Why are meetings so stoopid?

The Meeting Will Continue Until Morale Improves. We've all been there — the meeting that could have been an email, the 90-minute "alignment call" that aligned precisely nothing, and the induction session that somehow ended in a group sing-along to Lifted by the Lighthouse Family. Yes, really. In this episode, Rakhee and Heather take a long, hard (and deeply cathartic) look at the workplace meeting — why so many of them are pointless, what they're actually costing businesses, and why the people most addicted to them are often the ones least qualified to run them. They dig into the data from a 2024 German four-day week pilot — where meetings dropped by 60% — and ask why it takes losing a fifth of your working week before anyone questions whether a recurring Tuesday stand-up is actually achieving anything. Spoiler: it isn't. Along the way, there's a corporate rebrand song with a key change, a 30-person pitch meeting that devolved into the Eurovision Song Contest, and some genuinely useful research on why large meetings make everyone less accountable and more exhausted. Plus: what Amazon, Shopify, and GitLab are doing differently — and why calendar bankruptcy might be the workplace reset we all deserve. Stats that will make you want to delete your entire diary: Executives spend up to 80% of their time in meetings 72% of meetings are considered ineffective The UK economy loses an estimated £50 billion a year to poorly run meetings If you've ever sat in a meeting wondering why you're there, this one's for you. If you've enjoyed the series so far and would like to support more episodes, please show us some love and support our production costs at BuyMeACoffee: Brenda You're on Mute