The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible

Related Articles: Communication Skills Training | Professional Development | Leadership Training | Workplace Communication

Three weeks ago, I walked into what was supposed to be a "quick 15-minute standup" and walked out two hours later feeling like I'd been intellectually waterboarded by PowerPoint slides about synergistic paradigm shifts. That's when it hit me: we're not having meetings anymore, we're conducting elaborate theatrical performances where everyone's forgotten their lines.

After seventeen years of facilitating workshops across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, I've sat through approximately 4,300 meetings (yes, I counted during one particularly excruciating quarterly review). Here's the uncomfortable truth no one wants to admit: your meetings aren't terrible because of technology, scheduling conflicts, or that one colleague who always hijacks the agenda.

They're terrible because we've collectively forgotten what meetings are actually for.

The Great Meeting Amnesia

Most professionals treat meetings like mandatory church attendance - something you show up to, endure, and hope provides some vague spiritual benefit. But here's what's fascinating: when I ask workshop participants to define the purpose of their last meeting, 73% can't give me a coherent answer beyond "we needed to touch base."

Touch base on what, exactly?

I used to think this was just Australian corporate culture being typically laid-back about processes. Then I started working with American and European clients through video calls during the pandemic. Turns out, meeting dysfunction is a global epidemic. The symptoms are universal: agenda-free discussions, decision paralysis, and that special brand of exhaustion that comes from talking in circles for an hour without reaching a single conclusion.

The problem isn't that we're bad at meetings. We've simply confused activity with productivity.

What Actually Happens vs. What Should Happen

Let me paint you a picture of the typical Australian business meeting. Someone books a conference room (or these days, a Zoom link). Seven people show up. Three are checking their phones, two are still finishing their coffee, one is frantically trying to connect their laptop to the screen, and the meeting "owner" is shuffling through printouts looking mildly panicked.

"Right, so... thanks everyone for coming. I thought we should get together to discuss the project status and see where we're at with everything."

And there it is. The meeting death sentence. No clear objective, no decision framework, no exit criteria. Just a vague notion that talking = progress.

Compare this to how effective meeting management training approaches the same scenario: every meeting starts with a clear statement of what decision needs to be made or what specific outcome we're working toward. Not "discuss" or "touch base" or "sync up" - actual, measurable outcomes.

I learned this the hard way in 2019 when I was running strategy sessions for a mining company in Perth. We spent three months having weekly "project alignment meetings" that achieved absolutely nothing except ensuring everyone felt heard. The project was six weeks behind schedule before someone finally asked, "What are we actually trying to decide here?"

The Australian Politeness Trap

Here's where our cultural tendencies work against us. Australians are generally nice people. We don't want to interrupt, we give everyone a fair go to speak their piece, and we're uncomfortable with direct confrontation. These are wonderful qualities for barbecues and cricket matches.

They're productivity killers in business meetings.

I've watched countless meetings derail because someone raised a tangential point and nobody wanted to be the arsehole who said, "That's interesting, but it's not what we're here to decide today." Instead, we all nod politely and follow the conversational rabbit down its hole, emerging 45 minutes later wondering how we got from budget approval to discussing the office coffee supplier.

The most successful meeting facilitators I know - including several brilliant executives at companies like Atlassian and Canva - have learned to be productively rude. They interrupt. They redirect. They say, "Let's park that for now and focus on the decision in front of us."

It feels uncomfortable at first, but here's what happens: meetings get shorter, decisions get made, and people actually leave feeling energised rather than drained.

The Technology Red Herring

Everyone loves to blame technology for bad meetings. "Oh, if only we had better video conferencing software." "The presentation didn't load properly." "Teams was being glitchy again."

Bollocks.

I've facilitated brilliant meetings in pub back rooms with nothing but a whiteboard and marker. I've also sat through soul-crushing disasters in boardrooms equipped with more technology than mission control at NASA.

The tool doesn't make the meeting. The structure does.

But here's where it gets interesting. The shift to remote and hybrid work has actually revealed just how broken our meeting culture was all along. When you're forced to be more intentional about scheduling, when people can see exactly how much time they're spending in video calls, when the technical barriers force you to plan ahead - suddenly the meetings that survive this filter tend to be much more focused.

