I've thought about this a lot in terms of meetings that don't have to be meetings at my org, and I think it's essentially an adherence to protocol that communic

I've thought about this a lot in terms of meetings that don't have to be meetings at my org, and I think it's essentially an adherence to protocol that communicates a kind of mutual awareness and respect for the performative expectations everyone is operating under. Put differently, it's a kind of "parliamentary procedure": specific rules and expectations that everyone follows in the workplace to keep things "professional" and streamlined, in terms of interpersonal interactions. You may not actually give a damn about whatever the achievement is of Mx Boss, but you sending a congrats or party-popper emoji is sufficient to acknowledge that Mx Boss has done A Thing that Mx Boss thinks is significant. You may not care at all, but saying that to Mx Boss would have consequences, even if it is the truth that everyone knows. In the context of meetings-that-don't-have-to-be-meetings, it's (cynnically) a kind of show of fealty. I'm talking here about all-hands or whole department meetings, where every talking point is scripted ahead of time and you could pretty much just send the written up notes of what everyone is going to say already as an email and it'd save however many person-hours of work are wasted in just attending the meeting. For a while I was baffled about why our exec suite was okay with losing so much time across the org, then I realized in part it's an assurance of power: they declare a meeting, everyone shows up, and everyone is content within that social contract of how this stuff works. The point of the meeting isn't to convey information efficiently, it's to ensure that the power structure of the organization is functioning as expected.