how to prepare a business meeting

How to Prepare for a Meeting: Step by Step (With Examples)

It’s a good idea to make sure that all bases are covered if you’re planning a meeting ahead of time, so that you know it’ll go smoothly.

But there’s plenty more to do than just getting your slides and talking points ready while you’re in preparation for the meeting.

From working out a clear structure to getting your team prepped and ready, there’s a lot to consider.

Let us walk you step-by-step through the meeting preparation process that works for us at Slido and share some of the best practices that were game-changing for us.

1. Set purpose and goals

First, define the meeting purpose, or the ‘ Why ’ behind your meeting. Why are you meeting? Is it to brainstorm? Is it to have a discussion or plan the next steps? If you set one clear objective, it’ll be much easier for you to design an agenda for your meeting.

Second, specify the main goal, or the ‘ What ’ of the meeting. What should come out of the meeting? What is the main deliverable? Set a tangible meeting outcome and stick to it. If it’s to make a decision about X, don’t leave the meeting without seeing it through.

These will be the guideposts that will help you set the right expectations and steer the meeting in the right direction.

2. Create & share an agenda

Now that you’ve set your meeting objectives and goals, it’s time to create a bulletproof agenda.

A meeting agenda is an outline of all the activities and discussion points to cover during a meeting in order to reach the meeting goal/s. In short, a structure that your meeting will follow.

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all meeting agenda template, there are several best practices to keep in mind when designing an agenda for a) recurring and b) one-time/first-time meetings.

Recurring meetings

With meetings that you run regularly – e.g. team syncs – it is tempting to think there’s no need for an agenda. Your colleagues already know the format, so what’s there to design? Well, there are still things to consider.

The main keyword here is simplicity . A simple agenda goes a long way and will hold your meeting together like a skeleton. All you need is a list of action points to go through.

Write down the main discussion points that you want to touch on during the meeting. You can even assign owners that will drive the discussion around each point.

Here’s an example from one of our meetings:

💡 Don’t forget to share the agenda with your team members ahead of the meeting (1-3 days) via your internal comms channels, such as Slack, Webex, or Microsoft Teams.

One-time meetings/First-time meetings

With new meetings for which you don’t have an already established format, you need to go deeper. In these instances, you need to design the whole meeting agenda from scratch.

The main keyword here is alignment . Given that your team members don’t know the format, it’s crucial to:

• Communicate clearly the purpose, expectations and goals of the meeting
• Describe the structure and length
• Explain what needs to be prepared and what the responsibilities of each member are
• Crowdsource any questions or discussion points in advance of the meeting

If there are multiple speakers who will present at the meeting, align with them prior to the meeting. Set a time frame for each of the meeting sections. Be as specific as possible.

Get inspired by our first-ever ‘Cross-team alignment’ meeting, for which we set a very bold objective — to bring together 3 teams (20+ people) and get them aligned .

A lot also depends on the size of the meeting. If you’re preparing an all-company meeting, there’s a whole different strategy to employ. Read more about how to design an all-hands meeting agenda here .

3. Send out meeting invites

Send meeting invites to everyone involved in the meeting at least two weeks in advance so your colleagues have enough time to work it into their schedules.

Add all the important details in the meeting invite description. Share the meeting goals and the agenda (regardless of whether you already shared it or plan to share it later – make it available in the invite as well).

In case you’re meeting online or in a hybrid setup , also include the link to the video conference call so that nobody can miss it, and can easily access it via their calendars.

Here’s an example of a meeting invite for our summer brainstorming session:

💡 For even better invites, add links to Slido so you can start collecting people’s input , like questions or ideas before the meeting. Learn more in the next point.

4. Collect questions and ideas from your team

Gathering input from the team members before the meeting works well with some meeting formats.

Brainstorming & planning

For example, if you’re having a brainstorming session or a planning meeting, start collecting your team members’ ideas beforehand. Attach a link to Slido to the meeting agenda or to the meeting invite and ask your colleagues to type their ideas into the app.

This gives your colleagues a safe space for submitting their ideas and levels the playing field – everyone can contribute equally , even the ones who fear speaking up in the meeting. They can even do so anonymously if they wish.

Plus, it’s more efficient than brainstorming during the meeting. It allows you to review all the submissions before the meeting and then spend the meeting time discussing and prioritizing.

In preparation for our meetings at Slido we use this technique a lot:

Retrospective meetings

A team retrospective is another meeting type where you can benefit greatly from collecting insights beforehand.

Send a stop-start-continue survey for your participants to fill out in advance.

Go through people’s submissions and look for patterns, items mentioned repeatedly, or any other important feedback. This way, you can identify the most burning issues which you can then use to create an agenda, and drive discussions during the meeting.

Create your own poll or survey in Slido and hear from everyone. Sign up below and try it for yourself.

Sign up for free

All company meetings/All team meetings

Larger meetings such as all-hands, town halls, or strategic team meetings provide an opportunity to address questions or concerns that your team members might have. Give your team a chance to post their questions into Slido even before the meeting.

You can then address them during the meeting – either in a dedicated Q&A session , or address them continuously throughout.

We start collecting questions from our employees about a week before every company all-hands meeting .

This way, our executive team has time to prepare their answers and our colleagues have a chance to go through the submitted questions and upvote the ones they identify with. We also give our colleagues a chance to ask anonymously which means our leadership gets more honest questions.

You can find more tips and ideas for all-hands meetings at our all-hands hub .

Read also: How to Host More Effective Meetings by Collecting Input in Advance

5. Distribute supporting materials

If there’s material that you want your meeting participants to review before the meeting, or if there’s something that you want your team to prepare, communicate it well in advance. You may, for instance, add it as an attachment to your meeting invite or share it in your internal comms channel.

It’s good for getting everyone aligned and familiar with the forthcoming discussion.

However, it’s good practice to clarify expectations and make a clear distinction between what’s a must  and what’s nice to have . Perhaps not everyone needs to read through a 50-slides-long presentation. Sometimes, it’s enough to get a gist of what will be discussed.

6. Prepare your slides

Getting the slide deck ready is a drill you surely know very well, but here are a few tips that can make your life a little easier.

• Apply a minimalistic approach to your slides. Keep them simple – one idea/one number/one sentence per slide. People don’t want to read huge bodies of text on slides. Plus, it’s more visually appealing.
• Use the ‘Rule of three’ method – three bullet points, three columns, etc. It’s easier for people to process
• Cut the number of slides too. Spend the meeting time on a fruitful discussion rather than going through an 80-slides-long presentation.
• Use visuals like images, graphs, tables, etc. Preferable to making people read, apply the ‘show & tell’ approach – show something visual and describe what people are looking at.
• If there will be multiple presenters at your meeting, have one master deck. Share it with all the contributors before the meeting and ask them to add their slides there. It’s much smoother than switching presentation decks.
• As you prepare slides for your meeting, think of all the points of interaction with your meeting participants (see the next point). For instance, you can insert live polls directly into your slide deck with Slido for Google Slides and Slido for PowerPoint .

7. Create opportunities for interaction

When designing a meeting, create multiple ‘ interaction points ’ – the spots on the agenda where you purposefully create a space for your meeting participants to actively contribute.

This is important for creating meaningful engagement throughout your meeting. If you let your participants sit passively through the meeting, you will eventually lose their attention.

Forbes reports that the average person loses focus within 10 minutes.

If, on the other hand, you give them space to be actively involved in the meeting, you will engage them.

So, how do you create these interaction points?

Go through your meeting agenda and think about at which point it would make sense to hear from your participants.

For example, after you’ve brainstormed some ideas for projects, ask your teammates: “Which of these projects do you think we should prioritize in the next quarter?”

Turn it into an interactive poll . Add your project ideas as options in a multiple choice or a ranking poll and let your teammates vote.

