This Is the ‘Single Strongest Predictor’ of a Pay Raise: Harvard

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. 

Having more meetings will not automatically increase your pay

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. 

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’s operations or when their jobs require specialized knowledge and coordination with others.

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.

“Meetings are the cost you have to pay to organize and coordinate highly specialized, complex production,” Deming said. “Whether it’s 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.”

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 found that 64% of workers say that only about half or less of their meetings are productive.

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.