# The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible [Further reading](https://skillcoaching.bigcartel.com/blog) | [More insight](https://www.alkhazana.net/2025/07/16/why-firms-ought-to-invest-in-professional-development-courses-for-employees/) | [Other recommendations](https://ducareerclub.net/blog) Last month I sat in a three-hour "strategic planning session" where we spent forty-seven minutes debating the font size on a PowerPoint slide. Forty-seven minutes. I know because I was watching the clock, slowly losing the will to live, whilst our Head of Marketing explained why Comic Sans would "really make our quarterly projections pop." This wasn't some startup run by twenty-somethings who think ping-pong tables solve workplace issues. This was a legitimate consulting firm with over 200 employees. And that meeting? It perfectly encapsulated everything wrong with corporate Australia's relationship with meetings. Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to admit: your meetings are terrible because you're all pretending they're not terrible. You've convinced yourselves that sitting in a room for hours talking about talking about doing things is actually productive work. It's not. It's collective procrastination with catering. I've been running workshops on [effective communication](https://sewazoom.com/what-to-anticipate-from-a-communication-skills-training-course/) for the better part of fifteen years, and I can tell you the biggest lie in business today is that meetings are necessary for collaboration. Most meetings are actually collaboration killers. They're where good ideas go to die slow, committee-driven deaths. ## The Meeting Industrial Complex Here's what really happened during the rise of "collaborative workplaces" – we created an entire industry around meetings. Meeting facilitators, meeting technology, meeting rooms with names like "The Think Tank" and "Innovation Station." We've got standing meetings, walking meetings, virtual meetings, hybrid meetings, and my personal favourite – meetings to plan other meetings. The average Australian office worker spends 23% of their week in meetings. That's nearly one full day. But here's the kicker – when surveyed, 67% of these same workers admit that most of their meetings could have been an email. Yet we keep booking more rooms, buying more software, and scheduling more "touch bases." I worked with a mining company in Perth where managers spent so much time in meetings about safety protocols that they had no time to actually implement the safety protocols they were meeting about. [More information here](https://www.alkhazana.net/2025/07/16/why-corporations-ought-to-invest-in-professional-development-courses-for-employees/) on why this backwards approach to workplace efficiency is killing productivity across industries. The truth is, we've created a meeting culture because it feels like work without the risk of actually producing anything measurable. Failed project? "We had great discussions in our planning sessions." Missed deadline? "The stakeholder alignment meetings went really well though." ## The Psychology of Meeting Addiction Meetings have become the corporate equivalent of comfort food – they make us feel productive whilst actually making us sluggish and unproductive. There's genuine psychology behind this. Sitting around a table talking about work triggers the same neural pathways as actually doing work. Your brain gets a little hit of accomplishment without the effort of accomplishment. Plus, meetings are social. Humans are wired to enjoy group activities, even when those group activities are mind-numbingly pointless. You get to see colleagues, share coffee, occasionally laugh at someone's joke about quarterly forecasts. It's community building disguised as business necessity. But here's where it gets interesting – the people calling the most meetings are usually the ones with the least actual work to do. Think about it. When you're genuinely busy solving problems, creating products, or serving customers, the last thing you want is to stop and explain what you're doing to a room full of people who weren't doing it with you. I once worked with a CEO who scheduled four meetings per week to discuss "team productivity." Meanwhile, his top performer – the one actually bringing in 40% of company revenue – kept declining these meetings to focus on, you know, actually working. Guess who got labeled as "not a team player"? ## The Meeting Types That Need to Die Let's talk specifics. Some meetings deserve immediate extinction: **The Update Meeting**: If your update can be delivered via email, Slack, or a shared document, it doesn't need a meeting. "Going around the table" so everyone can report what they did yesterday isn't collaboration – it's performance theatre. Everyone's half-listening while mentally rehearsing their own two-minute presentation. **The Brainstorming Meeting**: Real brainstorming happens when people have time and space to think. Not when they're put on the spot in a conference room with Karen from Accounts staring at them expectantly. The best ideas I've ever heard came from conversations over coffee, not from whiteboards covered in sticky notes. **The Status Check-In**: These exist purely because managers don't trust their teams. If you need a weekly meeting to find out if someone's doing their job, you've got a performance management problem, not a communication problem. And my personal nemesis – **The "Just Wanted to Touch Base" Meeting**. This is code for "I don't have anything specific to discuss but I felt like we should meet." It's the meeting equivalent of sending "How are you?" texts to ex-partners. Stop it. ## What Actually Works Here's what I've learned from the companies that actually get stuff done: they