Harvard University and Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) researchers just put out the first large-scale study of workplace meetings. I assume it took a lot of meetings.
They surveyed 9,000 workers in Norway and matched the answers to actual pay records. Meetings took 12% of work hours and 14% of payroll. Time in meetings was also the strongest predictor of wage growth of any work activity they measured.
Please don't forward this to your team as a reason to add a Monday sync. It's a correlation, and the authors say so.
The more interesting part is why. People in meeting-heavy jobs said they learned more on the job. Time spent with people more senior than them went along with the biggest raises. Meetings are where knowledge actually moves inside a company. The authors call them "the broccoli of work," which is the best line I've ever read in an economics paper.
That fits what we've seen in 20+ years of running product and engineering teams. The meeting is rarely the problem. It's where the decision gets made, and where the junior PM figures out how the VP thinks.
The waste is what comes after. Someone has to write it up and turn it into a spec, a few tickets, a follow-up email, and a Slack message to the three people who weren't there. One of them will reply, "Wait, when did we decide this?" Decisions don't survive meetings on their own. By Thursday, half of them have drifted, and you're arguing them again in another meeting. Which, according to this study, is great for your career.
The meeting isn't the waste. The two hours after it are.
That second part is what we're building Earmark for. Go to the meeting. Eat your broccoli. We'll do the dishes.
They surveyed 9,000 workers in Norway and matched the answers to actual pay records. Meetings took 12% of work hours and 14% of payroll. Time in meetings was also the strongest predictor of wage growth of any work activity they measured.
Please don't forward this to your team as a reason to add a Monday sync. It's a correlation, and the authors say so.
The more interesting part is why. People in meeting-heavy jobs said they learned more on the job. Time spent with people more senior than them went along with the biggest raises. Meetings are where knowledge actually moves inside a company. The authors call them "the broccoli of work," which is the best line I've ever read in an economics paper.
That fits what we've seen in 20+ years of running product and engineering teams. The meeting is rarely the problem. It's where the decision gets made, and where the junior PM figures out how the VP thinks.
The waste is what comes after. Someone has to write it up and turn it into a spec, a few tickets, a follow-up email, and a Slack message to the three people who weren't there. One of them will reply, "Wait, when did we decide this?" Decisions don't survive meetings on their own. By Thursday, half of them have drifted, and you're arguing them again in another meeting. Which, according to this study, is great for your career.
The meeting isn't the waste. The two hours after it are.
That second part is what we're building Earmark for. Go to the meeting. Eat your broccoli. We'll do the dishes.
A really simple practice:
If you look at your calendar for next week and see a day that just looks overwhelming because of the number of meetings...make the decision now to make each meeting count.
Here is what I mean: in a day full of meetings, there is going to be at least one that doesn't go how you planned. It might even go badly (gasp)
Do not let one bad meeting affect the next meeting and make it a streak of bad meetings. Instead, if you have a bad meeting, make the next meeting count and don't just lump it in with the call before it.
Here is a real truth: the only thing connecting a bad meeting to the next one is you!
If you look at your calendar for next week and see a day that just looks overwhelming because of the number of meetings...make the decision now to make each meeting count.
Here is what I mean: in a day full of meetings, there is going to be at least one that doesn't go how you planned. It might even go badly (gasp)
Do not let one bad meeting affect the next meeting and make it a streak of bad meetings. Instead, if you have a bad meeting, make the next meeting count and don't just lump it in with the call before it.
Here is a real truth: the only thing connecting a bad meeting to the next one is you!
Great meetings aren’t about getting everyone to agree. They’re about creating enough space for people to challenge the thinking.
One of the biggest risks when making an important decision is groupthink.
When the most senior person speaks first, when everyone quickly aligns, or when people are hesitant to challenge the prevailing view, a team can leave a meeting feeling aligned, but not necessarily with the best decision.
As leaders, we can structure meetings differently.
A few practices I’ve found valuable:
🔹 Let people think independently first.
Get individual perspectives before opening the floor for discussion.
🔹 Ask for disagreement.
“Who sees this differently?” can be more valuable than “Does everyone agree?”
🔹 Challenge assumptions.
Ask: What are we assuming to be true?
🔹 Explore alternatives.
Don’t settle on the first reasonable solution. Ask what other options exist.
🔹 Invite the quiet voices.
Some of the most valuable insights come from people who aren’t naturally the loudest in the room.
🔹 Separate the person from the idea.
Healthy disagreement should strengthen the decision, not become personal.
🔹 Ask what could go wrong.
“What would make this decision fail?” is a powerful question.
🔹 Close with clarity.
Make sure everyone understands the decision, the rationale, the actions, and who owns what.
The goal of a leadership meeting shouldn’t be:
“How quickly can we get everyone to agree?”
