Advice

The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible: It's Not What You Think

Three weeks ago, I sat through a two-hour "strategic planning session" where we accomplished exactly nothing except agreeing to have another meeting next week. Sound familiar?

After twenty years of facilitating workshops and sitting in more boardrooms than I care to count, I've cracked the code on why 87% of meetings are complete time-wasters. And no, it's not because people don't prepare or because Janet from accounting always hijacks the agenda to talk about her cat's surgery.

It's because we're solving the wrong bloody problem.

The Meeting Mythology

Everyone thinks bad meetings happen because of poor facilitation, lack of agenda, or that one person who loves the sound of their own voice. These are symptoms, not causes. The real issue? Most meetings shouldn't exist in the first place.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: we've confused being busy with being productive. Having back-to-back meetings makes us feel important, like we're contributing to something meaningful. But strip away the corporate theatre, and half these gatherings are just elaborate procrastination sessions.

I learned this the hard way during my consulting days in Sydney. We had a client - major retailer, can't name them - who held meetings about meetings. Literally. They had a weekly session to discuss which meetings were necessary for the following week. The irony was completely lost on them.

What Airlines Actually Get Right About Communication

Now before you roll your eyes, hear me out. Airlines cop a lot of flak for customer service, but they've mastered something most businesses haven't: clear, essential communication under pressure.

When a Qantas pilot announces turbulence ahead, they don't schedule a meeting about turbulence response strategies. They communicate what's happening, what action they're taking, and what passengers need to do. Done. No follow-up meetings required.

This is exactly what your workplace communications should sound like. Clear purpose, specific actions, defined outcomes. Instead, we get meetings that meander through seventeen different topics with no clear resolution on any of them.

The effective communication training I attended last year in Melbourne completely changed how I approach this. Sometimes investing in proper communication skills makes all the difference between productive discussions and time-wasting talkfests.

The Five Meeting Types That Actually Work

After years of trial and error (mostly error), I've identified exactly five types of meetings that justify pulling people away from their actual work:

Decision Meetings: Someone needs to make a call, and they need input from specific people. Maximum 45 minutes. No exceptions.

Information Broadcasts: You have news to share that affects everyone. Email works better 90% of the time, but sometimes face-to-face delivers the message more effectively.

Problem-Solving Sessions: There's a specific issue that requires collective brainstorming. These work best with 4-6 people maximum.

Relationship Building: Yes, some meetings are purely social. Own it. Don't disguise team bonding as "strategic alignment discussions."

Crisis Response: When things are on fire, you need everyone in the same room (or Zoom call) immediately.

Everything else? Email, Slack, phone call, or just make the decision yourself and inform people later.

The Australian Way: Direct Communication

One thing I've noticed working with international clients is how refreshingly direct Australian business communication can be. We don't dance around issues for twenty minutes before getting to the point. Or at least, we shouldn't.

I remember working with a German manufacturing company in Brisbane who were blown away by how quickly we could resolve issues in face-to-face discussions. "In our meetings," their CEO told me, "we would spend three hours discussing what you just solved in fifteen minutes."

But somewhere along the way, we've adopted this American corporate meeting culture where everything needs a formal session with PowerPoint slides and action items that never get actioned.

The Technology Trap

Here's where I might lose some of you, but I think video conferencing has made meetings worse, not better.

Don't get me wrong - Zoom and Teams are brilliant for connecting remote teams. But they've also made it ridiculously easy to schedule meetings because "it's just a quick thirty-minute call." No travel time, no room booking, no real commitment.

The result? Meeting inflation. What used to be a five-minute phone conversation now becomes a scheduled video conference with screen sharing and recorded sessions that nobody ever watches.

I've started implementing what I call the "lift test" - if the conversation could happen in a lift between floors, it doesn't need a meeting.

The Real Solution: Ruthless Meeting Elimination

Here's my controversial take: cancel 60% of your recurring meetings for one month and see what actually breaks.

