Your Workplace Meetings Might Be Making You Richer

Nobody likes meetings. The average knowledge worker sits through more than 25 of them every week, according to a 2026 analysis of over half a million hours of remote work time, and most of us have quietly wondered whether that hour could have been an email. But a new working paper by economist David Deming and colleagues — summarized this month by the Economy of Meaning blog — makes an uncomfortable claim: all those workplace meetings might be making you richer, not poorer.

The researchers linked a survey of more than 9,000 Norwegian workers to administrative records on wages, firms, revenues and careers. The average worker in the sample spends 4.7 hours a week in meetings — about 12 percent of a 37.5-hour working week — and among employees who attend meetings regularly, that stretches to roughly 80 minutes per working day. Because salaries run high in meeting-heavy firms, the authors estimate meetings account for around 14 percent of the total wage bill, or about $9,000 per employee per year. That figure excludes preparation, follow-ups, travel and the mental cost of constant task-switching, so the real price tag is probably higher.

Then comes the twist. A one-standard-deviation increase in weekly meeting time is associated with about 0.47 percentile points of extra annual growth in wage rank — the strongest positive predictor of wage growth among all the workplace activities the team examined. Employees in meeting-heavy workplaces also report learning more on the job, and time spent with more senior colleagues shows a particularly strong link with pay growth. The interpretation: meetings may function as what the researchers call "organisational capital." Knowledge is scattered across every company, and meetings are where the pieces get assembled. Or, as the Economy of Meaning's summary memorably puts it, workplace meetings may be the broccoli of work — unloved, but good for you.

The counterpoint: bad workplace meetings still bleed millions

Not so fast, says Logitech. The company's Workplace Equation research — a survey of 1,700 workplace experience decision-makers across 11 countries, released on September 9 — as announced via Business Wire — exposes what it calls a "million dollar design flaw" in how organizations run their offices. According to the findings, only 24 percent of companies involve IT or AV teams before space planning begins, forcing technology to retrofit rooms it never helped design. The price of a glitchy meeting is concrete: a median productivity loss of 12.2 minutes per person for every technical disruption, with 30 percent of respondents reporting losses of 16 minutes or more per person each time it happens. Logitech estimates the cumulative toll of lost productivity and office retrofits runs into the millions of dollars, depending on company size.

That tension is the real story. Deming's paper suggests meetings themselves are valuable; the Logitech data suggests the way most companies run them is broken. It is worth noting that the Workplace Equation study was commissioned by Logitech, a company that sells meeting-room equipment, so its framing deserves a skeptical eye — but the underlying frustration is hard to argue with. A separate 2026 analysis of remote work patterns found that employees spend barely half their time in deep-work tools, with the rest swallowed by communication apps and calendar invites; the average worker manages just two to three hours of genuine deep focus a day, and only about 53.5 percent of planned tasks get finished each week. Managers average around 13 meetings a week, individual contributors about five.

Important caveats before you cancel your calendar purge

The optimistic case has real limits, and the researchers say so themselves. The Deming paper is an NBER working paper — not yet peer-reviewed. More importantly, it does not prove that meetings cause higher pay: ambitious employees may simply sort into roles with more meetings and better prospects, and people with complex responsibilities naturally attend more of them while also earning more. There is also a timing wrinkle, since meeting habits were measured in 2025 while the wage-growth data comes from 2022 and 2023, requiring assumptions about how stable those habits are. As the Economy of Meaning's author puts it with admirable honesty: this study does not show that meetings cause higher productivity or wages.

How to make your workplace meetings the broccoli kind

If meetings can be either an investment or a tax, the goal is to keep yours on the investment side. The Logitech findings point to the lowest-hanging fruit: bring IT and AV teams into the conversation before office spaces are designed, not after, since the "late-tech trap" is where glitchy meetings are born. Test the audio and connection before anyone dials in, because a single technical failure costs every attendee a meaningful chunk of their hour.

Then borrow the habits of the meeting-heavy, high-earning firms in the Norwegian data. Keep meetings focused on what they are actually for — planning, problem-solving, project coordination and information exchange, which the researchers found are the most common real purposes — rather than status theater. Default to smaller rooms and shorter blocks, protect two-to-three-hour deep-work windows around them, and let the meeting earn its place on the calendar. The evidence says the hour is not the enemy. The enemy is the meeting that wastes it.

The takeaway for your week: don't declare war on your calendar — declare war on bad calendar invites. If your workplace meetings build organisational capital, connect you with senior colleagues and surface problems you can't solve alone, the data says they are quietly compounding your career. If they are just 12 lost minutes of "can you hear me?", fix the tech or skip the call. For more on how modern work is changing, see our report on digital freelancers in the AI era, and browse our Productivity topic page.