Why Your Team Meetings Aren’t Working (and What High-Performing Teams Do Differently)
Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore one of the most important and often overlooked elements of a high-performance team culture: the team meeting.
Whether it’s a quick huddle at the start of a festival shift or a weekly staff meeting, the meeting is the team’s playing field where goals and approaches are decided, actions identified, unity of purpose reinforced and assignments made. It’s the team’s arena. And like any great team sport, effective meetings demand preparation, structure, and execution.
The Cost of Ineffective Meetings
Recent research underscores just how critical strong meeting protocols are. According to Flowtrace (2025), only 30% of meetings are considered productive, and just 37% include a defined agenda. MyHours (2025) reports that 65% of employees feel they regularly waste time in meetings, while a Fellow.ai survey found that 71% of senior executives describe their meetings as “unproductive and inefficient.”
Time is money as the saying goes and you can imagine unproductive and inefficient team meeting costs add up. Business.com estimates that employees spend 20% of their week in meetings - a number that rises to 35% for senior leaders. Unproductive meetings cost U.S. businesses an estimated $37 billion annually, and on an individual level, as much as $25,000 per employee each year in lost productivity.
Why High Performance Team Meetings Must Be Different
Team environments require a different approach - one where meetings are vital to success, not a drain on time. Every team member must have a voice, a role, and a reason to be there. Your team meeting should be high performance.
Key Principles of High-Performance Team Meetings
Meetings are the team’s playing field. It’s where the real work happens, plays are executed, and collaboration strengthens. A common myth is that great teams are constantly working together. In reality, high-performing team members spend much of their time working independently - each accountable for their part of the whole - then return to the meeting, their playing field, to share insights, integrate ideas, and refine results. Steve Jobs and the Apple team modeled this brilliantly. Individual contributors developed and refined their work independently, then came together to challenge, combine, and elevate ideas—producing innovations like the iPod and iPhone.
Focus on outcomes, not updates. Meetings should prioritize planning, problem-solving, and decision-making - not information sharing that could have been handled by email or chat.
Balance the three dimensions: every meeting has content (the “what”), process (the “how”), and relationships (the “who”). High-performing teams manage all three intentionally.
Build accountability. Rotate meeting roles - facilitator, timekeeper, note-taker, and process observer - so every member takes responsibility for effectiveness.
Always come prepared. Distribute an agenda in advance, include timeframes, presenters, and desired outcomes for each item.
End with clear action. Every meeting should produce an updated action list with owners (“who wants to take the lead on this one") and due dates (“And by when can we expect a first draft on that”).
Evaluate effectiveness. Each meeting should close with a brief reflection on what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve next time.
Design for inclusion. Arrange seating - or virtual screens - so everyone participates equally. No one sits “on the fringe.”
Maintain boundaries. Management attends as guests, not as drivers of discussion, unless serving as the team’s coach.
Keep structure consistent. Whether it’s a regular, sub-team, or project meeting, use the same format to build confidence and predictability across teams.
Direct Application
Before your next few team meetings, take a mental assessment:
Did the meeting start on time?
Did it focus on planning, problem-solving, and decision-making?
Was a time-bound agenda shared in advance with clear outcomes ?
Could this meeting have been an email instead?
