A recent study by Deming, Løken, Willén, and Xu (2026) shows that meetings are both common and costly, consuming an average of 12 percent of work hours and 14 percent of firm wage bills. The study finds that planning, problem solving, information sharing, and project coordination account for the majority of meeting activity, and 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, and workers in meeting-intensive firms report greater on-the-job learning and interactions with more senior colleagues, suggesting that knowledge tr…
Key points
Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.: Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.
The study finds that planning, problem solving, information sharing, and project coordina…: The study finds that 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 sub…: High-paying and high-revenue firms devote more resources to meetings despite facing a substantially higher opportunity cost of employee time.
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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.
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Copy CitationDavid J. Deming, Katrine V. Løken, Alexander Willén, and Yaling Xu, "Meetings," NBER Working Paper 35706 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35706.Download Citation
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