The New Survival Strategy: More Meetings
As mid-career officeworkers strive to keep their jobs, they’re homing in on the one arena wherehuman skills still reign supreme: meetings.
As AI slowly whittled away at his job duties, the worker began to devise a new strategy for staying employed: Sure, AI might be able to review documents and draft memos—but could it wow people in a meeting? Could it leave prospective clients grinning? Could it read the room to know when to push, when to pull back and when to say nothing at all? Nope. AI, it turns out, cannot charm the person sitting across the table. And so he began a strategy that, just three years ago, would have been anathema to him: He began inserting himself in extra meetings, becoming a central player in over a dozen of the firm’s standing gatherings. He called it job security.
Schmoozing is back, and this time it’s a survival strategy. After years of workplace-productivity experts disparaging meetings as a bane of efficiency, they are back as a way to prove relevance. After-hours meetings are notably on the rise, according to data from Microsoft, up 16% year-over-year. Nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones—a figure that’s jumped 8 percentage points since 2021. Meanwhile, other sorts of meetings are holding steady, some even drawing more attendees. “Meeting popularity might be increasing,” says engagement expert Mark Royal, senior client partner at Korn Ferry.
Leaders have long complained about meetings: Two-thirds of executives surveyed in the 2026 World’s Most Admired Companies report, a partnership between Korn Ferry and Fortune, cite meetings as their number-one time sink. Meetings rose dramatically between 2020 and 2023, with workers attending three times as many per week—a 192% increase, according to data from Microsoft. Meetings have remained at those elevated levels ever since, in both frequency and duration. The casualty is focus time: Managers and executives report that they don’t even open their laptops to do their “real” work until the end of the day.
The risk, of course, is more meetings. And not just more meetings, but more bad meetings. It’s easier than ever to call one, whether online or in the office—indeed, more than half (57%) of all workplace meetings are spur-of-the-moment, according to Microsoft—and firms once again are in jeopardy of hosting an endless stream of meetings. It gets worse: When workers are worried about their jobs, meetings can become a way to avoid taking risks, says Royal. Enter the “let’s meet so no one needs to make a decision” meeting, which can effectively blur accountability.
For now, meetings are simply attracting more workers. And the fastest-growing type, says Microsoft, are meetings with 65-plus attendees. At the same time, AI is playing a major role in shifting what happens during meetings: It can now complete much of the prep work, such as compiling research and drafting summaries, which enables meeting-goers to quickly absorb reports and documents beforehand. During meetings, participants can put down their laptops and fully engage, thanks to AI notetakers. Status updates are usually brief or nonexistent; participants arrive ready to move things forward. “People are getting together to apply human judgment and make decisions,” says Royal.
Overall, meetings are evolving from places where work gets done to places where decisions get made. Experts from a range of vantage points have recognized the shift. In European firms, “we’re seeing an increased emphasis on visibility, alignment, and stakeholder management,” says Korn Ferry senior client partner Marnix Boorsma, who says that meetings are becoming a place to demonstrate value. “Meetings remain one of the primary arenas where that plays out.”
Despite this, confessing to attending more meetings is still a faux pas. “No, I don’t hear people saying they seek out more meetings,” says Boorsma.
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