Meetings cost 14% of payroll. They may still be worth it.

ISSUE #37 • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2026 • 5 MIN READ

Good morning. Thanks for reading Still Monday, including on days when your calendar appears to have been designed by somebody who dislikes uninterrupted thought. Keep voting, replying and sending us to the coworker who has strong opinions about meetings and at least six of them today.

We have spent years treating meetings as the natural enemy of useful work. New research makes the case more annoying: meetings are expensive, often badly run, and may still be doing something valuable.

So yes, the meeting about meetings is back. This time it brought data.

A new NBER working paper uses survey data from more than 9,000 workers, linked with employer and wage records in Norway, to examine what meetings actually do inside companies. The researchers estimate meetings consume about 12% of work hours and roughly 14% of company wage bills. NBER

That is a remarkable amount of payroll devoted to people sitting together and saying things that occasionally could have been written down.

But the paper also finds that higher-paying and higher-revenue companies devote more resources to meetings even though their employees' time is more expensive. Meeting frequency and intensity are positively associated with wage growth, and workers in meeting-heavy companies report more on-the-job learning. Interactions with senior colleagues are also associated with stronger wage growth.

The paper does not prove that adding three recurring syncs will make everybody richer. Better companies may simply have better reasons to meet. Still, it complicates the assumption that every hour removed from the calendar automatically becomes productive time.

Meetings can transfer information that is hard to capture in a document. They expose junior employees to how experienced people think. They make tradeoffs visible. They allow a problem that bounced through twelve emails to be settled in eight minutes.

The useful question is whether the meeting earns the cost of the people inside it. A status update with twelve people reading numbers already available in a dashboard is expensive theater. A project review where a senior operator catches a six-figure mistake before it ships is a bargain.

Companies often attack meeting load with blunt instruments: no-meeting Fridays, shorter default durations, meeting-free blocks. Those can help, but they do not tell you which meetings are worth protecting.

If the room is making a decision, transferring knowledge, solving a cross-functional problem or building a relationship that helps future work move faster, the meeting may be doing exactly what the company needs. If everyone is reporting what they did yesterday, the company may simply be paying 14% of payroll to recreate Slack out loud.

The researchers estimate meetings consume a larger share of payroll than working hours because higher-paid employees spend more time in them. The meeting with five directors is not just longer than you think. It is more expensive than it looks.

High-paying and high-revenue firms in the study devoted more resources to meetings despite the greater opportunity cost. The pattern suggests coordination and knowledge transfer can be productive investments, not merely administrative overhead.

Workers who interacted more with senior colleagues showed stronger wage growth, consistent with the idea that meetings can transmit knowledge, judgment and organizational context that are hard to learn alone.

Before the next recurring meeting, label it with one purpose: decide, learn, coordinate or build. If nobody can identify which job the meeting performs, cancel one occurrence and see what breaks.

If something does break, you have learned what the meeting was doing. If nothing changes, congratulations. You just found recurring capacity.

Fourteen percent of wage bills is large enough to stop treating meetings as a cultural annoyance. A meeting is a purchase: the company buys one hour of several people at once.

That makes the manager's job simple to describe and surprisingly hard to do: make sure the value created in the room is worth more than the combined hourly cost of everyone invited.

EMPLOYEE: This meeting could have been an email.

MANAGER: Agreed. I sent the email.

EMPLOYEE: Nobody read it.

MANAGER: So I scheduled a meeting.

EMPLOYEE: Fair.

CALENDAR: I win again.

The best meeting policy may be less satisfying than banning meetings. Keep the ones where something actually happens. Kill the ones where attendance has become the objective.

Vote below and tell us whether meetings where you work are mostly useful, mostly expensive, or an advanced form of calendar wallpaper.

Technically Tuesday. Emotionally waiting for the agenda.

— The Still Monday Desk