It’s a way to make your meetings more democratic – you’ll give everyone a voice – and engaging – you’ll involve everyone in co-creating the meeting and influencing its outcomes.

Learn more about how to create interaction spots in your presentation here .

💡 You can add a Slido poll, quiz, or Q&A directly into your slide deck with Slido’s integration with PowerPoint and Google Slides – it will be added as a separate interactive slide. You can manage every interaction as you click through the slides.

8. Prepare the opening

How you kick off the meeting may lay the foundations for the rest of the meeting, so leave nothing to chance and make sure to prepare your opening well.

Welcome everyone; if your meeting includes remote participants, give them a special greeting to make them feel included from the start.

To loosen people up, prepare a little icebreaker, using our selection of icebreaker questions , or, if you need a quick interactive activity that will get people talking, fire up a fun poll question .

For example, check the mood in the room and ask your colleagues how they feel in a word cloud poll . You can even let them express their feelings in emojis.

Use the poll results to trigger a small chit-chat at the start – it’s good to start the meeting with a bit of socializing, and make sure to ask open-ended questions if you want to get people really talking.

Once you kick off the official part, provide a quick context for why you’re meeting up today and briefly run people through the agenda once again.

9. Set up the meeting

Lastly, make sure you have the meeting room arrangements figured out – whether you’re meeting in an actual room or in a virtual one.

Meeting room: Face-to-face meeting

• Book a meeting room and add the room number in the meeting invite or write it in your team’s internal comms channel so everyone knows where it is you’ll be meeting.
• Consider the number of participants;  make sure everyone will have a place to sit. Arrange some extra chairs just to be safe – more is better than less.
• Make sure the seating doesn’t favor anyone – everyone should feel equal and able to contribute. Ensure everyone can hear each other well. If it’s a large meeting, ensure there’s a microphone at people’s disposal.
• Arrange for refreshments; at least supply water, so people don’t need to leave the room to get a drink.

Meeting room: Hybrid meeting

• Book a room with a large screen and a tech setup that allows for a conference call with good audio and video.
• Good audio is key . Make sure that all participants – both on-site and remote – can see and hear each other well. If your online colleagues can’t hear what’s happening in the room, they’ll have trouble joining the discussion. Ensure all your meeting rooms are equipped with quality external speakers.
• Have microphones available in the meeting room to make sure everybody online can hear their on-site colleagues if they speak up. This is important especially for meetings with a larger number of participants.
• Check if people online can hear you well . Everybody has to hear everything – and feel like they’re heard.

Online room: Fully remote meeting

• Make sure everyone has easy access to the video conferencing link where the meeting will happen. Share the link in your team’s internal comms channel or in a calendar invite (see point #3).
• Send a meeting reminder via your team’s internal comms channel some 5 minutes before the meeting.
• Start the video conference a couple of minutes early , to avoid any delays. Test the audio and troubleshoot any potential tech issues.
• Ensure every participant can hear you well as people start joining the call. You can do a little ‘thumbs up’ check – just ask your participants to put their thumbs up if they hear you well.
• Encourage people to turn on their cameras so your meeting feels more personal.

Ready to kick off your meeting?

The quality of pre-meeting preparation can make or break your meeting. You can never be over-prepared. But fail to prepare at your own peril.

With the tips that we’ve shared above, you will be 9 steps closer to a stellar meeting . We wish you good luck.

And in the meantime, go ahead and try Slido for free. Start by adding one or two polls to your meeting presentation to keep your team members actively engaged . You can always add more later.

Here’s to better meetings! 🥂

Try Slido at your meeting

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What is an effective meeting?

“This meeting should have been an email.” Emblazoned on coffee mugs, endless memes, and your colleagues’ faces on their ninth video call of the day, this sentence may end up being a catchphrase of the modern era.

As the pandemic rewrote the rule book for coworking and office culture, new processes and untested systems allowed inefficiencies to creep in —inefficiencies that included meetings scheduled for the sake of unstructured discussion or even basic human interaction rather than for productivity. While interacting might be easier than ever, value-creating collaboration isn’t—and its quality seems to be deteriorating .

Effective meetings aren’t just about keeping ourselves from going around the bend. When meetings aren’t run well—or when there are too many of them— decision  making becomes slower and the quality of decisions suffers. According to one McKinsey survey , 61 percent of executives said that at least half the time they spent making decisions—much of it surely spent in meetings—was ineffective. Just 37 percent of respondents said their organizations’ decisions were both timely and high quality. And, in a different survey , 80 percent of executives were considering or already implementing changes in meeting structure and cadence in response to the evolution of how people worked during the pandemic.

What’s more, when leaders try to solve for inefficient decision making, they too often look to organizational charts and vertical-command relationships. Rarely, in McKinsey’s experience, do they see the real issue at hand: poor design and execution of collaborative interactions. In other words, you guessed it, ineffective meetings.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When meetings are run well, they not only foster better decisions but also leave attendees feeling energized and motivated to carry the momentum forward independently. For tips on how to put a stop to video call fatigue and restart your team’s productivity, read on.

Learn more about McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice .

What does time management have to do with effective meetings?

“The only thing on Earth that never lies to you is your calendar ,” says renowned business author and McKinsey alum Tom Peters. “That’s why I’m a fanatic on the topic of time management. But when you use that term, people think, ‘Here’s an adult with a brain. And he’s teaching time management. Find something more important, please.’ But something more important doesn’t exist.”

Endless, diffuse meetings, according to Peters, take up far too much of executives’ precious working time. Half of leaders’ time, he says, citing an idea from the Israeli executive Dov Frohman, should be unscheduled. What should they do with all that unstructured time? One typically cheeky suggestion from Peters is to read more.

The reality is that effective meetings and good time management exist in a virtuous circle. Good time management means you feel empowered to turn down unnecessary meetings—and better meetings mean you spend the rest of your time feeling more purposeful in carrying out your work.

How can leaders address the problem of time scarcity?

McKinsey’s experience shows that leaders may want to stop thinking about time management as primarily an individual problem and start addressing it institutionally. Increasingly, time management is an organizational issue with roots deeply embedded in corporate cultures.

Unsurprisingly, the solution seems to be balance. Executives in one McKinsey survey  who reported being satisfied with the way their time is allocated spent 34 percent of their working time interacting with external stakeholders (including boards, customers, and investors), 39 percent in internal meetings (including one-on-ones with direct reports, leadership team meetings, and other employee gatherings), and 24 percent working alone.

Here are five ways to achieve optimal balance in allocating time :

• Have a ‘time leadership’ budget—and a process for allocating it. When adding a project or initiative, companies should analyze how much leadership attention, guidance, and intervention each will need. In our experience, this is the best way to move toward the goal of treating leaders’ time as a finite resource—one that is as precious as a company’s financial capital.
• Consider time when you introduce organizational change. Understanding the time required to achieve goals is critical to the long-term success of any organizational change. The hours needed to manage, lead, or supervise an employee can leave managers with little time left over. Getting this balance right can be tough—having too few managers could lead them to feel overwhelmed, with more direct reports than they can manage. But having too many managers can cause redundancies and unnecessary complexity.
• Ensure that individuals routinely measure and manage their time. Time analysis exercises can yield surprising results—and can inspire time management that more closely aligns with organizational priorities. Including time-related metrics in performance reviews is another driver of behavioral change.
• Refine the principal calendar. Revisit all standing meetings and make an honest assessment of which ones are being held out of habit and which ones are genuinely useful.
• Provide high-quality administrative support. In a survey of executives on how they allocate their time , 85 percent of those who considered themselves effective time managers reported that they received strong support in scheduling and allocating time. Only 7 percent of ineffective time allocators said the same. In the case of one global chemical company, the administrative assistant of the CEO considers it her responsibility to ensure that the organization’s strategic objectives are reflected in the way she allocates the CEO’s time.

