The Hidden Cost of Meetings: How They Erode Organisational Culture and Productivity
Throughout my corporate career, there’s one frustration I heard more than any other:
“I spend all day in meetings and never get any real work done.”
It’s hardly a new complaint. Decades of research, employee surveys, and leadership programs have highlighted the issue—and yet most organisations still struggle to solve it.
But here’s the thing: cutting meetings entirely often isn’t realistic. Leaders want alignment. Team members want to feel included. Collaboration matters. So the solution isn’t simply less meetings.
The real lever is when those meetings are scheduled.
Because when they consistently collide with people’s peak deep work hours, employees don’t just feel busy—they feel robbed of their best thinking time. And that perception is what makes the workday feel overrun.
Meetings at the Wrong Time Cost More Than Time
I vividly remember leaders who blocked out back-to-back meetings from 9:00am to 12:30pm—prime hours for focus and deep work.
Research into chronobiology (the science of energy cycles) shows that most professionals are at their sharpest in the mid-morning. That’s when they’re best equipped to solve complex problems, think strategically, and produce high-quality work.
And yet, throughout my career, those hours were consumed by meetings. Many of them necessary, yes—but better suited to the afternoon, when collaboration can provide energy rather than drain it.
As part of the executive leadership team, we often debated how to balance inclusion (“everyone wants a seat at the table”) with efficiency (“we need fewer meetings”). Meeting-free days were floated as a solution.
But rarely did we consider the simplest shift of all: protecting deep work hours, and moving meetings into times when energy naturally dips.
That’s when it clicked for me—meetings weren’t the whole problem. The timing of them was.
I can remember the resentment I felt when my morning was swallowed by back-to-backs. Not because of the content, but because I knew the work requiring my full concentration would now be pushed into the late afternoon—when my energy was at its lowest.
That frustration often led me to multitask (checking emails, scanning messages, trying to “make up time”), which meant my contribution to the meeting suffered, my engagement dropped, and my energy drained further.
The result wasn’t just lower productivity. It was disengagement.
The Cultural Signal Meetings Send
Every time meetings are scheduled during peak productivity hours, we send unspoken messages:
Time in meetings is more important than producing outcomes.
Reactive work matters more than proactive thinking.
Your energy is less important than my schedule.
Over time, those signals wear people down. They feel they have little control over their day. Their frustration grows. And ironically, the very purpose of meetings—engagement, alignment, collaboration—gets lost when participants show up distracted and resentful.
What Leaders Can Do
The answer isn’t always fewer meetings. In fact, reducing them too much can leave people feeling excluded or disconnected.
The real opportunity is to re-time meetings in ways that respect human energy patterns.
Start by asking:
👉 When are my team’s natural high-energy hours?
👉 How can we protect those for deep work?
👉 How do we shift meetings into times that lift, rather than drain, energy?
Leaders who do this see a double win: engagement improves (because people don’t feel meetings rob them of focus), and productivity rises (because energy is spent where it counts).
So the question isn’t “How many meetings should we have?”
It’s: “When should we hold them to get the best from our people?”
Because meetings aren’t going away. But with conscious timing, they can shift from a daily drain to a real strategic advantage.
I work with teams and individuals in setting up their blueprint, to help drive productivity and ensure they are getting the most out of their day, through leveraging their capacity.
Contact me to set up some time to discuss further.
