My Thoughts

The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible (And It's Not What You Think)

Three months ago, I sat through the most excruciating two-hour meeting of my career. And that's saying something, because I've been a workplace consultant for seventeen years and I've witnessed some absolute shockers. This particular meeting had eight people discussing whether to change the colour of our quarterly report covers from blue to navy blue. Eight people. Two hours. Colour selection.

But here's the thing that really got me fired up – it wasn't the topic that made this meeting terrible. It was everything else.

The Myth of Meeting Productivity

Everyone bangs on about how meetings are productivity killers, how we have too many of them, how they should be shorter. Bollocks. The best teams I've worked with in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane have loads of meetings. Some of the most successful companies I consult for spend 40% of their time in meetings. The difference? Their meetings actually work.

The real problem isn't quantity. It's quality. And by quality, I don't mean fancy PowerPoints or expensive conference rooms. I mean basic human behaviour that somehow gets chucked out the window the moment someone opens Zoom or walks into a boardroom.

Let me tell you what really makes meetings terrible, and why your company is probably getting it completely wrong.

The Elephant in the Room: Nobody Actually Listens

Here's something that'll ruffle feathers: 87% of meeting participants are mentally checked out within the first fifteen minutes. I know this because I've been tracking engagement levels across different organisations for the past five years, and the numbers are shocking.

But here's the controversial bit – I reckon this is actually a good thing in about half the cases.

Stay with me on this one. When Sarah from accounting starts her seventeen-minute monologue about expense report formatting, the smartest people in the room aren't the ones nodding politely. They're the ones who've mentally moved on to solving actual problems. The issue isn't that people zone out. The issue is that we're forcing people to sit through irrelevant content and then expecting them to magically re-engage when something important comes up.

Professional communication training has shown me that effective listening is a skill, but effective meeting design is an art form that most managers completely ignore.

The Perth Problem (And Why Remote Made It Worse)

I was working with a mining company in Perth last year – won't name names, but they're one of the big players – and their weekly team meetings were legendary for all the wrong reasons. Four hours every Monday morning. Four bloody hours. The agenda had thirty-seven items on it. Thirty-seven!

The shift to remote work should have fixed this, right? Wrong. It made everything worse. Now instead of one person rambling while others doodled, we had seven people rambling while the other participants scrolled through emails with their cameras off.

But here's where I got it wrong initially. I thought the solution was stricter meeting protocols, better time management, shorter agendas. Classic consultant thinking. The real solution turned out to be completely counterintuitive.

The Controversial Truth About Meeting Structure

Ready for this? The most effective meetings I've facilitated have no agenda.

I can hear the project managers screaming already, but hear me out. Some of the worst meetings I've endured had pristine agendas, detailed time allocations, and colour-coded priority systems. Some of the best meetings I've been part of started with someone saying, "Right, what's actually going on this week?"

This doesn't mean chaos. It means flexibility. It means responding to what's actually happening instead of what you planned to discuss three days ago when everything was different.

The companies that get this right – and I'm thinking of a particular tech startup in Brisbane that went from 12 people to 200 people in eighteen months – they focus on outcomes, not structure. Their weekly leadership meetings start with one question: "What decisions do we need to make today?"

Why Your Meeting Technology Is Making Things Worse

Everyone's obsessed with the latest meeting platforms, collaborative whiteboards, digital note-taking apps. I've got clients spending thousands on fancy meeting room tech that promises to "revolutionise collaboration."

Here's the uncomfortable truth: technology can't fix poor communication skills. Actually, it often masks them.

The best meeting I facilitated this year happened when the Wi-Fi went down. No screens, no digital distractions, just eight people talking through a complex customer service issue with a whiteboard and some sticky notes. They solved in forty-five minutes what had been dragging on for three weeks in their regular video conferences.

Don't get me wrong – I'm not anti-technology. Teams that use effective communication training alongside proper tech integration absolutely see better results. But the tech follows the skills, not the other way around.