Learn more about McKinsey’s  People & Organizational Performance Practice .

What are three questions you should ask yourself before scheduling a meeting?

Good meetings nurture better decision making . On the flip side, inefficient meetings not only waste time but also create distraction and confusion even when people are working independently. Here are three questions you can ask when scheduling a meeting  that can help create the clarity needed for efficient decision making.

Should this even be a meeting at all? Recurring meetings are particularly susceptible to migration from the original purpose toward something more diffuse. Check in with stakeholders to ensure that the frequency is right (weekly meetings could be changed to monthly, perhaps), or think about whether decisions could be best made by an individual—with, of course, guidance from others.

Then go deeper. Examine whether your company’s culture is to encourage meetings rather than individual decision making. To remedy this, if you’re a leader, think twice before reflexively accepting any meeting invitation as it appears in your inbox. The goal should be to treat leadership capacity as a finite resource— just like your company’s financial capital .

What is this meeting for? A meeting’s title and its purpose are not the same. When the latter isn’t clear, meetings can seem frustrating at best and futile at worst. To help avoid this, companies can appoint a “chief of staff” for certain efforts or products. This person collates materials before meetings, ensures that they are distributed ahead of time, and verifies that the due diligence has been done to necessitate a meeting in the first place. This can lead to better-informed participants, which in turn can lead to more effective time spent in meetings—and, ultimately, better decisions.

What is everyone’s role? Even if a meeting has a clear purpose, it’s of little use if there is no one present deputized to make a decision . Equally, even if it’s clear who the decider is, it’s a mistake to hold a meeting when people are unsure of participants’ roles. McKinsey analysts have seen poor role clarity stymie productivity and cause frustration, especially when decisions involve complicated business activities that cut across organizational boundaries. Blurry accountability is especially costly in an era where speed and agility confer a competitive advantage .

Meeting participants can be divided into four roles:

• Decision makers should be the only participants with a vote, and the ones with the responsibility to decide as they see fit. Sometimes decision makers will need to “disagree and commit,” to use a phrase coined by Jeff Bezos in a 2017 letter to Amazon shareholders.
• Advisers give input and shape the decision. They typically have a big stake in the decision’s outcome.
• Recommenders conduct analyses, explore alternatives, illuminate pros and cons, and ultimately recommend a course of action to the advisers and decision makers. The more recommenders the better—for the process, not the decision meeting itself.
• Execution partners don’t give input in making the decision but are deeply involved in implementation. For optimal speed and clarity, execution partners should be in the room when the decision is made so that they can envision how the implementation will evolve from the decision.

OK, I’ve eliminated all unnecessary meetings and assigned specific purposes to each one. Now what?

Great work. Now you can assign each meeting to one of the following three categories , and make specific shifts to improve the outcomes.

• Decision-making meetings. This category includes routine decisions, like quarterly business reviews, as well as complex or uncertain decisions, like decisions about investments. In order to make high-quality decisions quickly, it’s critical to clarify exactly who is going to make them. Some of these meetings can be held virtually, but complex decision-making meetings are better in person. These meetings should result in a final decision (even if not everyone agrees).
• Creative solutions and coordination meetings. These include innovation sessions—for instance, in support of a new product—as well as routine working sessions, like daily check-ins. Rather than telling people what to do, leaders should work to empower employees to make their own (supported) decisions and to spend more time on high-quality coaching sessions. As with decision-making meetings, creative solutions and coordinating meetings can be virtual—but most innovation sessions should be in person. Innovation sessions should result in potential solutions and prepare for a decision meeting, whereas routine working meetings can result in next steps.
• Information-sharing meetings. Live interaction can be useful for information sharing, especially when an interpretive lens is required or if the information is sensitive. But information-sharing meetings are often regarded as having limited value. Many organizations have recently moved to drastically improve meeting efficiency. Netflix, for example, has limited the duration of meetings to a maximum of 30 minutes  and requires that meetings involving one-way information sharing be canceled in favor of other mechanisms like a memo, podcast, or vlog. Early data from Netflix shows that the company has reduced meetings by more than 65 percent and that more than 85 percent of employees favor the approach. The goal of these meetings should be to increase awareness of the new information shared in the meeting.

What are some best practices for video meetings?

Establishing best practices for meetings might seem like common sense—but they are not commonly practiced. Here are some helpful tips from Karin M. Reed , author of the 2021 book Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work :

• Time: The most effective meetings are short meetings. Rather than scheduling a two-hour call with ten agenda items, cut it down to a 20-minute meeting with two agenda items. There are limits to people’s endurance and attention spans in the virtual environment.
• Participants: When determining the number of attendees for decision-making meetings, the sweet spot is five to seven. More than seven attendees in any meeting can result in an unwieldy discussion.
• Appearance: Pay attention to your appearance when hosting a videoconference. It’s not a matter of vanity—it shows respect for your conversation partner and can help you get your message across. Light your face properly: facial expressions are critical to conveying a message. And anything that takes attention away from you, whether it’s a crackly audio connection or a silly picture of Uncle Rupert in the background, will distract from your message.
• Eye contact: Look at your camera lens when you’re talking, not at your screen. This goes against our natural impulses, but eye contact is critical when you’re having a conversation. And to maintain eye contact on a video call, you need to look at your camera.
• Inclusion: Leaders should engage in proactive facilitation to ensure that everyone has the chance to say their piece. Cold calling on people—gently, and with good intention—lets people know that it’s their time to speak. Even if someone doesn’t have anything to add, they will have felt included.

For more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice . Also check out organizational structure–related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? ,” January 10, 2022, Aaron De Smet , Caitlin Hewes, Mengwei Luo, J. R. Maxwell , and Patrick Simon  
• “ Author Talks: Karin M. Reed on virtual meetings ,” April 20, 2021
• “ To unlock better decision making, plan better meetings ,” November 9, 2020, Aaron De Smet  and Leigh Weiss
• “ Want a better decision? Plan a better meeting ,” McKinsey Quarterly , May 8, 2019, Aaron De Smet , Gregor Jost , and Leigh Weiss  
• “ Tom Peters on leading the 21st-century organization ,” McKinsey Quarterly , September 1, 2014, Aaron De Smet  and Suzanne Heywood
• “ Making time management the organization’s priority ,” McKinsey Quarterly , January 1, 2013, Frankki Bevins  and Aaron De Smet

Want to know more about effective meetings?

Related articles.

If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?

To unlock better decision making, plan better meetings

Author Talks: Karin M. Reed on virtual meetings

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Meeting agenda examples: How to plan, write, and implement

Your agenda tells your team what to expect during a meeting and how they can prepare for it. Ideally, you’ll use your agenda to connect your team with the meeting’s purpose, assign tasks or items to team members, and designate a realistic amount of time to each agenda item. A great meeting agenda maximizes the meeting’s effectiveness and keeps your team on track.

An effective agenda communicates the purpose of your meeting, gives your team the chance to prepare their agenda items, and keeps everyone on track.

Whether you’re preparing for your next board meeting, staff meeting, or business meeting, we’ll help you write an agenda that will maximize your meeting’s potential.

What is a meeting agenda?

A meeting agenda serves as a structured roadmap for your meeting, detailing the topics and activities planned. Its primary role is to provide meeting participants with a clear framework, outlining the sequence of events, the leader for each agenda item, and the time allocated for each task. By having this agenda as a guide both before and throughout the meeting, it helps to facilitate an efficient and productive flow of discussion.

How to write a meeting agenda

Crafting a meeting agenda is a key step in ensuring a focused and productive meeting. Here's how to do it effectively.

