A sign you're getting a raise? Tons of meetings.

Ever think to yourself, "This meeting could have been an email" as you walk out of what feels like the 30th office conversation of the day?

Turns out, a regular meeting gauntlet could be a sign your company is doing well — and you could personally benefit.

A new working paper examined the relationship between various workday activities and wage growth, such as emails and concentrated individual work. The authors found that "meetings are the single strongest predictor of wage growth" among the activities they looked at.

Harvard economist David Deming, one of the authors of the working paper, 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."

Correlation doesn't equal causation: The results don't mean joining more meetings will automatically bump your pay, or that your employer should have more people sit in on discussions. Instead, a healthy diet of meetings could indicate high-level, demanding work that tends to bring in more money at both the employee and company levels.

Deming said that if a worker is getting involved in meetings, they're more essential to the employer's work, and if their job is more complex, involving specific expertise and specialization, it could mean having to participate in more meetings.

"Measures capturing the intensity of workplace interaction — including meeting hours, meeting time on office days, meeting frequency, and active collaboration — are all positively associated with wage growth," the authors wrote. "Among these, meeting hours are the strongest predictor."

Meanwhile, the authors found broader measures, such as team support and shared responsibility, were weakly associated with wage progression. "Workers in environments characterized by more intensive communication experience faster wage growth, whereas workers reporting a generally more positive workplace environment do not," the authors wrote.

The study was based on a 2025 Norstat survey of thousands of workers, which examined workplace interactions and team organization. This was matched with administrative data from Norway, covering 2022 to 2024. The researchers measured wage growth between 2022 and 2023, because 2023 was the most recent year for wage data.

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"Because meeting practices are measured in the 2025 survey, the wage-growth analysis relies on the assumption that workers' meeting environments are persistent over time," the authors said.

Despite the association with wage growth, plenty of workers find meetings a drudgery. The researchers found that meetings account for over an hour per workday on average for the 60% of workers who regularly have them. A Resume Now survey of about 1,000 US workers from December found that about 64% said that about half or fewer of their meetings were actually productive.