I did this experiment with a Perth-based construction company last year. They had forty-seven regular meetings per week across the organisation. Forty-seven! We cancelled twenty-eight of them immediately.

The world didn't end. Projects didn't collapse. In fact, productivity increased because people actually had time to do their jobs instead of talking about doing their jobs.

The Meeting Alternatives Nobody Mentions

Instead of defaulting to meetings, try these approaches:

Async Decision Making: Present the problem, options, and deadline via email. People respond within 24 hours with their input and vote.

Walking Conversations: For one-on-one discussions, walk around the block instead of sitting in a sterile meeting room. Amazing what people share when they're moving.

Time-Boxed Stand-ups: Maximum ten minutes, everyone shares their current priority and any blockers. No solutions discussed in the moment - those happen afterwards between relevant people.

Documentation Reviews: Instead of presenting information in meetings, create detailed documents that people can review in their own time, then have a brief Q&A session.

The meeting management training programs I've seen focus too much on how to run better meetings instead of questioning whether the meeting should exist at all.

What About Team Culture?

This is where people usually push back. "But what about team building? What about maintaining relationships? What about ensuring everyone feels included?"

Valid concerns. But here's the thing - forced interactions in mandatory meetings don't build genuine relationships. They build resentment.

Real team culture develops through shared experiences working towards common goals, not through hour-long "check-ins" where everyone pretends to care about each other's weekend plans.

Some of the strongest teams I've worked with rarely had formal meetings. They communicated constantly through informal channels, made decisions quickly, and celebrated wins together. The magic happened in the margins, not in the scheduled slots.

The Leadership Paradox

Here's something that might ruffle feathers: most senior executives are the worst meeting offenders. They schedule lengthy strategy sessions because it makes them feel strategic, not because it actually drives strategic outcomes.

I've watched C-suite executives spend three hours discussing a decision they could have made in thirty seconds. The meeting becomes a form of corporate cosplay - everyone pretending to be thoughtful leaders while avoiding the responsibility of actually leading.

Real leadership often means making quick decisions with imperfect information and adjusting course as needed. Not endlessly workshopping every possibility until the opportunity passes.

The Productivity Myth

We've been sold this idea that productivity means being constantly engaged in collaborative activities. That open communication means infinite availability for discussion.

But most breakthrough work - the stuff that actually moves businesses forward - happens in quiet, focused blocks of time. Meetings fragment this focused time into useless thirty-minute chunks where nothing meaningful gets accomplished.

I calculated once that if the average knowledge worker spent just two hours per day in uninterrupted focus time instead of meetings, they'd accomplish more in four days than they currently do in five.

Making the Change

So how do you escape meeting hell without torpedoing your career or team relationships?

Start small. For one week, before scheduling any meeting, ask yourself: "What specific decision or outcome am I trying to achieve, and is there a faster way to get there?"

If you must meet, set a timer. Seriously. When it goes off, the meeting ends. You'll be amazed how focused discussions become when there's a real deadline.

Most importantly, lead by example. Start declining meetings that don't have clear agendas or specific outcomes. Others will follow once they see it's possible to say no without career suicide.

The Bottom Line

Your meetings are terrible because you're using an industrial-age solution for knowledge-age problems. Most workplace communication doesn't require real-time collaboration - it requires clear thinking, decisive action, and efficient information sharing.

The best meetings I've ever attended felt more like focused problem-solving sessions than formal corporate gatherings. Everyone came prepared, spoke honestly, made decisions quickly, and left with clear next steps.

Everything else is just expensive therapy disguised as business activity.

Time to admit that maybe, just maybe, we'd all be more productive if we spent less time talking about work and more time actually doing it.

Stop scheduling meetings to feel busy. Start making decisions to create value. Your calendar - and your sanity - will thank you.

For more insights on workplace effectiveness, check out these related articles: Team Development | Leadership Skills | Professional Growth