Meetings May Be More Valuable Than Many Think

Meetings are costly, often unpopular, and potentially disruptive. But they may also be an important mechanism for learning, collaboration, and organizational performance, according to recent research.

A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, based on survey and administrative data from about 9,000 workers, found that employees spend an average of 4.7 hours a week in meetings, or about 12% of a standard workweek. The researchers estimate that meeting time represents roughly 14% of an organization’s payroll costs.

“Few features of modern work are as widely criticized as meetings,” said David Deming, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass., and lead author of the survey report. “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.”

But Deming noted that the case against meetings cannot be separated from the changing nature of work. As organizations rely more heavily on employees with specialized knowledge, workers increasingly need ways to exchange information and coordinate their efforts.

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

Event: All Things Work 2026

Not Every Meeting Is Created Equal

The research cautioned HR leaders about treating meeting reduction as an objective in itself.

The most common meeting activities identified by the researchers were planning and strategy, collaboration and problem solving, project updates, and information sharing. In other words, many meetings are devoted to precisely the kinds of activities that become more difficult when knowledge is dispersed across teams and employees work remotely.

That distinction could be particularly relevant as organizations redesign work around remote and hybrid work arrangements. Meetings that bring together people who possess different information or expertise may serve a different purpose from recurring status meetings that simply relay information.

The research found that meeting-intensive companies tended to have higher wages, higher revenue, and higher revenue per worker. Workers who spent more time in meetings also experienced faster wage growth and reported greater on-the-job learning.

“Meetings are not only a coordination technology, they are also an important channel through which firms facilitate learning and develop human capital,” Deming said.

A Different Question for HR

The research does not suggest that organizations should simply add more meetings. The more useful question may be which meetings create organizational value, and which ones do not?

That could mean examining whether meetings are being used to solve problems, coordinate specialized work, share knowledge and develop employees, or simply to compensate for unclear processes and communication gaps.

For employers, that frames meeting policy as an organizational-design issue rather than simply an employee-productivity issue.

“Meetings are costly,” Deming said, “but the firms facing the highest opportunity cost of worker time use them more, not less.” He and his co-authors conclude that the evidence is most consistent with meetings functioning as investments in organizational capital.

As AI takes over more routine tasks and remote and hybrid work continues to reshape how employees interact, the value of those human interactions may become an increasingly important consideration.

As Deming put it, meetings may be the “broccoli” of work: “widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.”