1. Clarify meeting objectives

The first step in writing a meeting agenda is to clearly define any goals. In clarifying the goal, be as specific as possible. This specificity helps guide the discussion and ensure that the meeting remains focused. It also helps stakeholders prepare for the meeting.

For example, if the goal is to finalize the budget for the next quarter or discuss new business, participants would come prepared with relevant data and insights.

A well-defined goal also helps set the meeting's tone and align everyone's expectations. This clarity leads to a more structured discussion and a more productive meeting overall.

2. Invite participant input

Inviting input from participants before finalizing the agenda is a critical step in creating a comprehensive and inclusive meeting plan. This involves reaching out to potential attendees and asking if there's anything specific they would like to discuss or add to the meeting agenda.

For example, if you're planning a meeting for a project team, you could send an email asking each member to suggest topics they feel are important to address. This could reveal issues or ideas you hadn't considered, ensuring a more well-rounded agenda.

Incorporating participant input not only makes the agenda more comprehensive but also increases engagement. When team members see their suggestions included, they feel valued and are more likely to participate actively in the meeting. It also ensures that the meeting addresses the concerns of all attendees.

Gathering input can be done through various channels, like email, shared docs, or team collaboration tools. The key is to make it easy for meeting participants to contribute and to ensure their suggestions are considered and, where appropriate, included in the final agenda.

3. Outline key questions for discussion

Making a list of important things to talk about is important for keeping the meeting on track and focused. Start by identifying the main meeting topics that need to be addressed and framing them as questions.

For instance, if the meeting is to discuss the progress of an ongoing project, key questions might include:

What are the current roadblocks in the project?

How are we tracking against the project timeline

What resources are needed to maintain the pace of work?

These questions serve as talking points and a guide for the discussion, ensuring that all relevant topics are covered. They also help in structuring the conversation, making it easier for participants to prepare and engage effectively.

4. Define each task’s purpose

Each task or topic on the agenda should have a clearly defined purpose. This transparency helps participants understand the importance of each discussion point and how it relates to the overall goal of the meeting.

For example, if one of the agenda items is to review recent client feedback and performance metrics, the purpose might be to identify areas for improvement in customer service. By stating this purpose, participants can focus their thoughts on this specific objective, leading to a more targeted and fruitful discussion.

Defining the purpose of each task also helps prevent the meeting from going off track. When participants understand why a topic is being discussed, they are less likely to veer off-topic, making the meeting more efficient.

5. Allocate time for agenda items

Effective meeting management requires allotting time for each item on the agenda. This includes determining the amount of time needed for each meeting topic or task and scheduling the meeting appropriately.

For instance, if you have five items on your agenda, you might allocate 10 minutes for a brief update, 20 minutes for brainstorming, and 15 minutes for discussing action items. This time allocation should be based on the complexity and importance of each topic.

Effective time management requires being realistic with your time estimates and factoring in extra time for unforeseen conversations or inquiries. This approach helps in keeping the meeting within the scheduled time frame, respecting everyone's time, and maintaining focus.

6. Assign topic facilitators

Assigning facilitators for each topic on the agenda can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the meeting. A facilitator’s role is to guide the discussion, make certain that the conversation stays on track, and that all voices are heard.

For example, if one of the agenda items is to discuss sales strategies, you might assign this topic to a senior salesperson. Their expertise and familiarity with the subject can help steer the conversation productively.

Facilitators should be chosen based on their knowledge of the topic and their ability to manage group discussions. They should also be briefed on their role and the expectations for the discussion.

7. Write the meeting agenda

Finally, compile all the elements into a structured and comprehensive agenda. The agenda should include the meeting’s goal, a list of topics to be discussed with their purposes, time allocations, and assigned facilitators. This structure provides a clear roadmap for the meeting, ensuring that all important points are covered.

Share the agenda with all participants well in advance of the meeting. This allows them to prepare and ensures that everyone is on the same page. A well-written agenda is a key tool in running an effective and productive meeting.

Tips to create an effective meeting agenda

Let’s start with some of our favorite tips on creating great meeting agendas so you can make the most of yours:

Create and share your meeting agenda as early as possible. At the very latest, you should share your meeting agenda an hour before the meeting time. This allows everyone to prepare for what’s going to happen. Your team can also relay questions or additional agenda items to you for a potential adjustment before the meeting. Besides, when your team members have a chance to properly prepare themselves, they’ll have a much easier time focusing during the meeting.

Link to any relevant pre-reading materials in advance. This can be the presentation deck, additional context, or a previous decision. Everyone arriving at the meeting will be on the same page and ready to move the discussion forward rather than asking a ton of questions that take up relevant time.

Assign facilitators for each agenda item. Remember that feeling of being called on in school when you didn’t know the answer? It’s a pretty terrible feeling that we’re sure you don’t want to evoke in your teammates. By assigning a facilitator for each agenda item before the meeting, you allow them to prepare for a quick rundown of the topic, questions, and feedback.

Define and prioritize your agenda items. Differentiate between the three categories of agenda items: informational, discussion topics, and action items. Clarifying the purpose of each agenda item helps your team member understand what’s most important and what to focus on. You’ll also want to prioritize which items are most important and absolutely have to be discussed during the meeting and which ones can be addressed asynchronously, should the clock run out.

Use your meeting agenda during the meeting to track notes and action items. That way, all of the meeting information is in one place. If anyone has questions about decisions or action items from the meeting, they have an easy place to find it. Bonus: Do this in Asana so you can assign out action items and next steps to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Asana also integrates with Zoom and pulls in your Zoom recording or meeting transcript directly into the meeting agenda task.

Create flow by categorizing your agenda items. To maximize productivity, you’ll want to create a meeting agenda that flows well. Batch similar items together and ensure they can build off of one another. For example, list any informational items before the discussion items so your team has all of the information going into the discussion.

Allocate enough time for each item on your agenda. Nobody will complain about a meeting that runs short—keeping everyone longer than anticipated isn’t as much fun. Plan sufficient time for each agenda item by calculating an estimated time and adding a couple of minutes as a buffer. This will help with keeping your team on track and moving on from a topic when the time runs out.

By sticking to these best practices, you can ensure that your meeting agenda is a reliable tool and does the job—before, during, and after your meeting.

Why are meeting agendas important?

Whether you work from home and take virtual calls or sit in the office and meet in person, meetings can be incredibly draining. Beginning with some small talk may be nice to get to know each other better or catch up on what everyone did this past weekend but it certainly isn’t goal-oriented or productive. A meeting agenda can help your team maximize the potential of each meeting you hold.

Our research shows that unnecessary meetings accounted for 157 hours of “work” in 2020, compared to 103 in 2019. Considering a 40-hour work week, that’s almost four weeks of wasted time. This is where your meeting agenda comes in. If you’re doing it right, writing your meeting agenda is the first and best indicator of whether or not your meeting is actually necessary. If you find that everything on your meeting agenda can be discussed asynchronously , you can cancel the meeting and share your message in a time-saving email.

That isn’t to say all meetings should be replaced by emails. If you’re sure that the meeting is justified and necessary in order to drive your team’s progress, have that meeting. However, always make sure that you create an agenda before getting together so your team members know what you’ll be discussing and why the meeting matters.

Here are a few more great reasons to have meeting agendas:

Your agenda allows everyone to prepare for the meeting. Ideally, every item on your agenda will have a dedicated topic facilitator. When everyone going into the meeting knows what their responsibilities are in advance, they have time to prepare and will be more efficient during the meeting.

It shows you’re considerate of your team’s time. When your team receives a well-thought-out meeting agenda, they’ll immediately see that the meeting is actually necessary. Besides, it’s also a roadmap that will keep you on track during the meeting and ensure no time is wasted.

