The Hidden Cost of Bad Meetings: Why Leaders Lose More Than Time
- Merve Kagitci Hokamp
- Nov 24
- 7 min read
Most teams spend more time in meetings than they realize — and even more time recovering from the unproductive ones. Before you fix your meeting culture, it helps to see what’s actually going wrong. And let’s be honest: every workplace has its own collection of meeting disasters.
Here’s what bad meetings look like:
(and there are A LOT of these — every workplace has its greatest hits)
❌ The meeting that could’ve been an email. A 45-minute gathering to share… three bullet points everyone could’ve read in 12 seconds. But nope — we needed 8 people on camera for that.
❌ The “we lost the plot” meeting. It starts with one topic… ends with a debate about office plants, marketing budgets, and someone’s cat walking across the keyboard. No agenda + no facilitation = chaos.
❌ The “mystery meeting.” You join with no idea why you’re there. No agenda. No context. Just vibes. It’s like being invited to a party and realizing you don’t know the host, the occasion, or why there’s a slideshow.
❌ The hostage situation. One person talks for 35 minutes straight while everyone else goes numb inside. A monologue disguised as a meeting. There are TED Talks shorter than this.
❌ The passive-aggressive update meeting. Everyone shares updates even though no one needs them. The subtext? “I don’t trust you to do your job, so prove to me you’re alive.”
❌ The déjà vu meeting. Same topic. Same people. Same “action items.” Zero movement. You could replay last week’s recording and no one would notice.
❌ The group therapy session. You came to solve a business problem. Instead, you witnessed a conflict, a meltdown, and a monologue about someone’s workload from 2018.
❌ The performative meeting. Everyone’s there because someone “upstairs” likes rituals. No one asks why it exists. It has the same energy as a compulsory school assembly.
❌ The meeting where nobody knows who’s in charge. Five people facilitating. Zero decisions made. Everyone leaves thinking someone else is owning it.
❌ The “I invited the whole company just in case” meeting. Seventeen people invited. Four cameras on. Less than half actually needed. A scheduling apocalypse for absolutely no reason.
1. Bad meetings create decision fog
When meetings lack purpose, people walk out with more questions than answers: Who owns what? What changed? What’s next?
Decision fog spreads quickly because no one feels confident enough to move.
This is exactly why so many planning meetings flop. Leaders assume alignment will naturally happen once everyone is in the same room. It doesn’t. Alignment requires structure, preparation, and clarity.
The Harvard Business Review has shown just how costly unclear meetings can be. In one well-known analysis, a weekly leadership meeting at a large organization cost $15 million per year in combined salaries alone. (Source: “Estimate the Cost of a Meeting with This Calculator,” HBR.)
When meetings don’t create clarity, the organization pays for it twice: in time spent and in time wasted.
2. Bad meetings erode psychological safety
Teams want to contribute. Most people genuinely enjoy working with others. But an unfocused, leader-dominated meeting shuts people down: cameras go off, mics stay muted,
and ideas stay unspoken.
Over time, people stop speaking up — not because they’re disengaged, but because they assume it won’t matter. It’s self-protection at its best.
High-performing teams rely on active participation. A bad meeting quietly turns participation into performance art.
3. Bad meetings reveal deeper organizational issues
Every recurring meeting that feels pointless is usually a symptom of something bigger:
→ The team has outgrown the meeting’s original purpose.
→ The leader is unclear about priorities.
→ The team is running on habit, not current needs.
I worked with a leadership team recently whose weekly update meeting had become pure choreography. No real decisions, no meaningful alignment — just reporting. When we redesigned the format to focus on decisions, we freed more than ten hours a week collectively and execution sped up immediately.
The meeting wasn’t the problem. The meeting did, however, reveal the actually problem, when we double clicked on it.
4. Bad meetings damage culture more than leaders think
Culture shows up in the daily rhythms of work, and meetings are one of the most visible of those rhythms.
The London School of Economics recently highlighted how meeting culture connects directly to productivity, inclusion, and decision-making. Their 2024 research found that more than one-third of business meetings are unproductive, costing U.S. companies an estimated $259 billion annually.
A team that sits through pointless meetings learns their time is not respected. A team that cannot speak openly learns hierarchy matters more than truth. A team that walks out without decisions learns accountability is optional.
