Meeting Madness: How Australian Businesses Are Talking Themselves to Death
The conference call was supposed to start at 2 PM.
The average office employee now spends 42% 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 measurable results.
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 effective.
Here’s what nobody wants to admit about meetings: the majority of them are just performance anxiety disguised as collaboration.
Think about the last “brainstorming session” you attended. How much actual brainstorming happened? How many new ideas emerged?
I’ll bet the first twenty minutes were spent on status reports, the middle section was dominated by whoever loves to hear themselves talk, and the final portion was a rushed attempt to assign actions that were probably unnecessary in the first place.
This isn’t collaboration – it’s group therapy for leaders who can’t trust their teams outside of a formal setting. It’s management theatre, performed for an audience of captive colleagues.
Let me tell you about the worst meeting I ever experienced.
I watched a sales team spend an hour in a meeting discussing why their previous meeting had run overtime.
The first meeting ran for two hours. The agenda covered fifteen different projects, most of which only involved a handful of 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.
Video conferencing technology was supposed to save us time, but it’s actually made meetings more frequent and less effective.
When meetings required physical presence, there was an automatic filter. That friction meant you only called meetings when they were genuinely necessary.
Now you can set up a video call in thirty seconds, invite dozens people with a few clicks, and create the illusion of productivity without any of the logistical constraints that used to make people think twice.
The result? Meeting inflation. What used to be a brief discussion is now a formal meeting with agendas. Every day is fragmented into hour-long chunks between endless conferences.
What absolutely drives me mental about meeting culture: the myth that more collaboration automatically leads to better outcomes.
Over-collaboration is just as destructive as under-collaboration.
I worked with a design team 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 discussed in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was safe work that had been focus-grouped into blandness. The innovative solutions died in the endless feedback loops.
Genius doesn’t happen in conference rooms full of committee members.
The meeting industrial complex has its own vocabulary designed to make everything sound important.
“I think we need a deeper dive” – 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}.}}
“Let’s schedule a follow-up” – 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.
Real problem-solving happens in uninterrupted spaces where experts can think deeply without the pressure of performing for an audience.
Collaboration isn’t sitting in a room brainstorming from scratch – it’s intelligent people bringing their best thinking to a time-limited discussion. The meetings that actually work are the ones where people come with solutions, not the ones where they come to figure things out together.
How do you fix a meeting-addicted organisation?
Create barriers that force people to justify gathering time.
The most effective teams I work with have simple rules: no meeting without a specific agenda, no recurring meetings without regular evaluation, and no meetings longer than ninety minutes without a extraordinary reason.
Some companies assign a dollar cost to meetings based on the time value of attendees. When you see that your “quick sync” is costing $500 per hour, you start to think differently about whether it’s necessary. The quality improvements are usually immediate.
Stop confusing data transfer with meaningful interaction.
Most meeting content should be asynchronous communication.
The engineering teams that do this well have real-time visibility that eliminates the need for update sessions entirely.
I worked with a advisory business that replaced their weekly team updates with a simple weekly report. Meeting time dropped by half, and project visibility actually improved. Everyone can see what’s happening without sitting through presentations.
Recognise that democratic decision-making often produces mediocre outcomes.
The need with broad consultation has created meeting inflation where large groups discuss problems that could be resolved by a small group.
Consultation is important for organisational issues, but not every choice requires group consensus. Most routine choices should be made by the individuals closest to the work. They understand that more perspectives isn’t always better input.
Here’s the metric that changed everything for me:
Track the ratio of discussion time to actual work on your key initiatives.
For most teams, the ratio is terrifying. They’re spending four hours discussing every one hour of actual work.
Sometimes the ratio is even worse. Successful teams flip this ratio. They spend focused time in meetings and extensive time on execution. The talking serves the doing, not the other way around.
That’s not efficiency – it’s madness.
The psychology of meeting addiction is problematic.
There’s also a security in meetings. If you’re in meetings all day, you can’t be held accountable for not completing work.
Execution is often solitary, uncertain, and doesn’t provide the same social feedback as leading a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your productivity, even if they don’t create value.
Look, I’m not suggesting we eliminate all meetings.
The meetings that work are short, carefully planned, and action-oriented. They bring together the necessary participants to create solutions that require collaborative interaction.
Everything else is just corporate ritual that wastes the time and energy that could be spent on actual work. They’re strategic about when to use them, strict about how to run them, and ruthless about whether they’re working.
After fifteen years of helping organisations improve their effectiveness, here’s my conclusion about meeting culture:
Effective meetings create clarity that reduces the need for follow-up discussion.
Ineffective meetings multiply like viruses.
Make every gathering earn its place in your schedule.
The future of Australian success depends on it.
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