The $50 Billion Meeting Problem Nobody Wants to Fix
If I had a dollar for every meeting I’ve attended that achieved absolutely nothing, I could retire to the Sunshine Coast tomorrow.
The average office employee now spends 38% of their week in meetings.
I estimated recently that my clients are collectively spending over millions of dollars per year on meetings that produce no tangible outcomes.
That’s not including the opportunity cost of what doesn’t get done while everyone’s sitting around a table discussing things that could be resolved in a five-minute conversation. The meeting culture has become so entrenched that people feel guilty when they’re not in meetings. I’ve had professionals tell me they don’t feel productive unless their calendar is completely booked with back-to-back sessions.
We’ve created a culture where being busy is more important than being useful.
The uncomfortable truth about meeting culture? 80% of them are just performance anxiety disguised as collaboration.
Think about the last “brainstorming session” you attended. How much actual brainstorming happened? How many concrete decisions emerged?
The dirty secret of meeting culture is that most meetings exist to make managers feel like they’re in control, not to actually solve problems or make progress.
This isn’t collaboration – it’s group therapy for managers who can’t make decisions outside of a formal setting. It’s management theatre, performed for an audience of captive staff.
Here’s a true story that perfectly captures the insanity of modern meeting culture:
I watched a operations group spend forty minutes in a meeting discussing why their previous meeting had run overtime.
The first meeting ran for nearly three hours. The agenda covered twelve different projects, most of which only involved some people in the room. By the end, everyone knew a little bit about everything, but nobody had the time to actually work on anything.
Within a month, they were having meetings to plan meetings, and follow-up meetings to discuss what was covered in the previous meetings. The project delays got worse, not better. The irony was completely lost on them. They genuinely couldn’t see that the meeting about meetings was the exact problem they were trying to solve.
The rise of remote work has made the meeting problem exponentially worse.
In the old days, you had to book a room, coordinate schedules, and physically gather people. That friction meant you only called meetings when they were genuinely necessary.
I’ve seen departments where it’s literally impossible to find a half-day block of uninterrupted time in anyone’s calendar.
The result? Meeting proliferation. What used to be a brief discussion is now a formal meeting with presentations. Every day is fragmented into brief chunks between various meetings.
Here’s the part that really gets me fired up: the belief that more discussion automatically leads to better results.
Over-collaboration is just as destructive as under-collaboration.
I worked with a marketing department that was so committed to “transparent communication” that writers were spending more time explaining their work than actually doing it.
Every concept needed to be presented in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was predictable work that had been over-analysed into blandness. The innovative solutions died in the endless discussion cycles.
Genius doesn’t happen in conference rooms full of stakeholders.
The meeting industrial complex has its own vocabulary designed to make everything sound important.
“Let’s circle back on this” – translation: “I haven’t thought this through, but I don’t want to look unprepared.”
{{“{Let’s get everyone in a room|We need all the stakeholders aligned|This requires a cross-functional approach}” – translation: “I’m afraid to make a decision, so let’s spread the responsibility around.”|The phrase “let’s unpack this” makes me want to {scream|lose my mind|run for the hills}.}}
“We should touch base next week” – translation: “Nothing will actually change, but we’ll create the illusion of progress through scheduling.” It’s become corporate speak for “let’s turn a simple issue into an hour-long discussion that resolves nothing.”
But here’s where I’ll probably lose some people: most “collaborative” meetings are actually harmful to real teamwork.
True collaboration happens when people have the time to develop ideas independently, then come together to refine on each other’s work.
Collaboration isn’t sitting in a room discussing from scratch – it’s capable professionals bringing their best thinking to a purposeful discussion. The meetings that actually work are the ones where people come ready, not the ones where they come to figure things out together.
What are the alternatives to meeting madness?
Introduce friction back into the meeting process.
The most effective companies I work with have strict rules: no meeting without a defined outcome, no recurring meetings without regular justification, and no meetings longer than sixty minutes without a compelling reason.
Some teams assign a dollar cost to meetings based on the time value of attendees. When you see that your “quick sync” is costing $800 per hour, you start to think differently about whether it’s necessary. The output improvements are usually obvious.
Second, distinguish between status reports and actual problem-solving.
Most meeting content should be documented communication.
The technical teams that do this well have real-time visibility that eliminates the need for status meetings entirely.
I worked with a advisory business that replaced their weekly team updates with a simple online dashboard. Meeting time dropped by two-thirds, and project visibility actually improved. Everyone can see what’s happening without sitting through presentations.
Recognise that consensus often produces compromised outcomes.
The best managers I know are strategic about who they include in different types of decisions.
Stakeholder engagement is important for organisational issues, but not every choice requires group consensus. Most operational decisions should be made by the people closest to the work. They understand that additional voices isn’t always useful perspectives.
The measurement that transformed my thinking about meetings:
Track the ratio of discussion time to actual work on your major projects.
For most professionals, the ratio is embarrassing. They’re spending two hours discussing every one hour of actual work.
Sometimes the ratio is even worse. High-performing companies flip this ratio. They spend limited time in meetings and extensive time on actual work. The talking serves the doing, not the other way around.
That’s not efficiency – it’s organisational failure.
Why are people so attached to meetings?
For many managers, meetings provide a sense of control that actual work doesn’t offer. In a meeting, you can guide the conversation, prove your knowledge, and feel central to business success.
Actually doing work is often individual, uncertain, and doesn’t provide the same immediate feedback as contributing to a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your commitment, even if they don’t generate results.
Don’t get me wrong – some meetings are absolutely necessary.
The companies that do meetings well treat them like expensive resources.
Everything else is just organisational ritual that consumes the time and energy that could be directed on productive work. They’re selective about when to use them, strict about how to run them, and realistic about whether they’re valuable.
After fifteen years of helping organisations improve their performance, here’s my observation about meeting culture:
Good meetings solve problems permanently rather than creating ongoing consultation cycles.
Poor meetings generate more meetings.
Design your meeting culture to support work, not substitute for it.
The future of business success depends on it.
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