It should be:
“Have we challenged our thinking enough to make a well-informed decision?”
Good leaders don’t eliminate disagreement.
They create an environment where constructive disagreement is safe, expected, and valuable.
One of the biggest risks when making an important decision is groupthink.
When the most senior person speaks first, when everyone quickly aligns, or when people are hesitant to challenge the prevailing view, a team can leave a meeting feeling aligned, but not necessarily with the best decision.
As leaders, we can structure meetings differently.
A few practices I’ve found valuable:
🔹 Let people think independently first.
Get individual perspectives before opening the floor for discussion.
🔹 Ask for disagreement.
“Who sees this differently?” can be more valuable than “Does everyone agree?”
🔹 Challenge assumptions.
Ask: What are we assuming to be true?
🔹 Explore alternatives.
Don’t settle on the first reasonable solution. Ask what other options exist.
🔹 Invite the quiet voices.
Some of the most valuable insights come from people who aren’t naturally the loudest in the room.
🔹 Separate the person from the idea.
Healthy disagreement should strengthen the decision, not become personal.
🔹 Ask what could go wrong.
“What would make this decision fail?” is a powerful question.
🔹 Close with clarity.
Make sure everyone understands the decision, the rationale, the actions, and who owns what.
The goal of a leadership meeting shouldn’t be:
“How quickly can we get everyone to agree?”
It should be:
“Have we challenged our thinking enough to make a well-informed decision?”
Good leaders don’t eliminate disagreement.
They create an environment where constructive disagreement is safe, expected, and valuable.
The career advice nobody ever hears: go to more meetings.
A new NBER working paper looked at how workers spend their days. Email. Administrative work. Training. Travel. Teaching. Concentrated individual work. Meetings.
Surprisingly, meetings are the single strongest predictor of wage growth.
Meeting time was the only activity with a positive, significant coefficient. Concentrated individual work, the heads-down time we all protect so carefully, showed a negative correlation.
Every productivity book of the last decade says the same thing. Protect your focus time. Guard the deep work. Apparently that's not where careers get made.
Let's go to the data. One standard deviation more weekly meeting time corresponds with a 0.47 percentile point gain in annual wage rank. Modest in a year, considerable over a career, and larger for people starting below the median wage.
Workers in meeting-heavy environments also report they learn more on the job.
Then the paper gets specific about who's in the room.
Time with senior colleagues predicts wage growth at 0.268. Peers come in at 0.097 and junior colleagues at 0.105, neither statistically distinguishable from zero. Consider all three together, and the senior coefficient holds at 0.262 while the same level falls to -0.011.
So it's not just time in meetings. It's who is in those meetings.
The authors can't separate cause from effect, and they say so directly in the study.
Maybe the meetings cause the raises. Maybe the people headed for raises get invited to more meetings with people higher on the org chart. Or maybe learning more drives earning more.
In 2012 I wrote a book asking "Who's in the Room?" I didn't expect labor economists to weigh in on the answer with Norwegian wage data.
Think about the last three meetings you convened. Who did you leave out that could have learned the most from being there?
More importantly, in our zeal to reduce the number and length of meetings, are we inadvertently destroying the most effective tool we have to develop the next generation of management?
A new NBER working paper looked at how workers spend their days. Email. Administrative work. Training. Travel. Teaching. Concentrated individual work. Meetings.
Surprisingly, meetings are the single strongest predictor of wage growth.
Meeting time was the only activity with a positive, significant coefficient. Concentrated individual work, the heads-down time we all protect so carefully, showed a negative correlation.
Every productivity book of the last decade says the same thing. Protect your focus time. Guard the deep work. Apparently that's not where careers get made.
Let's go to the data. One standard deviation more weekly meeting time corresponds with a 0.47 percentile point gain in annual wage rank. Modest in a year, considerable over a career, and larger for people starting below the median wage.
Workers in meeting-heavy environments also report they learn more on the job.
Then the paper gets specific about who's in the room.
Time with senior colleagues predicts wage growth at 0.268. Peers come in at 0.097 and junior colleagues at 0.105, neither statistically distinguishable from zero. Consider all three together, and the senior coefficient holds at 0.262 while the same level falls to -0.011.
So it's not just time in meetings. It's who is in those meetings.
The authors can't separate cause from effect, and they say so directly in the study.
Maybe the meetings cause the raises. Maybe the people headed for raises get invited to more meetings with people higher on the org chart. Or maybe learning more drives earning more.
In 2012 I wrote a book asking "Who's in the Room?" I didn't expect labor economists to weigh in on the answer with Norwegian wage data.
Think about the last three meetings you convened. Who did you leave out that could have learned the most from being there?
More importantly, in our zeal to reduce the number and length of meetings, are we inadvertently destroying the most effective tool we have to develop the next generation of management?