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The Meeting Plague: Why 78% of Your Staff Are Mentally Checking Out

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Meetings are the cockroaches of corporate life. They multiply faster than you can kill them, they seem to survive everything you throw at them, and nobody really knows why they exist in the first place.

After running more workshops on chairing meetings than I care to count across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, I've come to one inescapable conclusion: most meetings are elaborate theatre productions where everyone pretends to contribute whilst secretly planning their weekend grocery shopping.

But here's the thing that'll make you uncomfortable – some of your most successful competitors are absolutely nailing their meeting culture. While you're stuck in two-hour "alignment sessions" that align nothing except everyone's growing resentment, they're making decisions, solving problems, and actually moving forward.

The Australian Meeting Epidemic

Walk into any Melbourne office building at 2 PM on a Wednesday. Count the conference rooms filled with people staring at laptops, checking phones, or wearing that glazed expression that screams "kill me now." It's epidemic levels of time wastage, and we've all become willing participants.

I made this mistake early in my consulting career. Thought longer meetings meant more thorough discussions. Wrong. Dead wrong.

The most productive client I ever worked with – a Brisbane-based logistics company – had a strict 25-minute meeting rule. No exceptions. You know what happened? They tripled their quarterly revenue in eighteen months. Coincidence? Hardly.

The Meeting Personality Types You Know Too Well

The Rambler: Turns a simple yes/no question into a 15-minute personal journey story. Usually starts with "That reminds me of when..."

The Silent Assassin: Says nothing during the meeting, then spends the next three days undermining every decision made via private Slack messages.

The Meeting About The Meeting Person: Calls meetings to discuss what should be discussed in other meetings. These people are productivity vampires.

The Device Devotee: Laptop open, phone buzzing, clearly responding to emails while nodding thoughtfully at whatever you're saying.

You've worked with all of them. You might be one of them.

What Actually Works (And Why Nobody Does It)

Here's where I'm going to lose half of you: most of your meetings don't need to exist.

That weekly status update meeting? That's an email. The brainstorming session for "blue sky thinking"? That's a waste of everyone's time unless you've got specific problems to solve. The all-hands where leadership shares "exciting updates" that could've been a newsletter? Pure corporate theatre.

But the meetings that DO need to happen? They need emotional intelligence from whoever's running the show. Because managing a room full of personalities, egos, and agendas isn't just about following an agenda – it's about reading the room and knowing when to push, when to pause, and when to shut things down.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Meeting Culture

Your meeting culture reflects your leadership culture. If your meetings are directionless time-sinks, your leadership probably is too.

I've sat in boardrooms where senior executives spend 45 minutes debating the colour scheme for the quarterly presentation while their customer satisfaction scores are circling the drain. I've watched middle managers schedule "quick catch-ups" that stretch to 90 minutes because nobody has the backbone to say "we're done here."

This isn't about being efficient for efficiency's sake. It's about respecting that time is the only resource you can't manufacture more of.

The Five Meeting Types That Actually Matter

Decision Meetings: Someone needs to make a call. Present options, discuss briefly, decide, move on.
Problem-Solving Sessions: Specific issue, focused discussion, actionable solutions.
Information Transfer: Critical updates that require discussion or clarification.
Creative Collaboration: Genuine brainstorming with clear creative objectives.
Relationship Building: Team dynamics, conflict resolution, or genuine team development.

Everything else is probably just habit masquerading as necessity.

The Meeting Prep Nobody Does

Here's what separates the pros from the pretenders: they prepare differently.

Before any meeting, ask yourself three questions:

What specific outcome do I need?
Who absolutely must be here for that outcome?
What's the minimum time required to achieve it?

If you can't answer all three clearly, cancel the bloody meeting.

Most people wing it. They book the room, send a vague agenda, and hope something productive emerges from the collective intelligence of whoever shows up. That's not meeting management – that's group therapy.

The Technology Trap

Everyone's obsessed with meeting platforms, collaboration tools, and digital whiteboards. Meanwhile, the most effective meeting I attended last month happened around a cafe table in South Melbourne with three people, one notebook, and zero technology.

Don't get me wrong – Teams and Zoom have their place. But technology won't fix bad meeting habits any more than a fancy kitchen will make you a better cook.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Bad meetings compound. One poorly run session leads to follow-up meetings to clarify what should've been decided in the first place. Which leads to more meetings to implement what should've been implemented weeks ago.

I've seen teams spend more time talking about doing work than actually doing work. It's like being trapped in a productivity purgatory where everyone's constantly busy but nothing meaningful ever gets accomplished.

The Meeting Audit Challenge

Here's something that'll terrify most managers: audit your meetings for one month. Track every single one – duration, attendees, outcomes achieved, decisions made.

You'll discover that roughly 60% of your meeting time produces zero measurable value. Zero.

That's not speculation – that's what happens when my clients actually do this exercise. The results are consistently sobering.

What Good Looks Like

The best meeting culture I've ever witnessed belonged to a Adelaide-based tech startup. Their CEO had one rule: if you can't explain the meeting's purpose in one sentence, it doesn't happen.

Their weekly leadership meetings? Thirty minutes, standing room only, three agenda items maximum. Their quarterly planning? Half-day intensive with clear deliverables and assigned ownership.

They grew from twelve people to 85 in two years. Their meeting discipline wasn't the only reason, but it definitely wasn't holding them back.

The bottom line? Your meetings are either accelerating your progress or sabotaging it. There's no neutral ground.

Time to choose which side you're on.