Meetings are time-consuming, but might be good for you

WHITE-COLLAR workers, there is new research that you must keep from your manager at all cost. A paper released earlier this month that surveyed more than 9,000 workers in Norway has found that meetings might actually be economically beneficial for employees.

Crucially, meetings were found to be “the single strongest predictor of wage growth”, beating activities such as concentrated individual work, training and e-mail. For every worker who has said “This meeting could’ve been an e-mail”, this is devastating news.

These meetings add up, too. The average Norwegian employee spends 4.7 hours a week in meetings. This works out to about 14 per cent of a company’s wage bill – about 88,000 Norwegian kroner (US$9,000) per employee annually. Furthermore, the study found that high-paying and high-revenue firms devoted more resources on meetings “despite facing a substantially higher opportunity cost of employee time”.

The causality between more meetings and these positive outcomes isn’t explicit, but the paper’s authors do highlight some nuanced mechanisms that might be at play. Employees who are more skilled or have more responsibilities (and therefore tend to be higher-earners) may simply end up in more meetings due to their greater abilities and roles.

But more centrally, workers in meeting-intensive firms report “greater on-the-job learning”, the paper said, and “interactions with more senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth”. So, meetings are where some of this valuable knowledge transmission happens across ranks.

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

Ultimately, they concluded: “Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.”

Not all good

Even if this builds a case for more meetings, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Before firms make their employees eat more metaphorical broccoli, they should consider the larger body of research on meetings.

For example, managers should bear in mind the 2006 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology which found that highly ambitious or goal-oriented employees are the most negatively affected by meetings. A fatter top-line might come at the expense of your best workers’ morale.

Also, even meeting-intensive firms might want to avoid back-to-back broccoli-eating sessions. Academics have found that whether a meeting is a good or bad one, people need time to recover from one.

Instead, meetings could end five to 10 minutes earlier than scheduled, the study’s authors suggested. “The default calendar systems suggest 30-minute and 60-minute meetings. Our findings would suggest considering making those meetings 25 and 50 minutes instead,” they wrote.

But if you do end meetings early, resist telling everyone present, “I’ll give you some of your time back”. This averts workplace violence, which has a positive effect on wage growth. This is my personal finding; you can have it for free.

Circling back (hah), this latest Norwegian research has at least one crucial implication: If your time in meetings has increased but your salary has not, it might be time to leave for a firm that does have a positive wage-meeting correlation. Conversely, for managers, if your meetings are not enriching those present, you are serving the wrong sort of broccoli.

This column is four words under the word limit. I’ll give you some of your time back.