An agenda sets clear expectations of what will and won’t be discussed. Think of a meeting agenda as a way of setting boundaries and ensuring that only topics on the agenda will be talked about. If anything comes up during the meeting that needs to be discussed, write it down in your minutes and return to it later. Either at the end of your meeting—if you got through it faster than expected—asynchronously, or in the next meeting.

It keeps your team on track. Your meeting agenda will prevent your team from drifting off—whether that’s discussing non-agenda topics (like the barbecue at Kat’s place last night) or taking too much time for an item that had specific time allocated.

Your agenda will provide purpose, structure, and opportunities to collaborate. With a clear plan for everyone to follow, your team will go into the meeting knowing the purpose and goal of the meeting. Your meeting agenda also allows your team to direct their attention toward opportunities to collaborate, whether that’s during a brainstorming session , a town hall, or your daily standup.

Track next steps and action items so nothing falls through the cracks. Keep your agenda open during the meeting to capture any next steps or action items . By adding them directly into the agenda, these items won’t be forgotten when the meeting ends.

Meetings are great opportunities for your team to bond but the time spent on small talk can be worked into the first few minutes of the agenda rather than surfacing every now and then during the meeting, disrupting the flow and productivity or your team’s discussion.

Meeting agenda examples

We’ve discussed what makes a good meeting agenda and what you should avoid doing but, as always, it’s easiest to learn from a real life example. Let’s take a look at a project kickoff meeting agenda created in Asana:

As you can see, each item has a timebox and a teammate assigned to ensure everyone knows when it’s their turn and how long they have to lead their discussion or give their presentation. The agenda also has relevant files attached and is shared with all team members for visibility and better collaboration.

Meetings are a staple in the professional world, each with its own unique focus and dynamics. Understanding how to tailor your meeting agenda to the type of meeting you're conducting is key to ensuring effective communication and teamwork. Here are some common types of meetings and examples of how to structure their agendas.

Team meeting agenda

Team meetings serve as a platform for team building, decision making, and brainstorming. They can vary in frequency and duration but are essential for ensuring alignment and forward momentum. Effective team meeting agendas should include recurring items for regular meetings and space for new, ad-hoc topics. It’s also vital to track next steps and responsibilities assigned during the meeting. An example of a 45-minute team meeting agenda might cover metrics, a round-table plan, identification of blockers, and recognition of team members' contributions​​.

Daily Scrum meeting agenda

Daily scrum meetings, or stand-ups , are brief, focused gatherings aimed at keeping the team aligned during a sprint. These meetings typically cover blockers, a recap of the previous day’s work, goals for the current day, and progress towards sprint goals. The agility of these meetings helps in maintaining momentum and addressing issues promptly.

Project kickoff meeting agenda

Project kickoff meetings bring together cross-functional teams to start a new project. These meetings set the tone for the project and align everyone on objectives and expectations. The agenda should cover the project brief, roles and responsibilities, meeting cadence, actionable next steps, and a Q&A session to clarify doubts and ensure everyone is on the same page​​.

Retrospective meeting agenda

A retrospective meeting is a type of recurring meeting focused on reflecting on a past period of work, usually at the end of a project cycle or sprint. Its main purpose is to share information among team members about what worked well and what didn't. During the meeting, the entire team discusses various meeting topics, including successes, challenges, and blockers that impacted their work. This process helps in identifying areas for improvement and developing strategies to address any issues. Retrospective meetings are vital for continuous team development and ensuring better outcomes in future work cycles.

One-on-one meeting agenda

One-on-one meetings , whether they are between a manager and a direct report, peer-to-peer, or skip-level, are crucial for discussing work projects, roadblocks, and career development. They are foundational for building trust.

A good agenda for these meetings should balance topics like motivation, communication, growth, and work-related discussions. Avoid status updates; those are better suited for stand-up meetings. Sample questions for a weekly one-on-one might include assessing highlights and lowlights of the week, discussing any blockers, and inquiring about work-life balance​​.

Remote one-on-one meeting agenda

Remote one-on-one meetings require a slightly different approach, with a focus on rapport-building and clear communication. Since physical presence is lacking, these meetings benefit from a shared online agenda accessible to all participants. Key points could include checking in on general well-being, discussing current work assignments, and addressing any immediate concerns or assistance needed​​.

Skip-level meeting agenda

Skip-level meetings, involving senior managers and employees not in their direct report chain, offer a chance to connect across organizational levels. These meetings are ideal for discussing broader career development and providing feedback to senior leadership. Agenda items might cover clarity on company strategies and goals, personal professional objectives, and suggestions for organizational improvements​​.

Leadership team meeting agenda

Leadership team meetings are vital for strategic decision-making and issue resolution at the highest levels of an organization. An effective agenda for such meetings might include personal updates, reviewing key metrics, sharing wins and insights, discussing important messages, addressing pressing issues, and allocating time for an open discussion or "hot seat" session where specific topics are addressed in-depth​​.

Each type of meeting, be it an all-hands gathering, one-on-one discussion, performance review, or team brainstorming session, requires a thoughtfully crafted agenda to avoid unproductive meetings and keep discussions on track.

By using these meeting agenda examples, you can ensure that each meeting, regardless of its format, contributes meaningfully to the organization's goals and enhances teamwork and collaboration.

Running an effective meeting

It’s one thing to have an amazingly organized and detailed agenda that your team can reference before the meeting—using it as a tool during the meeting is a whole other ballpark. These tips will help you make your meeting agenda as useful during the meeting as it is as a preparation tool

Stick to your agenda. The best agenda becomes useless if you don’t stick to it during the meeting. Try not to bounce back and forth between agenda items but rather stick to the priorities you established earlier.

Stick to your timeboxes. It absolutely helps release some tension and lighten the mood if you have a bit of small talk or a quick check-in at the beginning of your meeting. That’s why you should allocate three to five minutes to this—and stick to the timeframe. Pictures of Kabir’s son’s adorable Halloween costume can be shared elsewhere so you have enough time to reach your meeting’s goals now.

Designate a note taker. At the beginning of the meeting, designate a note taker who will write down any questions, feedback, tasks, and ideas that come up during the meeting. You can rotate this position so everyone on your team gets to contribute at some point. Ideally, these notes are taken in the same place as the meeting agenda—this will make it a lot easier for team members to follow the notes and link them to agenda items. Notes can also be directly entered into Asana for real-time updating and tracking

Follow up after the meeting. Typically, the note taker will be responsible for following up with the meeting notes afterward. The notes should include any decisions that were made during the meeting, tasks that need to be completed, and questions that remained unanswered. If possible, assign teammates and add due dates to action items to keep accountability high. To ensure that these action items are tracked and completed, they should be promptly added to our Asana project management tool.

Make the most out of every meeting

With Asana, you can keep your meeting agenda, meeting minutes, and meeting action items in one place. Effortlessly share the agenda with your team and assign agenda items in real time so nothing falls through the cracks.

Streamlining your meetings with one central tool will reduce the amount of work about work your team faces, connect everyone to the purpose of the meeting, and allow for productive meetings everyone enjoys.

Related resources

How to choose project management software for your team

7 steps to complete a social media audit (with template)

3 visual project management layouts (and how to use them)

Grant management: A nonprofit’s guide

How to write a meeting agenda (and run better meetings!)

Learning how to write a meeting agenda that sets the stage for an effective and engaging gathering is an important leadership skill. Not only will it help you be organized and on time, but it will also help you and your team make the most of your time together.

In this guide, we’ll explore what makes a meeting productive and guide you through the process of designing a great meeting agenda . You'll also learn practical tips you can use to improve your next meeting and get every team member engaged and involved. Ready to leave behind boring, unproductive meetings? Let's dive in!