treat meetings like emergency procedures. You don't call a meeting unless something's on fire or you're trying to prevent a fire. The best teams I've worked with have brutal meeting hygiene. Every meeting needs a clear decision that needs to be made or a specific problem that needs solving. No decision needed? No meeting booked. [Here is the source](https://farmfruitbasket.com/2025/07/16/why-professional-development-courses-are-essential-for-career-growth/) for more research on how high-performance teams structure their communication. Some practical rules that actually work: Start with the end in mind. Before booking any meeting, write down the specific outcome you need. Not "discuss the project" but "decide whether to hire two additional developers or outsource the mobile app development." Invite the minimum viable audience. If someone doesn't need to contribute to the decision or won't be affected by the outcome, they don't need to be there. Being included in every conversation isn't a reward – it's a punishment. Set a timer. Most decisions don't require extended deliberation. They require sufficient information and the courage to choose. If you can't reach a conclusion in 30 minutes, you either don't have enough information or you're avoiding making a hard choice. ## The Australian Context We've got a particular problem here in Australia with "consensus building" meetings. We love the idea that everyone should have input on everything. It's very egalitarian and very inefficient. Not every decision needs democratic participation. Sometimes the person with the most knowledge and responsibility should just decide and move on. I see this constantly in Australian workplaces – three-hour meetings to decide on coffee suppliers because "everyone deserves a voice." Meanwhile, the actual coffee drinkers just want decent coffee and couldn't care less about the procurement process. This isn't about being dismissive of people's opinions. It's about respecting people's time. The best way to show you value someone's contribution is to not waste their time on decisions that don't require their expertise. ## The Virtual Meeting Evolution COVID changed everything about meetings, mostly for the worse. We went from too many in-person meetings to way too many virtual meetings. Suddenly, every conversation became a Zoom call. People started scheduling 15-minute "quick sync" calls for things that could be resolved with a two-sentence message. The technology made meetings easier to call, but it didn't make them more necessary. If anything, [virtual meetings](https://performancepro.bigcartel.com/product/managing-virtual-teams-training) require even more discipline because the barriers to entry are so low. But here's the thing – some of my clients actually improved their meeting culture during remote work. When you're limited to screens and can't rely on physical presence and fancy meeting rooms, you're forced to be more intentional about why you're bringing people together. ## The Cost of Bad Meetings Let's do some quick maths. Take an average meeting with eight people earning $75,000 per year. That's roughly $36 per person per hour in labour costs. A two-hour meeting costs your business $576 in wages alone. Add the opportunity cost – what those eight people could have accomplished in those two hours – and you're looking at genuine money. I worked with a mid-sized consultancy that calculated they were spending $47,000 per month on unproductive meetings. That's more than a full-time salary. They could have hired another team member instead of talking about the work they didn't have time to do. The hidden cost is even worse – meeting fatigue leads to decision avoidance. People start delaying important choices because they can't face another discussion session. Projects stall not because they're complex, but because everyone's exhausted from talking about them. ## What Good Meetings Look Like I don't hate all meetings. I hate bad meetings. Good meetings are rare and powerful. They happen when you genuinely need multiple perspectives to solve a complex problem or when you need real-time collaboration to work through something complicated. The best meeting I ever attended was forty-five minutes of passionate disagreement about product direction, followed by a clear decision and immediate action steps. Everyone left knowing exactly what they needed to do. No follow-up meetings required. Good meetings feel different. There's energy in the room. People are engaged because they have something meaningful to contribute. Decisions get made. Problems get solved. Work gets done. [Personal recommendations](https://ydbvideolight.com/why-firms-ought-to-invest-in-professional-development-courses-for-employees/) suggest that companies who audit their meeting culture and eliminate 40% of recurring meetings see immediate productivity improvements without any loss in coordination or communication. ## The Way Forward Here's my challenge to every manager reading this: for the next month, before scheduling any meeting, ask yourself these three questions: 1. What specific decision needs to be made or problem needs to be solved? 2. Who are the minimum number of people needed to make that decision or solve that problem? 3. What happens if we don't have this meeting at all? If you can't answer the first question clearly, don't book the meeting. If the answer to the third question is "nothing really," definitely don't book the meeting. Start treating meetings like precious resources instead of default solutions. Your team will thank you. Your bottom line will thank you. And maybe, just maybe, you'll start getting actual work done instead of just talking about it. The most productive teams I know have the shortest meeting calendars. That's not a coincidence.