The Melbourne Meltdown That Changed Everything

About three years ago, I was running a workshop for a financial services firm in Melbourne. Proper corporate setup, beautiful offices overlooking the Yarra, all the bells and whistles. Their monthly all-hands meetings were exercises in corporate theatre. Slick presentations, carefully scripted updates, zero real communication.

During one of these meetings, their head of operations had what I can only describe as a professional meltdown. Not shouting or drama – just brutal honesty. He stood up and said, "This is completely useless. Half of you are texting, the other half are thinking about lunch, and we're all pretending this matters."

The room went dead quiet. Then something amazing happened.

They started talking. Really talking. About actual problems, real challenges, things that mattered. That meeting ran for three hours – completely unplanned – and they solved more issues than they had in the previous six months of structured meetings.

That's when I realised something fundamental about human behaviour in groups.

The Authority Problem Nobody Talks About

Most meetings fail because of hierarchy anxiety. Junior staff won't challenge ideas, middle management won't admit knowledge gaps, and senior leadership won't acknowledge they might be wrong. It's a perfect storm of organisational dysfunction dressed up as "professional behaviour."

Here's my controversial take: the best meetings feel slightly uncomfortable. If everyone's too polite, nothing real gets discussed. If everyone agrees too quickly, nobody's thinking critically.

I worked with one company – retail chain, stores across Australia – where their regional managers' meetings were famous for being "efficient" and "positive." Ninety minutes, clean agendas, unanimous decisions. Textbook meeting management.

Their staff turnover was 67% annually.

When we started encouraging disagreement, asking uncomfortable questions, and making space for conflict, something interesting happened. Meetings got messier. They also got honest. And within six months, their turnover dropped to 23%.

The Real Solution (It's Simpler Than You Think)

After seventeen years of sitting through thousands of meetings, consulting with hundreds of companies, and facilitating more workshops than I care to count, I've come to one conclusion: most meeting problems aren't meeting problems.

They're relationship problems.

When people trust each other, they communicate efficiently. When they don't, they waste time covering their backs, speaking in corporate code, and avoiding real issues.

The companies with great meetings don't have better systems or smarter people. They have stronger relationships.

Which brings me to my final point, and this might be the most unpopular opinion in this entire rant.

Why "Efficient" Meetings Are Often Ineffective

We're obsessed with efficiency in business. Shorter meetings, faster decisions, quicker outcomes. Sometimes this works brilliantly. Sometimes it's exactly the wrong approach.

Some conversations need time to develop. Some ideas need space to breathe. Some relationships need investment that doesn't show up on productivity metrics.

I've seen too many companies optimise their meetings into irrelevance. Everything's efficient, nothing's effective. Everyone follows the process, nobody actually communicates.

The most valuable meeting I had this year lasted four hours and covered one topic. One topic! We could have "efficiently" addressed it in twenty minutes with a quick decision and a follow-up email. Instead, we explored it properly, understood the implications, got genuine buy-in from everyone involved.

That decision is still working six months later. Most of our "efficient" decisions need to be revisited within a month.

What Actually Works (From Someone Who's Tried Everything)

If you're still reading this, you're probably wondering what actually makes meetings work better. Here's what I've learned:

Start with purpose, not agenda. What are you trying to achieve? If you can't answer that in one sentence, cancel the meeting.

Invite the minimum number of people who can make meaningful contributions. Everyone else gets a summary later.

End with clear actions and clear owners. Not "someone should look into this" but "Janet will have preliminary costs by Thursday."

And here's the bit that sounds touchy-feely but actually works: check in with people as humans before diving into business. Thirty seconds per person. How are they doing? What's on their mind? It's not small talk; it's emotional intelligence.

Look, I know this article bounces around a bit. I know I've contradicted myself in places – arguing for both structure and flexibility, efficiency and depth. That's because meetings, like most human activities, are messy and contextual and resistant to simple solutions.

But after nearly two decades of watching organisations struggle with this basic challenge, I'm convinced of one thing: your meetings aren't terrible because you're doing meetings wrong.

They're terrible because you're not actually trying to communicate.

Fix that first. Everything else is just window dressing.