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Going into a meeting without a purpose or a clear sense of what you’re going to cover rarely results in a productive session. Writing a clear step-by-step meeting agenda is a great way to improve your management and facilitation practice. Not only will you be more effective as a team, but you can avoid frustrating or unproductive meetings and get better results too! 

In this guide, we’ll explore what makes a productive meeting and guide you through the process of designing a great agenda . Additionally, we’ll also share some sample meeting agendas so you can see some working examples you can use as the basis of your next meeting.

What is an agenda?

In short, an agenda is a breakdown of all the items that will be covered during a meeting. It should list all of the topics and tasks that will be covered during the meeting and also clearly articulate the purpose and expectations of the meeting. 

Your meeting agenda should also give everyone involved the information they need to successfully attend and adequately prepare . This means including all information relating to logistics, links and attachments and mentioning any preparations you wish everyone to do before the meeting. 

The best meeting agendas also help you effectively run the meeting on the day by giving you a step-by-step list of what to cover and timings for each major section of the meeting. 

A meeting agenda is usually created in a clear, shareable format, such as a Word document or SessionLab agenda. This makes it easy to follow and share with meeting participants.

You can see some examples of a meeting agenda template here . These meeting agendas include meeting objectives and a step by step process complete with timings so you can see how to put them together effectively.

Why is a meeting agenda important?

A meeting agenda is an effective tool for many reasons. First up, it helps ensure the meeting facilitator has everything they need to run an effective meeting. You’ll have an itemized list of every agenda item, reminders of the meeting goal and all your relevant documents attached too.

Perhaps most importantly, a meeting agenda is how you can your meeting participants can stay on track and ensure everything that needs to get done is completed.

Without it, your team meeting can quickly go off the rails or be unproductive. It helps other team members be aware of your core meeting objective, what’s going to be covered, and to give them time and space to prepare.

Preparation

By outlining what will be covered in your meeting, your agenda will ensure every team member can adequately prepare. This might mean preparing discussion topics, supplementary materials, or other items.

Creating your meeting agenda and sending it out well in advance means everyone can do what they need to come to the meeting and make it a success. If you want your meeting attendees to contribute meaningfully, give them a chance to prepare with a good meeting agenda.

Scheduling and logistics

In the most basic terms, a meeting agenda will help everyone involved align their schedules and attend. By including the location or virtual room, date and time, and any necessary links, your meeting agenda will contain all the information people need to be there and adjust their calendars.

You’ll also include information on how long the meeting will run for and timebox each section. If you have multiple people leading sections of the meeting, ensure you include clear timings for each of those sections so everyone can prepare and keep the meeting on track.

Productivity

Even the most simple meeting agenda will enable both the facilitator and participants to be productive . Going into a meeting with a clear agenda and timeboxed schedule means you and your group can be more effective and not get lost in side-discussions or unagreed topics.

In short, an effective meeting agenda clearly sets the stage for what will and what will not be included and can ensure everyone is pushing in the same direction during the meeting.

Get team buy-in

Going into a meeting without clear expectations or an idea of the talking points is frustrating for everyone involved. Make meetings work for everyone by creating and sharing the agenda with the participants and agreeing on the format. 

Getting everyone on board can massively increase the productivity of any project or meeting and by developing a standardised agenda that makes it easy for everyone to understand and attend, they’ll fit more naturally into your team workflow too!

Improve your planning

Documenting your meeting agenda is the first stage in improving the quality of your meetings. DId you find that something in your agenda plan didn’t work out? Need less time for old business and more time on new items or setting follow-up actions? Go back to your agenda and adjust. Use a collaborative agenda planner tool if you want to get comments and feedback on your meeting agenda!

Simplify a recurring meeting

In the case of recurring meetings – whether it be board meetings or a weekly meeting to catch-up – creating an agenda can simplify and streamline the process.

In SessionLab, for example, you can create a meeting agenda template or simply duplicate your session so you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

Improve meeting culture

Creating a meeting template that works for everyone and has been refined over time can help make your entire team more productive and shift the mindset around meetings. 

The work you do in meetings can and should improve all the work you do and a better meeting culture can help teams communicate better and surface issues effectively in any context.

Help identify and remove ineffective meetings

A common complaint of most teams is that they have too many meetings or that the meetings they have are ineffective.

Agenda-setting and following a process when developing your meetings can also help you and your team identify if a meeting should be run at all. We’ll cover this in more detail in our final section on how to decide if you should run a meetin g too!

What to include in a meeting invite?

Getting people to attend the meeting means sending a meeting invitation that includes all the necessary information in a simple, easy to understand format.

You’ll likely send your meeting invite as an email or Calendar invite, though you might also use other dedicated meeting software. Here’s what you should include for your next meeting.

Meeting logistics

Here, you’ll include everything your participants need to know in order to attend the meeting. Including:

• Title of the meeting
• The date and time of the meeting
• The location of the meeting
• For virtual meetings, include a link to the virtual meeting room and any necessary passwords
• The run-time of the meeting
• Host (and co-hosts) of the meeting
• Additional meeting roles such as note taker
• List of participants 

Purpose of the meeting

Ensure you include the purpose of the meeting in your agenda so everyone can understand why they’re being asked to attend and prepare adequately. You may also want to include any links to resources or co-creation documents. Additionally, include any background information to help participants understand the context of the meeting. If it’s the first in a series of meetings or a project retrospective, be sure to include that information here. 

Preparatory work 

If you have any preparations you wish participants to make before the meeting, include them here. This might include contributing ideas to an online whiteboard, reading a document that will be discussed, or preparing questions around the central topic of the meeting. Be sure to include links to any resources and make instructions completely clear.

Meeting agenda

The final section of your meeting invitation should be the agenda for your meeting. This should include a clear, simple list of the topics you will be covering. If a discussion item is led by someone other than the primary facilitator, include that information alongside each entry too. Ensure that the meeting agenda you send your participants covers everything 

What to include in a meeting agenda

Meetings of different purposes and may require different items in their agenda, though they should broadly follow the same structure in order to ensure the whole team can move through it productively.

Remember to set timings for each section so your meeting can run on time and give everyone an indication of the scope of the discussion.

It’s worth noting that while you might have a detailed meeting agenda for yourself and any co-facilitators, you might share a simplified version with your participants.

So long as you ensure that everyone attending has the information they need and a sense of each agenda item, your agenda can be as detailed or as simple as necessary. Let’s dive in!

Introductions and housekeeping 

Here, you’ll make sure everyone who needs to be in the meeting is present and make introductions where necessary. You’ll also briefly reiterate the purpose of the meeting and introduce the meeting leader too.

In a virtual meeting, allow extra time to solve technical issues and get everyone on camera.

Icebreaker (optional)

Meeting icebreakers can be a great way of helping new groups get to know each other or warm-up and prepare a team for a difficult conversation ahead. Depending on your meeting format, agenda and length, you may want to include an icebreaker at the beginning.

Remember that not every meeting needs an icebreaker. A regular weekly standup doesn’t need an icebreaker to warm everyone up. A board meeting with a tight agenda may not need this step either.

On the other hand, an interdepartmental meeting where people are coming together for the first time to discuss better ways of working might benefit from an icebreaker. 

Meeting topics and items for discussion

This is the main bulk of the agenda. Here, you’ll set out all of the items to be covered in your meeting. These might include a review of what was accomplished in a previous meeting, presentations of news and information, discussions, collaborative exercises and more. These items are completely contextual depending on the nature of your meeting and in our next section, you’ll see some example meeting agendas that include all kinds of items. 

Be sure to set a time for each item in your agenda and include a short description. If someone other than the host is leading this section, include that information too. Remember that the purpose of the agenda is to not only outline these items so people can understand the meeting at a glance but also give them opportunity to prepare.