Some of my clients have discovered that their most productive sessions now happen entirely asynchronously. They use shared documents for input, record video updates for context, and only meet live when they need to make a decision that requires real-time discussion.

The Decision-Making Bottleneck

Here's the core issue: most meetings aren't actually about sharing information or brainstorming ideas. They're about making decisions. But we've forgotten how to decide things efficiently.

I worked with a retail chain last year that was taking six weeks to approve new store locations. Six weeks! Not because the analysis was complex, but because every stakeholder wanted to "have input" on every decision. The actual decision-making process took about forty minutes once we got everyone in the same room with the right information.

The other five weeks and four days were just elaborate procrastination disguised as consultation.

Smart organisations are getting ruthless about decision rights. Who needs to provide input? Who needs to be consulted? Who actually makes the call? And critically - what information do we need to make this decision, and how will we know when we've made it?

This is where proper communication skills training becomes invaluable. It's not about learning to facilitate better discussions - though that helps. It's about learning to distinguish between decisions that need group input and decisions that can be made individually with appropriate consultation.

The Energy Audit

Every meeting costs energy, not just time. I learned this from a CFO in Adelaide who started calculating the true cost of meetings by including not just salary time, but the cognitive load and opportunity cost of pulling people away from focused work.

A two-hour meeting with eight senior staff members doesn't just cost 16 person-hours. It costs preparation time, context-switching overhead, and the momentum lost from interrupting everyone's deep work. When you factor in the real costs, that "quick alignment session" suddenly looks like a very expensive way to share information that could have been communicated via email.

The best teams I work with now treat meeting time like precious natural resources. They ask hard questions: Is this decision complex enough to require group discussion? Are we the right people to make this call? What's the smallest number of people who need to be involved?

What Good Looks Like

Let me tell you about a meeting I attended last month that restored my faith in corporate gatherings. The facilitator started with: "We're here to decide whether to launch the beta programme in March or wait until May. We have three pieces of information to consider, two stakeholder perspectives to hear, and one decision to make. Should take 30 minutes."

And it did. Because everyone knew exactly what they were there to accomplish.

No icebreakers. No status updates that could have been emails. No "let's go around the room and hear everyone's thoughts." Just the specific information needed to make a specific decision, presented efficiently, discussed briefly, and decided clearly.

The meeting ended with: "We're launching in March. Sarah will send the timeline by Friday. Thanks, everyone."

Done. Decision made, responsibilities assigned, next steps clear. I actually felt energised walking out, instead of that familiar meeting-induced mental fog.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Status Updates

While we're being honest, let's talk about status meetings. You know the ones - where everyone goes around sharing what they're working on, what they accomplished last week, and what's coming up.

These meetings are organisational theatre.

If your team is so disconnected that people need a weekly meeting to know what their colleagues are working on, you have much bigger problems than meeting efficiency. Good teams communicate continuously through the tools and processes they've established. They don't need elaborate show-and-tell sessions to stay aligned.

I've started asking clients: "What decisions are made in your status meetings?" The answer is usually "none" - which means it's not really a meeting, it's a performance.

Replace them with shared dashboards, async updates, or written reports. Save the live meeting time for when you actually need to decide something together.

The Meeting Recovery Programme

So how do you fix this? Start small. Pick one recurring meeting and ask yourself: what specific outcome are we trying to achieve? If you can't answer that clearly, cancel the meeting and see what happens.

I guarantee you'll discover that 80% of what you thought required a meeting can be handled more efficiently through other channels. The remaining 20% - the real decisions, the complex problems, the situations that benefit from live discussion - those meetings will suddenly become much more valuable.

And for those essential meetings that remain, try this simple framework: Start with the decision or outcome you're working toward. Share only the information needed to reach that outcome. Make the decision. Assign next steps. End.

No presentations about presentations. No updates about updates. No meetings about scheduling meetings.

Just clear thinking, efficient discussion, and actual progress.

Your calendar will thank you. Your team will thank you. And you might even start looking forward to Monday mornings again.

Further Reading:

• Workplace Communication Training
• Leadership Development Resources
• Team Development Strategies