This is why meeting design is culture architecture.
Meetings are where cultural norms get reinforced — good or bad.
5. The cost is measurable. And real.
The Doodle State of Meetings Report found that the average professional loses 2+ hours every week to pointless meetings.
Let’s quantify it.
A 60-minute meeting with eight mid- to senior-level people can easily represent $800 to $2,000 in salary costs. If that meeting runs weekly, the annual cost exceeds $40,000–$100,000.
That doesn’t include:
the productivity lost from context switching
the work delayed because decisions weren’t made
the morale hit from feeling time is wasted
the creative energy drained from constant interruptions
Financial cost hurts. Opportunity cost hurts even more.
6. What great leaders do differently
Leaders who do this well often subscribe to the logic of the famous “Maker’s Schedule vs. Manager’s Schedule” argument by Paul Graham — a foundational piece about why meetings are so costly for people who need focus to produce meaningful work.
High-performing leaders treat meetings as strategic tools. They:
✓ Redesign or eliminate meetings every quarter
✓ Replace large update meetings with short written summaries
✓ Use 1:1s intentionally for alignment and coaching
✓ Move decisions into smaller, faster huddles
✓ Protect deep-work time
✓ Make the purpose explicit: alignment, decision, or connection
7. A simple reset you can do this week
Here’s an exercise I use in leadership workshops and strategic-planning sessions. It’s simple, but it reveals more about team culture and decision-making than most leaders expect.
Start by asking your team three questions:
Which meetings energize you? These usually have clarity, ownership, and real progress. They reveal what’s working.
Which meetings drain you? These highlight everything from unclear purpose to poor facilitation to the wrong people in the room.
If you were redesigning our meeting rhythm from scratch, what would you keep, cut, or change? This forces people to separate habit from necessity. Teams almost always realize they’re operating on an outdated rhythm.
Then take it a step further with a meeting-by-meeting audit:
→ Ask: Does this actually need to be a meeting?
Most “check-ins” can be replaced with a one-page written update. If information can be shared asynchronously, do it.
→ No agenda, no meeting
An agenda isn’t about bureaucracy — it creates boundaries. It signals what decisions need to be made, who needs to be there, and how to prepare. If no one takes the time to write an agenda, the meeting is rarely worth having.
→ Clarify the purpose
Every meeting falls into one of three categories:
Decision-making
Alignment
Connection / relationship building
If you can’t name the purpose, the meeting will drift. If the purpose is “updates,” convert it to a written pre-read.
→ Run a post-mortem
After key meetings, do a 60-second check-in:
Did we get the outcome we needed?
Who talked the most? Who didn’t talk at all?
Did we make actual decisions or just discuss?
Did the meeting run long because of unclear ownership or unclear data?
This also surfaces power dynamics and participation patterns you can’t see in the moment.
→ Use pre-reads or pre-fills and keep meetings short
A good pre-read or pre-fill respects everyone’s time:
People come prepared.
Discussions are richer.
The meeting can be half as long.
Decision meetings should rarely exceed 30 minutes when pre-reads are used properly.
Shorter meetings force better prep, sharper thinking, and clearer ownership.
Patterns emerge immediately. You reclaim hours — often thousands across the year.
In conclusion...
Bad meetings aren’t just an inconvenience — they’re a slow leak in your organization’s time, energy, and decision-making capacity. Every unnecessary meeting chips away at clarity, momentum, and culture. Every unclear agenda erodes trust. Every hour spent in a room with no purpose is an hour taken away from real work that moves the business forward.
The good news is that meeting culture is one of the easiest levers to fix. The moment you start asking better questions — Why are we meeting? Who actually needs to be here? What decision are we making? — you can impact real change. Teams get sharper. Decisions get faster. People feel respected. And the organization starts operating with a level of intentionality that shows up everywhere else.
If your team is feeling stretched, slow, or stuck, start with your meetings. Fixing the calendar is often the fastest way to fix the culture.
Hi! I’m Merve. 👋 If your team is struggling with meeting overload, indecision, or unclear priorities, I run strategic-planning and leadership workshops that help teams move faster with far less friction. Send a message anytime and we can talk through what would help most.
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