Breaks (optional)

In longer meetings, breaks can be vital in ensuring everyone stays engaged, energized and is able to contribute meaningfully. As a general rule of thumb, a break every 1.5 to 2 hours is a great way to keep everyone happy and keep up group energy levels. Remember that virtual meetings are often more draining and so the necessity for a quick break is even greater in those situations. 

Set follow-up actions

Whatever the format or purpose of your meeting, there are likely to be follow-up actions that should be agreed upon before you adjourn. These might include taking action on items discussed during the meeting, sending notes or resources, or simply agreeing the time and date of follow-ups or later meetings. The more complex the meeting, the more involved this part of the agenda is likely to be, so ensure you set adequate time for this.

When setting follow-up tasks, be sure to give each task an owner and agree with your team members when they will be completed or checked in on. Ownership and timeboxing can help ensure that items set are completed in a timely manner.

All meetings should be brought to an effective close. Give participants an opportunity to add any final items, give feedback or briefly clarify any hanging questions before closing the meeting can help ensure follow up actions are taken and that everyone is on the same page leaving the meeting.

You might even use a closing activity from our library of facilitation methods to help your group meaningfully reflect on the meeting. 

Tips for writing an effective meeting agenda 

Once you know you are running the meeting and have an idea of the framework of the agenda, you’ll want to write up your agenda so you can share it with your participants. This means getting every agenda item in order, articulating your meeting objective and designing for flow and engagement.

Creating a great meeting agenda doesn’t need to be a chore. Check out our tips below for help in writing a meeting agenda that can help your meeting be a success and improve your general meeting facilitation too.

Clearly identify and articulate your meeting goal

One common frustration point for meetings is that not everyone is on the same page regarding the goal or purpose of the meeting. Be absolutely clear on what falls under the remit of the meeting and what falls outside of it. By doing this, you can ensure all attendees are aligned going into the meeting, and you can also identify if additional work needs to be done elsewhere. 

If the goal of a meeting is to align your marketing and product teams on a specific project make sure everyone knows it. When running a board meeting, make it clear what you’re going to cover so that everyone’s time is respected. By identifying and sharing the goal and purpose of the meeting early, you’re helping everyone make it a success.

Ask participants for input

If you’re running a meeting that will benefit from the input of participants, ask them to contribute ideas or possible agenda items in advance of the meeting. Not only can you ensure that the meeting is fit for purpose, but you can also source the best ideas and get team buy-in too.

You might also find that some sections of the meeting are best led by certain team members or stakeholders. Be sure to liaise with those people beforehand and let them know what sections they’ll be running, when and for how long. Switching meeting leaders can be productive, but only if everyone has had a chance to prepare! 

List the topics you want to address

If your meeting is following a discussion format, ensure that you include a list of all the topics or questions you will be discussing in the agenda. Though you might find these changes on the day, listing all of these items ensures participants know what to expect and can begin to prepare answers or know what to think about before the meeting. 

An effective agenda should help you stay on track without effort. Having a list in place also helps with time management and prioritization during the meeting – if you know you have some key topics yet to be discussed, it helps guide the team to end one topic of discussion and move onto the next effectively.

Identify the purpose of each task

Identifying the purpose of your meeting should be the first thing you do, but when it comes to writing your meeting agenda, you’ll want to understand the purpose of each component in order to make it a success. 

Group meetings always benefit from focus and so each task or item should be selected in order to fulfill the purpose of the meeting. If you’re running a project retrospective meeting, you don’t need a section on company-wide news, for example. If you were running an all-day virtual meeting, you might include an online energizer after lunch so that people come back recharged and ready to engage. 

We often find that certain tasks deserve to be explored but a general team meeting is not the place to explore them. In these cases, it’s worth considering how best that work should be done – is it a separate meeting or could it be done asynchronously? Whatever the case, ensure that all of the items in your meeting agenda belong there, and that you’re not overstuffing or trying to combine two meetings. 

Remember that each part of the meeting should relate to your central meeting objective. Design with this in mind and your meetings will be leaner and more productive as a result! 

Meetings that are effectively timeboxed are more productive and less frustrating for all involved. Try not to overrun and set times for each and every section of your meeting agenda. This can help prevent meandering conversations and keep everyone focused. Furthermore, people are less likely to dread attending your meetings if they run on time and they can schedule around them without worry! 

Setting times for discussion items can be difficult if you’ve never run the meeting before – estimate and use your best judgement but also take notes on how much time each section took up. You can go back to your agenda afterwards and improve for the next meeting.

Be simple and clear

Meetings do not need to be complicated and neither should there agendas. Keep your meeting agenda simple, clear and short for the best results. You want your participants to get a sense of the meeting easily, understand what they need to do to prepare and attend. Remember that people tend to have more meetings than they would like – don’t make it difficult for your team members to attend yours! 

Create a reusable template

Creating a meeting agenda from scratch each time is not only a waste of time, but it means you lose the potential to iterate and improve. By creating a template for your meeting agenda , you can speed up the process, develop a standard meeting schedule and also figure out where you can make improvements.

Find that your team meeting agenda overran? Go back to the template and change the timings. Find that energy levels dip in your longer meetings? Find space to include an energizer. 

Making your agenda into a reusable and editable template is the first step to iterating and improving and is made easy in SessionLab too!

Keep it focused

A common mistake when designing a meeting agenda is to try and cram too much in. Your group will be much less effective if you attempt to cover lots of ground and don’t spend enough time where you need to. Try to think of the most important items for every business meeting and ensure your agenda is designed so you can focus on those things.

It is much better to cover key points with the relevant depth so you find solutions and make meaningful decisions rather than try and cover everything. 

Remember that focus is contextual. A daily-standup will have a different focus to a general team meeting agenda or project retrospective. Think of the purpose or goal of the meeting – if what you’re exploring is unrelated to the goal or purpose of the meeting, it shouldn’t be in the meeting. If your goal is to align on the next steps of a project or sum up progress so far, you might cover a lot of ground but it should be related to the core goal.

Get feedback

Improving your meetings can’t happen in a vacuum. Get feedback from your participants on how the meeting went in order to improve the quality and structure of them. You can achieve this by using a debriefing activity or a round of feedback at the end of the meeting.

While this is often the most effective way of getting quick, honest feedback on your meeting, you can also send out a survey afterwards. Whatever method you choose, listen to your meeting participants and make changes so that your meetings continue to be effective and useful for everyone involved. 

Meeting agenda templates

The job of meeting agenda isn’t truly complete until it’s been shared with your participants. But are you wondering what a meeting agenda template looks like and want to see how you might put the finishing touches on an agenda that you might send to clients or internal teams?

For simple meetings, an agenda that covers the main discussion topics in a simple format such as a calendar invite is likely sufficient . See our Team alignment meeting agenda for an example of a simple meeting agenda.

For more involved meetings and group processes, a more in-depth meeting agenda template should be used to adequately prepare everyone involved for the meeting ahead. We’ve included some common meeting formats that require a more complex agenda too. 

These meeting agenda examples will give you a taste of what a completed agenda looks like and hopefully give you inspiration for your own. Let’s take a look!

Team Alignment Meeting

Aligning teams and discussing possible roadblocks or team dependencies is often better in real-time. Being able to bring up ideas and concerns while also clarifying any points in a structured manner can help prevent email back and forths too!

Here’s a simple meeting agenda template made using Google Calendar. Feel free to copy the format and use it for your next team meeting!

Ready for some more complex meeting agendas? We’ve chosen a few common meeting formats and outlined an example agenda for you below. Each of these meeting agendas also features a SessionLab template so you can adjust it to your own needs too. Let’s take a look!

Project Kickoff 

Starting a new project is always worth getting together for. Even if you’re doing preparatory work in a collaborative Google document or working asynchronously for much of the project, a kick-off meeting in real time is an efficient way to align and surface any issues before getting down to work in earnest. Let’s take a look at this meeting agenda template to see how you can set off on the right foot with a short, one-hour meeting.

