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Key Takeaways A new working paper found that workers who attend more meetings may also experience stronger wage growth and career momentum.
Among the work activities studied, time spent in meetings was the strongest predictor of wage growth.
The findings show correlation, not causation: Attending extra meetings will not automatically earn someone a raise.
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.
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 “Meetings.” The paper “provides the first large-scale economic evidence on workplace meetings” by conducting “an original survey of more than 9,000 workers.”
The researchers compared meetings to “the broccoli of work” because workers “widely dislike” them but they remain “probably good for us anyway.” They found that meetings are both time- and cost-consuming, taking up an average of 12% of work hours.
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 “single strongest predictor” of getting a raise among the activities studied.
One of the authors of the working paper, Harvard economist David Deming, told Business Insider that “companies that have more meetings are, in general, more successful, and workers who have more meetings tend to experience greater wage growth and career success.”
In other words, all those status updates, brainstorms and “quick sync” meetings may signal that you are becoming more valuable to your company.
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