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Have a packed calendar full of meetings? A new working paper suggests that the employees spending the most time in meetings could also be the ones seeing the biggest pay gains.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Researchers at Harvard University and the Norwegian School of Economics published a new working paper this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research titled \u201cMeetings<\/a>.\u201d The paper \u201cprovides the first large-scale economic evidence on workplace meetings\u201d by conducting \u201can original survey of more than 9,000 workers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The researchers compared meetings to \u201cthe broccoli of work\u201d because workers \u201cwidely dislike\u201d them but they remain \u201cprobably good for us anyway.\u201d They found that meetings are both time- and cost-consuming, taking up an average of 12% of work hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, researchers positively correlated meeting frequency and intensity with worker wage growth. When the researchers compared how people spent their workdays, from firing off emails to doing heads-down solo work, they found that the number of meetings was the \u201csingle strongest predictor\u201d of getting a raise among the activities studied.\u00a0<\/p>\n One of the authors of the working paper, Harvard economist David Deming, told Business Insider<\/a> that \u201ccompanies that have more meetings are, in general, more successful, and workers who have more meetings tend to experience greater wage growth and career success.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, all those status updates, brainstorms and \u201cquick sync\u201d meetings may signal that you are becoming more valuable to your company.\u00a0<\/p>\n More meetings are not a shortcut to a bigger paycheck by themselves. The study shows a relationship between pay and meetings but does not provide proof that piling additional people into calls or calendar invites causes wages to rise. Correlation does not equal causation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead, meeting-heavy schedules may be a byproduct of work that is more consequential and difficult to do alone. Deming said that employees are likely to spend more time in meetings when they play a central role in the company\u2019s operations or when their jobs require specialized knowledge and coordination with others.<\/p>\n The authors linked several markers of workplace interaction to wage growth. They included total meeting time, meetings on in-office days, the frequency of meetings and active collaboration. Of those measures, time spent in meetings had the clearest and strongest connection.<\/p>\n \u201cMeetings are the cost you have to pay to organize and coordinate highly specialized, complex production,\u201d Deming said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s producing output for a client or shipping a product or whatever it is, a lot of people have a lot of different assignments and some complicated work stream. And the only way to get them all on the same page is to have meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n Even though researchers correlate meetings with wage growth, workers still question their value. The researchers discovered that the 60% of workers who regularly have meetings spend over an hour per workday in them. A recent Resume Now survey<\/a> found that 64% of workers say that only about half or less of their meetings are productive.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Have a packed calendar full of meetings? A new working paper suggests that the employees spending the most time in meetings could also be the ones seeing the biggest pay gains.\u00a0<\/p>\n Researchers at Harvard University and the Norwegian School of Economics published a new working paper this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research titled \u201cMeetings<\/a>.\u201d The paper \u201cprovides the first large-scale economic evidence on workplace meetings\u201d by conducting \u201can original survey of more than 9,000 workers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The researchers compared meetings to \u201cthe broccoli of work\u201d because workers \u201cwidely dislike\u201d them but they remain \u201cprobably good for us anyway.\u201d They found that meetings are both time- and cost-consuming, taking up an average of 12% of work hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nHaving more meetings will not automatically increase your pay<\/h2>\n
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