The meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work. This is Work in

White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now

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2024-07-09 14:30:07

The meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work.

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The paradox of the modern white-collar worker is that she is simultaneously more and less alone than her analogue in any previous generation. On a given weekday, the share of the labor force working from home is roughly four times higher than it was before the pandemic. At no other point in modern history have so many workers spent so much time in a room by themselves during the weekday.

But how much of that time is truly alone—in the absence of other people’s faces and voices? By some measures, our colleagues are with us more than ever, whether or not we’d like it that way. The share of the typical white-collar workday spent in meetings has steadily increased for the past few decades, and it continues to grow by the year.

Official data on the time we spend in meetings are hard to come by. We don’t have federal calculations for, say, GMP: gross meetings prescheduled. But the private data suggest that we are deluged. In 2016, a small group of work researchers calculated that time spent in meetings had increased by 50 percent since the 1990s. “Collaboration is taking over the workplace,” they wrote in an article in Harvard Business Review. “Buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice," some workers were spending so much time in meetings, taking calls, and combing through their inbox that their most “critical work” often had to wait until they were home. Wall-to-wall meetings from 9 to 5 were pushing any creative or individual work to some period after dinner.