Why Do Meetings Feel Pointless?

There's a particular kind of fatigue that comes from sitting in a meeting you can already tell, five minutes in, is going to produce nothing. No decision, no clear next step, just information that could have been an email, delivered out loud to a room of people who are now collectively a little further behind on the work they were actually trying to do.

‍That feeling isn't just your perception, it’s backed by hard numbers. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that when one organization cut its meeting load by 40%, employee productivity increased by 71%, alongside measurable improvements in satisfaction and retention. A separate Asana survey found that 48% of workers said their most recent meeting was unnecessary, 53% called it a waste of time, and 61% said little was actually accomplished. These aren't disengaged junior employees venting. Plenty of senior leaders report the same thing about meetings they themselves called.

Shopify offered one of the more aggressive responses to this problem in recent years. The company eliminated all recurring meetings involving more than two people, banned meetings entirely on Wednesdays, and restricted large meetings to a narrow weekly window, removing roughly 10,000 calendar events and over 76,000 hours of meeting time in one move. Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian called the change a "useful subtraction," and built a cost calculator that translated every meeting into its actual dollar value in salary and lost time, a tool designed specifically to make the hidden cost of a recurring meeting impossible to ignore.

Shopify didn't simply ask employees to attend fewer meetings. It removed the default and made every remaining meeting earn its place back onto the calendar.

Meetings rarely feel pointless because of the topic discussed, but more-so, because the meeting was built to produce information rather than decisions, and information without a decision attached is just a status update wearing a calendar invite. A meeting that exists because it has always existed, with no named owner for what gets decided in it, will degrade into exactly the kind of dead weight Shopify's leadership set out to eliminate, regardless of how smart or well-intentioned the people in the room are.

This is the precise distinction at the centre of Install Operating Discipline inside the BrandTruth Alignment™ System. Alan Mulally's Business Plan Review at Ford was valuable because every meeting produced specific owners, specific actions, and specific deadlines, every single week, without exception. The format itself demanded a decision; there was no version of that meeting where people simply updated each other and left. That single design choice, decisions instead of updates, is the difference between a meeting that builds momentum and one that quietly drains it.

If you want to test your own organization's meeting culture, pick your three most frequent recurring meetings and ask, honestly, what specific decision each one produced the last time it happened. If the answer for any of them is "we discussed it" rather than a named owner and a deadline, that meeting isn't broken because of who's in the room. It's broken because of what it was built to produce, which, right now, is nothing in particular.

‍Redesigning a meeting cadence so it produces real decisions instead of well-organized updates is core to the operating discipline work we help leadership teams build at Leadership In Focus.

Reach out to us at contact@leadershipinfocus.ca to talk through what that could look like for your organization.