What do you want from the formal meeting?
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You’ve been told you need to come to a meeting about misconduct or performance. These meetings are all about the employer, but you play a role, and how you play that role depends on what you want.
Keep your job? keep doing this work?
There’s the first question, and it’s a bit loaded, because you can’t have it both ways. Do you want to keep your job? Is this your plan for the next two years? This is important, and is very apparent in performance, so let’s talk about that specifically, but it applies conduct as well.
Often in performance situations, the employee doesn’t like the job or want to do the job, but can’t go without the paycheck. So they are essentially ‘phoning it in’-but not really getting away with it. It’s not the job they would like, but it the best they can get and they resent that.
Anyone in the meeting committed to keeping the paycheck (but not the job) is going to struggle; you need to think about the work- are you committed to keeping the work? Sure, the economy may be bad and you may struggle to get another job, so if you need to stay and keep your work; trying to keep the pay but avoid the work isn’t a successful strategy.
Can you see this working?
If so, how? Working relationships go sour, and often spiral into toxicity (see here). This may not be your fault, but it’s not going to change without you playing some part. You’re sitting the meeting, addressing a problem bad enough for them (in their eyes) to call this meeting.
If you want to keep your job, you need to have a working relationship with your boss. At some stage you got on reasonably with them (or potentially your co-worker if its a co-worker friction problem), so you need to get back to that stage. Part of this meeting needs to be your offering some olive branch to get back to that stage.
Get money?
Maybe you can see the writing on the wall. They didn’t go to this expense of bringing in a lawyer to not get rid of you (see here for specifics on this). Or you just don’t see yourself staying, (which is a perfectly reasonable option), and you’re prepared to go, but some financial assistance would be very helpful. In this case, you’re looking for errors on their part (see here and here).
Stand up for yourself?
This is tricky, because it’s what you want right now, but what effect will that have. You still need to think about the other questions above. Everyone does what they do for a reason, and you have good reasons for doing what you did/do, and this meeting is unfair. It is not unreasonable to stand up for youself, and you have every reason to do this (see here and here for options) but this may be a short-term view, and you need to keep your eye on the long-term as well. If you want to stay, by all means fight your corner and explain your reasons, but remember you also need to be part of the solution to get back to that working relationship.
