates, and information sharing. Administration, networking, and informal discussion are considerably less common. These purposes are remarkably stable across occupations, industries, and work arrangements, suggesting a common role for meetings in exchanging information, solving problems, and coordinating activity.

Figure 2 Meeting activities

Notes: Bars show the percentage of respondents selecting each type of meeting activity, from the survey question ‘You mentioned “meeting” as one of the activities. What type of meeting(s) was this?’. Respondents could select all activities that apply, so the shares sum to more than 100 percent. The sample is the survey respondents who reported attending a meeting.

Finally, a substantial part of this variation sits at the firm level. Firm effects explain around one-fifth of the variation in weekly meeting hours and one-quarter of meeting time on work-from-home days. By contrast, firm effects explain much less of the variation in perceived meeting productivity and broader measures of workplace climate. Taken together, these patterns suggest that meeting intensity is an important dimension of organisational design: firms differ systematically in the extent to which they organise work through meetings.

Meetings and firm performance

We next ask whether this variation in meeting intensity is related to firm outcomes. Meetings are substantially more common at firms with higher wage premia, higher revenue, and higher revenue per worker. The wage-premium relationship is particularly notable because high-paying firms face a greater opportunity cost of meeting time; bringing the same group of workers together is simply more expensive. Yet these firms meet more, not less. At the same time, broader measures of workplace climate – including role clarity, shared responsibility, and team support – are largely unrelated to these firm outcomes. This combination is difficult to reconcile with meetings primarily reflecting organisational waste or simply being part of a generally better workplace. Instead, the relationship appears to be specific to how intensively firms use meetings.

Figure 3 Meeting intensity and firm wage premia

Notes: This figure reports the relationship between firm wage premia and our principal measures of meeting intensity. Firms are sorted into 20 equal-sized bins (vigintiles) of their estimated AKM wage premium – the firm fixed effect from a two-way worker–firm wage regression (2019–2023). The horizontal axis is the bin’s mean wage premium and the vertical axis is the bin mean of the meeting measure, standardised across workers (z-score). The measure is weekly meeting hours (‘On average, how much of your work week is spent in meetings?’). Each point is a firm-level bin mean; the curve is a quadratic fit. The sample is the 3,818 survey-linked firms with an estimated wage premium.

Meetings and worker careers

The worker-level evidence points in the same direction. Workers who spend more time in meetings experience faster wage growth, even after accounting for worker characteristics, occupation, sector, firm, and initial wages. Meetings also predict wage growth more strongly than other uses of work time, including concentrated individual work, administrative tasks, training, travel, and email. Finally, workers in more meeting-intensive environments report greater on-the-job learning. These patterns are consistent with meetings providing opportunities to exchange information and knowledge that may benefit not only the firm, but also the workers who participate in them.

Figure 4 Predictive power of workday activities for wage rank growth

Notes: This figure compares how time spent on different workday activities predicts wage rank growth. The figure reports, for each activity, the coefficient from a separate regression of wage rank growth on the standardised time a worker spent on that activity during their most recent in-office day, with its 95% confidence interval. All regressions include individual controls and sector, occupation, and firm fixed effects. Individual controls include gender, college education, age group, immigrant status, marital/cohabitation status, union membership, municipality of residence, and baseline wage. Standard errors are clustered by firm.

What do meetings do?

Our evidence is descriptive, and these relationships should not be interpreted as causal returns to meetings. Workers with greater ability or more complex responsibilities may sort into meeting-intensive jobs, and firms that rely heavily on meetings may differ in other ways that we cannot observe.

Still, the patterns help distinguish between different views of meetings. Meetings are costly, but the firms facing the highest opportunity cost of worker time use them more, not less. Their prevalence is not accompanied by systematically better workplace climates, while workers who meet more experience faster wage growth and report greater on-the-job learning. Taken together, these findings are most consistent with meetings as investments in organisational capital: a costly way for firms to exchange information, solve problems, and coordinate specialised workers. 

As production becomes increasingly specialised, understanding when these investments are productive – and when they become the meeting overload workers complain about – is an important question for future research. Meetings may, in other words, be the ‘broccoli’ of work: widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.

Source : VOXeu