Advice

The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible: It's Not What Your Consultant Told You

Three months ago, I sat through the worst meeting of my professional life. And I've been to some absolute shockers over the past seventeen years in workplace training and business consulting across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. This particular nightmare lasted two hours and forty-three minutes (yes, I timed it), involved fourteen people, and accomplished precisely nothing except making everyone hate their jobs a little bit more.

The meeting had an agenda. It had objectives. It even had one of those fancy facilitators with a whiteboard and coloured markers. Everything your average business improvement course tells you makes for effective meetings. Yet it was still terrible.

Here's what no one wants to admit: most meetings fail because we're solving the wrong problem entirely.

We're Obsessing Over Process When Culture Is Broken

Every second business article bangs on about meeting efficiency. Start on time, end on time, have clear agendas, assign action items. Blah, blah, blah. I've seen companies implement elaborate meeting protocols with military precision, only to watch their teams become more disengaged than before.

Why? Because efficiency without engagement is just organised boredom.

Last year, I worked with a Perth-based mining services company that had meeting efficiency down to a science. Their weekly team meetings ran like clockwork: exactly forty-five minutes, structured agenda, everyone got three minutes to speak. Productivity metrics looked fantastic on paper. Employee satisfaction scores were in the toilet.

The real issue wasn't process—it was that nobody felt safe to disagree with anything. Ever.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Psychological Safety

Here's where I'm going to lose some of you, but stick with me. The number one predictor of meeting effectiveness isn't agenda management or time boxing. It's whether people feel they can speak up without career consequences.

Google's Project Aristotle figured this out years ago, though most Australian businesses are still catching up. Teams with high psychological safety consistently outperform those with better processes but lower trust levels. It's not even close.

I remember working with a Brisbane tech startup where the CEO prided himself on "radical candour." Except his version of radical candour meant he could say whatever he wanted while everyone else had to smile and nod. Meetings became theatrical performances where the real decisions happened in coffee queues afterwards.

That's not psychological safety. That's performance art.

Why Your Action Items Are Actually Making Things Worse

This might sound controversial, but I think our obsession with action items is killing genuine collaboration. Don't get me wrong—accountability matters. But when every conversation gets reduced to a task list, we lose the messy, creative thinking that actually moves businesses forward.

Some of the best business decisions I've witnessed came from meetings that looked chaotic on paper. Ideas bouncing around, people building on each other's thoughts, conversations going down unexpected rabbit holes. You can't capture that energy in a SMART goal framework.

I worked with a Adelaide manufacturing firm where the CEO banned action items for three months. Sounds crazy, right? Productivity actually improved because people started having real conversations instead of just ticking boxes. They began focusing on solving problems rather than documenting that problems existed.

Of course, they had to bring action items back eventually—you need some structure. But the experiment proved a point about what really drives results.

The Meeting Personalities No One Talks About

Every business has them: the Agenda Hijacker, the Silent Saboteur, the Endless Elaborator. We spend fortunes on presentation skills training and communication workshops, but we never address the elephant in the room—some people just shouldn't be in certain meetings.

The Agenda Hijacker turns every topic into their pet project. The Silent Saboteur agrees with everything in the room then complains to everyone afterwards. The Endless Elaborator... well, we've all met that person.

Here's what I've learned: these aren't personality flaws, they're usually responses to dysfunctional meeting cultures. The Hijacker might be someone who never gets heard otherwise. The Silent Saboteur could be scared of speaking up. The Elaborator might be compensating for feeling undervalued.

Fix the culture, and these personalities often sort themselves out.

The Australian Context Makes Everything Harder

Let's be honest—Australian workplace culture has some unique challenges when it comes to meetings. We value egalitarianism, which is fantastic for psychological safety. But we also have this weird thing where disagreeing with your boss feels almost un-Australian.

I've noticed this particularly in family-owned businesses across regional Australia. The owner's son can derail every meeting with half-baked ideas, but nobody says anything because "it's not our place." Meanwhile, the best ideas stay locked in people's heads.

Then there's our relationship with hierarchy. We're not as rigid as some cultures, but we're not as flat as we pretend to be either. This creates confusion about who can actually make decisions, which leads to meetings where everything gets "taken offline" for the real discussion.

What Actually Works (And Why You Won't Like It)

After nearly two decades of fixing broken meeting cultures, here's what actually moves the needle:

Start with trust, not process. If people don't trust each other, your perfectly crafted agenda won't save you. I've seen teams spend months building psychological safety through deliberate practice—giving people permission to disagree, celebrating when someone changes their mind, acknowledging when the boss gets something wrong.

Embrace productive conflict. This is where most Australian teams struggle. We're so focused on being nice that we avoid the healthy tension that creates breakthrough thinking. Conflict resolution training helps, but only if leadership models it first.

Question whether you need the meeting at all. About 60% of meetings I observe could be emails. Another 25% could be handled by smaller groups. That leaves 15% that actually benefit from getting everyone together.

The Perth mining company I mentioned earlier? We cut their weekly meetings from four to one. Engagement scores doubled within six months.

The Role of Technology (Spoiler: It's Complicated)

Everyone's obsessed with meeting technology these days. Virtual whiteboards, AI note-takers, automated action item tracking. Some of it's genuinely helpful—particularly for distributed teams. But technology can't fix fundamental trust issues.

I watched a Sydney fintech company spend fifty thousand dollars on collaboration software while their CEO still interrupted everyone and made unilateral decisions. The fancy tech just made their dysfunction more visible.

That said, when you get the culture right first, technology can amplify good meeting habits. Video calls have actually improved psychological safety for some introverted team members who find it easier to speak up from their own space.

The Metrics That Matter (Hint: It's Not Meeting Duration)

Most companies measure meeting effectiveness by looking at time efficiency or agenda completion rates. These metrics are useless.

What you should measure:

How often people change their minds during discussions
Whether decisions stick after the meeting ends
How frequently new ideas emerge during conversations
Whether the quietest team members contribute meaningfully

Yes, these are harder to quantify. But they actually predict business outcomes.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Here's the thing about terrible meetings—they don't just waste time. They actively damage team performance. Bad meetings create cynicism, reduce psychological safety, and train people to disengage from collaborative processes.

I've seen talented people leave good companies primarily because they couldn't stand the meeting culture. That's expensive. Really expensive.

On the flip side, teams that crack the meeting code develop a competitive advantage. They make better decisions faster. They innovate more effectively. They actually enjoy working together.

Which brings me back to that terrible meeting I mentioned at the start. Six months later, I worked with that same team to rebuild their meeting culture from scratch. Last month, their CEO told me it was the single most impactful change they'd made in five years.

The process wasn't complicated. But it required admitting that their real problem wasn't efficiency—it was trust.

Most organisations aren't ready for that conversation yet.