I watched a reasonably intelligent marketing manager spend 45 minutes of my life telling people in the company why we needed a committee to decide what colour our new office wastepaper bins should be, three months ago. Not joking. Forty-five minutes. About bins.

That’s when I realised: we’ve made a circus out of workplace collaboration, and no one will admit the emperor has no clothes. The Meeting Madness Must Stop!

Listen up, I’ve been running national sales training sessions for Australian businesses for almost 20 years, and the biggest complaint I hear isn’t about bad-debtors or impossible deadlines. It’s about meetings. Namely, meetings that could’ve been an email, meetings about meetings and my personal favorite: “quick catchups” that somehow turn into three-hour strategic planning meetings.

Here’s what nobody else wants to say out loud: Most team meetings are intellectual quicksand. They’re where good ideas go to die and where perfectly sane people start speaking corporate gibberish as if they’ve been possessed by a LinkedIn influencer.

The data backs this up too. Recent studies from the workplace have shown that 67% of senior executives say that too many meetings are preventing them from doing productive work. But we insist on scheduling them as if we were trading Pokémon cards.

What Works (and What Doesn’t)

After years of watching teams struggle with this, I’ve noticed something curious. The best-run organisations I’ve worked with in 20 years of consulting have a healthy obsession with constantly asking themselves when and where people need to meet in person.

Consider the staff of Virgin Australia, for instance. They have this amazing thing where they only get people together in a meeting when you’re actually going to make a decision or you need to have a debate to actually decide something, and otherwise you don’t have a meeting. All other information is processed via their project management software or rapid one-on-one chats.

Compare and contrast that with … oh, almost any government department I’ve ever worked with. (Sorry, not sorry.) They’ll face a schedule to discuss scheduling for another meeting to discuss whether or not they need a meeting. This is like dreaming or some imaginative illusion, but wasted and costly. Quite honestly, most of these “group discussions” happen with one person seeming to think aloud while everyone else mentally makes updates on what they have to do. Real collaborative efforts would require giving people time to actually think before you just cram them in a room together.

The Real Cost of Meeting Overload

So here is the big twist and a pretty interesting downright depressing one as well. Beyond 40 percent of the time spent in meetings will cause reductions in real output by about 30 percent. But the kicker is that job satisfaction falls even further.

Imagine hiring bright, able people and then immediately put them behind closed doors to discuss things that they could solve in five minutes without the group coming together. It’s like buying a Ferrari but only driving it in school zones.

I recall working with a small accounting firm in Brisbane where the management partners were convinced that they needed to meet as a team daily to “maintain culture.” Poor staff members spent every morning attending two-hour meetings regarding cases already being handled perfectly well on their own. Productivity was in the toilet, deadlines were missed, and everyone looked like they’d rather be somewhere else.

We cut their meetings down to two per week, with a maximum duration of 30 minutes, and demanded an agenda. A month later, they had cleared their backlog and started onboarding new clients. The partners were shocked. I was not.

The Psychology of Meeting Addiction

But really, why do we do that to ourselves? Why do smart business leaders schedule meetings they know to have zero value?

Some of them are psychological. Meetings, in some way, make us feel important. They give us the illusion of leading and collaborating with other buzzwords that sound so good in the performance review. But to me, I think we are just scared of making decisions that would not have the consent of others.

Here’s something to stir the pot: consensus is overrated. A lot of times, truly the best decision is made by one person who knows his stuff and has the power to act.

I’ve seen teams waste weeks debating marketing strategies that an adequate marketing manager could sort out in an afternoon. It was never really all that complicated; it was just that everyone needed to feel “consulted.”

This is where meeting training and delegation will prove invaluable. What alternative exists? How do you maintain team cohesion without turning everyone’s calendar into a game of Tetris? Begin by making meetings fight for their existence on the calendar. Every meeting has to have a purpose: an expected outcome and the person who is supposed to make the decisions. If you cannot say what will change when the meeting ends, then do not have it.

Second, use asynchronous communication. Not all discussions need to be in real-time. Some of the best strategic thinking works when people have space to think through ideas without seven other voices jumping in every thirty seconds.

And finally, this is where many organisations lose out: you need to actively develop conflict resolution skills for your managers. Because what really happens: teams have way too many meetings simply because their managers don’t know how to resolve conflicts efficiently.