If your calendar is packed, that may be more than office chaos. A new working paper found that 'meetings are the single strongest predictor of wage growth' among the workday activities it studied.
Harvard economist David Deming, one of the authors, 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.'
The study looked at workplace interactions such as emails and concentrated individual work. It found that measures of workplace interaction — including meeting hours, meeting time on office days, meeting frequency, and active collaboration — were all positively associated with wage growth. Among those measures, meeting hours were the strongest predictor.
But the link is not a promise that sitting through more calls will boost your pay. The authors said correlation does not equal causation, and the results do not mean joining more meetings will automatically increase wages or that employers should add more people to every discussion.
Deming said that workers who are pulled into meetings are often more essential to the employer's work. He also said more complex jobs, with specific expertise and specialization, can require more participation in meetings.
The paper found weaker links between wage growth and broader measures like team support and shared responsibility. Workers in environments with more intensive communication experienced faster wage growth, while workers who reported a more positive workplace environment did not.
The research was based on a 2025 Norstat survey of thousands of workers, matched with administrative data from Norway covering 2022 to 2024. Wage growth was measured between 2022 and 2023.
The math is simple: meetings are often the cost of coordinating specialized work. Deming called them 'the broccoli of work: widely disliked, but probably necessary.' For founders, that matters. A heavy meeting load can be a sign that the company has enough moving parts to require real coordination — and enough complexity to justify higher-value work.
That does not make meetings a virtue on their own. It does mean leaders should treat them as a signal, not a strategy. Start smaller than you think: if meetings are multiplying, ask whether the business is scaling because the work is getting more valuable, or just because the calendar is getting noisier.
