“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.” John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, 1969 For most of my career I’ve agreed with Galbraith in the quote above. Large organisations seem to treat meetings the way 19th-century doctors treated leeches: applied to every complaint, mostly draining the patient. I have sat in plenty of meetings whose main output was the date of the next meeting. But a chap who only reads the evidence that agrees with them is just a pundit with footnotes. So when four economists published the first large-scale study of what meetings actually do to companies and careers, I read all 64 pages. It has changed my mind. A bit. 9,000 Norwegians and their calendars David Deming at Harvard, with Katrine Løken, Alexander Willén and Yaling Xu at the Norwegian School of Economics, asked more than 9,000 Norwegian workers how often they meet, for how long, what for and with whom. Then they did something only a Scandinavian country makes possible, linking every answer to official records of each person’s pay and their employer’s accounts. Around 90% of the people asked filled the survey in, which anyone who has ever sent a staff survey will find faintly unbelievable. The average worker spends 4.7 hours a week in meetings, 12% of the standard Norwegian working week. That average hides two tribes. About 40% meet less than once a week, while 21% spend more than a full working day a week in meetings. The people who meet regularly spend approx. 80 minutes every single day in meetings! Then there’s the bill. Meetings cost Norwegian firms around NOK 88,000 (about $9,000) per employee per year, roughly 14% of the national wage bill. The authors call that a lower bound, because it leaves out the preparation, the follow-up and the time it takes to get your head back into whatever you were doing before. In finance, tech, consultancy and the civil service, meetings swallow about a fifth of the wage bill. The best-paying firms meet the most You’d expect the slickest, best-paid companies to have stamped meetings out. They do the opposite. The higher a firm’s pay and revenue, the more its people meet, and the curve gets steepest right at the top. That’s odd, because a well-paid person’s hour is the dearest hour there is. A firm paying twice the wages pays twice as much for every meeting it holds. The telling bit is what stays the same. Staff at the top-paying firms rate their meetings no more highly than anyone else (everyone gives them roughly 6.3 out of 10), and they report no better role clarity, team support or shared responsibility. Everyone grumbles in roughly equal measure; the high-paying firms simply hold far more of them. Meetings and your pay packet The researchers then tracked how fast each person climbed the national pay rankings. Meeting hours were the strongest predictor of wage growth they tested, ahead of email, admin, training, travel and focused solo work. Put all those activities into one model and meetings were the only one with a clear positive link. Concentrated solo work, the stuff productivity gurus tell us to guard with our lives, pointed slightly the other way. The yearly effect is modest. Roughly five extra hours of meetings a week went with climbing about half a percentile further up the national pay ladder. Careers are long, though, and that compounds. Where the learning leaks out The authors’ favoured explanation is knowledge passing between people. Workers in meeting-heavy jobs say they’ve learned more new skills and got better at their jobs over the past year. Time spent with more senior colleagues goes with faster pay growth, while time with peers or juniors doesn’t, though the authors admit that link wobbles once you allow for career stage. The philosopher Michael Polanyi had a name for this in 1966: tacit knowledge, the things we know but can’t quite put into words. How a senior person reads a client, when they push and when they fold, which problem actually matters: none of it makes it into the handbook. It leaks out sideways, when someone junior watches them think out loud. Meetings may be where apprenticeship survives now that nobody is formally apprenticed. Which makes one finding rather awkward. The under-30s meet least of all, though they’re the people with most to gain from a seat at the table. A separate study of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm shows who pays for all this. Engineers in the same building as their teammates got 22% more feedback on their code, mostly from old hands, while those senior engineers wrote about a fifth less code themselves. That may be why meetings feel so wasteful. The person grumbling loudest (senior, busy, watching their inbox fill up) is the one paying, and the person benefiting is the quiet 26-year-old in the corner taking notes. The health warnings The authors are honest that this describes a pattern rather than proving a cause. Able, ambitious people may simply drift into meeting-heavy jobs and get pay rises for other reasons. The people surveyed lean towards graduates and the public sector, and this is Norway, a famously flat country where a junior can contradict the boss without updating their CV. So my scepticism partly survives. The one key takeaway Meetings look like pure cost because the cost lands on the people running them, while much of the benefit lands quietly on the people learning from them. How to use this at work Keep a seat for the junior. When a guest list gets trimmed for efficiency, the first name cut is usually the most junior, the person with most to learn. Keep one seat for them, even if they only listen. Ask seniors to think out loud. Get them to explain the why behind a decision, including the options they threw out. That reasoning is what juniors carry into the rest of their careers. Send the updates, keep the arguments. Project updates are the single most common thing meetings are used for, and a written note handles them perfectly well. Save the room for problem-solving and planning, where the learning seems to happen. Run the broccoli test. Afterwards, ask whether anyone learned anything. If nobody did, it was a memo with chairs. My verdict now is that meetings are “the broccoli of work”, widely disliked but probably good for us anyway. It’s a better metaphor than it first looks. Broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts are all one species, bred by farmers from a single scrappy wild cabbage, and meetings are much the same. The stand-up, the all-hands, the one-to-one and the “quick sync” that somehow lasts 90 minutes are one plant with wildly different nutritional value. In 1990 George H. W. Bush banned broccoli from Air Force One, declaring that as President he’d eaten his last floret. Most of us don’t have that kind of authority. We should probably eat up, and get a lot fussier about what goes on the plate.