Meetings

Why do we have so many meetings? Few workplace features are so scorned, yet seemingly so necessary. This paper provides the first large-scale economic evidence on workplace meetings using an original survey of more than 9,000 workers linked to matched employer–employee administrative data from Norway. We show that meetings are both common and costly, consuming an average of 12 percent of work hours and 14 percent of firm wage bills. Planning, problem solving, information sharing, and project coordination account for the majority of meeting activity. High-paying and high-revenue firms devote more resources to meetings despite facing a substantially higher opportunity cost of employee time. Meeting frequency and intensity are positively related to worker wage growth. Workers in meeting-intensive firms report greater on-the-job learning, and interactions with more senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth, suggesting that knowledge transmission within firms is an important mechanism. Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.