A particular breed of employee is a meeting tourist.
They gravitate to meetings just as tourists are drawn to attractions in a city. Their criteria for attending a meeting isn’t how relevant it is to them, but rather who else is attending. Further, their engagement in these meetings is just as superficial as that tourist whose trip to Rome can be entirely summed up by a string of Instagram selfies.
The prevalence of meeting tourists serves as a litmus test for a company’s meritocracy. At best, they are a rare species. At worst, they occupy its most prominent positions.