Meeting Agenda
Providing meetings with a structured purpose
Meeting agendas can help clarify the meeting objectives. Agendas help participants to arrive prepared and ready to contribute.
As you may know, meetings consume a lot of organizational resources. Maximize the use of the team’s time by distributing an agenda in advance of your team’s meetings. Ideally, the agenda will be shared at least 24-48 hours before the meeting begins. Having a standardized meeting agenda template can reduce the amount of thinking needed in creating the agenda. Additionally, the standard will make it easy for participants to receive and review the agenda and arrive ready to contribute.
Most meeting agendas will include a list of topics, talking points, action items, and decisions to be made. The agenda should clearly outline what activities and conversations will take place during the meeting, who owns each agenda item, and how the group will use the meeting time. Common items provided on a typical meeting agenda include:
- team, committee, or project name
- logistics such as time, date, and location
- meeting objective
- meeting participants
- meeting roles (time keeper, scribe, etc.)
- discussion topics
- topic owner
- time allotted for each topic
The primary benefit of an agenda is that it can help the project team stay on track and avoid sidebars and other distractions. But other than that benefit, a good agenda can help give the meeting a clear purposes – while establishing expectations and opening the door for all meeting participants to contribute to the conversation. Another advantage to having an agenda for the meeting is that the meeting agenda template can help to capture meeting minutes and keep record of critical decisions made and action items that were assigned during the meeting. This helps to create shared accountability and ensures the meeting is action-oriented.
In this brief video we summarize the importance of creating an agenda for your meetings. This overview highlights the common components of a typical agenda along with some suggested best practices on how to use a meeting agenda to help set your team up for success.
Agendas, when shared prior to a meeting, can help clarify the meeting objectives. Helping participants to arrive prepared and ready to contribute. To obtain a copy of our meeting agenda template please complete the form below.
Download the Free "Meeting Agenda" Template (PDF)
Purchase the template to customize for your own organization
All of our tools and templates are available in Word or PowerPoint format to allow organizations to purchase and customize the templates to their brand standards.
To advance your understanding and skills around creating a purposeful agenda and using other meeting management tools to make meetings more effective, please consider participating in our Meeting Management Fundamentals certification course.
The Meeting Management Fundamentals class is perfect for individuals who are new to leadership or are looking for simple ways to improve their meeting effectiveness. The Meeting Management Fundamentals course provides a variety of meeting management tools and techniques on how to:
- Create an agenda
- Lead and facilitate a meeting
- Manage participants
- Coordinate next steps and improve future meetings
Need help implementing meeting management best practices?
Schedule a 30 minute coach call today and let’s talk through the details.
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