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

Three hours. That's how long I sat in a meeting last month watching twelve supposedly intelligent professionals debate whether our quarterly reports should use Arial or Calibri font. By the end, I was genuinely considering a career change to sheep farming in Western Queensland.

But here's the thing everyone gets wrong about terrible meetings – it's not the length, it's not the lack of agenda, and it's definitely not because Sarah from accounting always brings her emotional support coffee that smells like vanilla regret. The real culprit? We've collectively forgotten that meetings are meant to be conversations, not performances.

The Performance Trap

Walk into any boardroom in Melbourne or Perth and you'll witness the same theatrical production. Janet's got her PowerPoint locked and loaded with 47 slides of charts that could've been an email. Mark's practising his "strategic synergy" speech in his head. Everyone's competing to sound the most corporate while saying absolutely nothing of substance.

I've been running workplace communication training sessions for sixteen years now, and the number one complaint I hear isn't "meetings are too long" – it's "nothing ever gets decided." That's because everyone's too busy performing their role as Serious Business Person to actually engage with the problem at hand.

The irony? The best decisions I've ever seen made in corporate Australia happened during impromptu conversations by the coffee machine or walking to the car park. No slides. No formal agenda. Just humans talking through problems like humans do.

Why Australian Businesses Get This Wrong

We've inherited this bizarre American corporate culture where meetings are treated like sacred rituals. You know the type – those companies that schedule meetings to plan meetings, then follow up with an email summarising the meeting about planning the meeting.

Telstra figured this out years ago. They ditched half their recurring meetings and saw productivity actually improve. Not rocket science, but apparently controversial enough that most companies still haven't caught on.

The real kicker? About 67% of employees report spending more time in meetings than actually doing their jobs. And yes, I made that statistic up, but I bet you believed it because it sounds about right.

The Conversation Revolution

Here's what actually works: treating meetings like the problem-solving conversations they should be. No PowerPoints unless absolutely necessary. Definitely no reading from scripts. Just smart people in a room (or Zoom, whatever) talking through challenges.

I learned this the hard way running a disastrous client presentation in 2019. Spent weeks perfecting slides, rehearsing transitions, timing everything to the second. The client fell asleep. Literally. During the financial projections section, which I thought was the highlight.

The follow-up meeting? We scrapped the deck entirely. Sat around their kitchen table with coffee and talked through their actual problems. Signed the biggest contract of my career that day.

What Good Meetings Actually Look Like

First rule: if it can be solved with a phone call, make a phone call. If it needs an email, send an email. Meetings are for complex problems requiring multiple perspectives.

Second: invite the right people, not the important people. There's a difference. That senior manager who never speaks but insists on being included "for visibility"? Yeah, they can get the summary later.

Third: start with the problem, not the background. We all know why we're here. Skip the corporate foreplay and get to the point.

Some of the most effective meeting management strategies I've seen involve what I call "standing meetings" – literally standing up the entire time. Amazing how quickly people get to the point when their feet start hurting.

The Technology Trap

Every company thinks their meeting problems will be solved by the latest collaboration software. Teams, Slack, Zoom, whatever the flavour of the month is. Here's a revolutionary idea: the problem isn't the platform, it's the people.

I've seen brilliant decisions made on napkins and terrible ones made with million-dollar presentation systems. The medium isn't the message when it comes to effective communication.

Although, credit where it's due – Microsoft Teams actually made remote meetings bearable during COVID. Before that, conference calls were basically high-tech torture sessions where half the participants were on mute talking to their cats.

The Real Solution

Stop treating meetings like formal presentations and start treating them like working sessions. Bring problems, not solutions. Ask questions, don't make speeches. Challenge ideas, don't just nod politely.

And for the love of all that's holy, learn to disagree professionally. The best meetings I've ever been in involved heated debates that somehow ended with everyone laughing and a clear path forward. Conflict isn't the enemy of good meetings – consensus-seeking theatre is.

Your next meeting should feel more like a strategy session between friends and less like a corporate performance review. If people leave energised rather than drained, you're doing it right.

The funny thing is, most of us already know how to have good conversations. We do it every day with our mates, our family, our neighbours. We just somehow forget these skills the moment we step into a conference room.

Making the Change

Start small. Next meeting you run, try this: no slides, no formal agenda, just write the problem on a whiteboard and ask "what do we think?" You'll be amazed how quickly people start actually participating instead of just attending.

The meeting culture in Australian business doesn't have to stay broken. We just need to remember that meetings are conversations, not performances. And good conversations happen when people feel safe to be honest, make mistakes, and challenge each other's thinking.

Try it next week. Your team will thank you. Your productivity will improve. And you might even look forward to Monday morning meetings again.

Well, maybe that's going too far.

Further Reading: Professional Development | Communication Training | Team Management | Workplace Skills