Project Retrospective

Large projects can take many twists and turns. A retrospective meeting is where you and your team will discuss and learn from such projects with a view to improve things next time around. In this retrospective meeting agenda , see how your group might effectively reflect on a completed project and bring up any essential learning points in less than an hour!

Lightning Decision Jam

Unstructured, meandering discussions can kill a team’s creativity and remove the appetite for future meetings. Use Jonathan Courtney’s Lightning Decision Jam method as the basis for a short meeting in which you can use a group process to make quick, effective and thoughtful decisions. See the method below for full instructions.  

One-Hour Brain Sprint

With the right process, working collaboratively in a real-time meeting can be one of the most effective ways of generating ideas and get every team member involved. Try the One-Hour Brain Sprint template to give your next brainstorming meeting a framework for success. 

How to decide if you should run a meeting?

Organized and well-facilitated meetings can be hugely productive to any group or organisation but not everything should be a meeting . In fact, some meetings can be detrimental to your team if they aren’t thoughtfully designed and run.

We’ve all felt the burnout of having too many meetings or been frustrated by a directionless meeting that feels like a waste of time. Before you set a meeting, ask yourself these questions to decide whether it is worth bringing everyone together.

Does the meeting have a clear goal or purpose?

Whenever you’re considering bringing your team together to work in real-time, it should be with a clear end result you want to achieve. 

If you need to collaborate on a topic or make a decision as a group in real-time, this is a great reason to have a meeting.  If you do not have a goal or purpose, you should reconsider whether you should run the meeting at all. Nothing is more frustrating for a group than a meeting with no reason to be run. 

Remember that a daily catch-up or weekly progress report can be a good reason for a short meeting, though only if you can clearly articulate a goal and purpose. If you can’t, go back and clarify the purpose or goal and really determine if it’s worth holding the meeting. You might find asynchronous work or a simple email is a better option for sharing information or collaborating with your team. 

Could this be summed up in an email?

You don’t need to run a meeting every time you have a small piece of information to share. If your goal is to share information quickly, effectively and without the need for discussion, perhaps that could be shared in an email or on Slack instead?

Some topics are too large for email and if you want to discuss a topic or collaborate on solutions, a meeting might still be the right approach. Before you go in this direction, ask yourself if you couldn’t transmit the information you need to share in an email and save everyone involved the time and effort of an extra meeting. 

Could the meeting work be done asynchronously?

Not all discussions or activities need to be conducted in real-time. When asking a group to collect ideas or bring items for discussion to the table, ask whether you couldn’t do so in a shared document asynchronously. 

Collecting insights in this way allows everyone to contribute in their own time and reflect on the topic meaningfully before adding to the discussion. You will still want to timebox the activity and potentially debrief over email or in a meeting, but allocating tasks asynchronously can not only save time but also make everyone more productive too.

Who needs to be at the meeting?

Some challenges do not need an entire organisation in order to be solved. When holding a meeting, carefully consider who needs to be in the room to make it a success. You might find that you only need to chat to one other person in Slack in order to make something happen. Alternatively, you might still hold a meeting but limit the attendees so it is useful for everyone involved. 

Is the meeting an effective use of everyone’s time? 

Meetings are rarely the most important part of everyone’s day. Disrupting the flow of your team’s working day should only be done if it is an effective use of time for everyone involved. Particularly in times of upheaval or heavy workload, the potential time spent in meetings can mean other work is left incomplete.

If you can achieve the same results without interrupting people whose time is better spent elsewhere, do so. Sometimes an email or invitation to a shared document is sufficient to get the work done. 

Is the meeting actually a workshop?

If the scope or the complexity of the meeting grows, it might be that you are running a workshop and not a meeting. In simple terms, the difference between a meeting and a workshop is that meetings are often where things are discussed while workshops are where groups go through a process and take action. 

Meetings are great for surfacing issues and discussions, while workshops are better at generating ideas, developing solutions and choosing the best followup actions. While both formats are worthwhile in different contexts, workshops employ group process, facilitation techniques and activities in order to be successful and do deeper, more involved work.  

Now you’ve written a great meeting agenda that is clear, simple and fit for purpose, you’re almost set to run your meeting! Here, we’ll explore what you should do next and point out some resources that can help you improve the effectiveness of your meetings too.

Distribute your agenda in advance 

Give your participants adequate time to prepare and adjust their schedules for the meeting. Sending a complete agenda the day of the meeting isn’t sufficient and will only serve to frustrate your participants and lessen the potential productivity of the meeting. 

Remember that the more complex the meeting and the greater the prep work, the more time you want to give your participants between receiving the agenda and running the meeting.

Double check the logistics

Ensure that your meeting room is booked and free if you haven’t done so already and double check that anyone assigned to lead part of the meeting is available and prepared to do so. If you’re using tech as part of your meeting, make sure you have everything you need and perform a technical test if necessary. This is especially important if running an online meeting where the success of your meeting can be entirely lost if your tech fails!

Learn how to run better team meetings

Creating an agenda for your meeting is a vital part of ensuring its success, but running the meeting and managing discussions, tasks and activities requires some additional skills. In our post on running better team meetings , find out how you can encourage better working practices and create more productive meetings too.  

Improve your facilitation skills

Becoming a better facilitator can enable you to lead better meetings and make the most out of any group process. In our post on essential facilitation skills , learn all about the role of the facilitator and what you can do to be a more effective facilitator in meetings, workshops and more! 

Over to you

Learning how to improve your meeting agendas can make all the difference when enabling groups to work together effectively and make the most of their time spent in meetings.

Did we miss something from the list above or did you find one of the meeting agenda templates especially useful? Let us know in the comments below?

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The 16 Types of Business Meetings (and Why They Matter)

There is SO MUCH advice out there about how to run meetings, and most of it is just useless.

It’s not that the advice is wrong, per se. It’s just not specific enough.

• Introduction
• Background: The thinking behind the taxonomy
• Cadence Meetings
• Catalyst Meetings
• Meetings to Evaluate and Influence
• Table: Summary of Types
• Example: How Different Types of Meetings Work Together

For example, it’s not wrong to tell people they need an agenda with clear outcomes listed for every topic. It just doesn’t apply to a lot of situations. A detailed agenda for the one-on-one with my boss? For the sales demo? For our morning huddle? Yeah, I don’t think so. For the board meeting or the requirements analysis meeting? Absolutely.

Sometimes an organization has a pervasive problem with meetings. People complain that there are too many meetings, nothing gets done, it’s wasted time, it’s all power and politics instead of productivity—and they start to look for solutions. They find lots of generic advice, and they find lots of this kind of drivel:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted. by Simon Jenkins for the Guardian September 2017

This article is wildly popular. Over 1000 people who hate having their time wasted in meetings paradoxically had extra time they could spend commenting here to express their agreement and outrage.

Mr. Jenkins has clearly struck a nerve. It’s the kind of pandering that drives clicks and sells ads, which makes that a job well done for the Guardian. But it’s also nonsense.

There’s no proof that organizations benefit from meetings? You can only say something like that when you’re speaking too generally for anyone to know what you’re talking about. Because otherwise – did you hear that, sales teams? There’s no proof those client meetings help your company. Go ahead and cancel them! Hospital workers, stop wasting your time in those shift-change meetings! You should know what to do without talking to each other so much – go heal people already! Boards? Board meetings are for losers. Just use chat and email to manage all your governance duties.

When you get specific about the kind of meeting you’re talking about, the generic “meetings waste time” or “you must have 5 people or less” statements become ridiculous, and people who complain about meetings in general sound like childish whingers.

A meeting is not a meeting.

Want to skip the background information?  Jump ahead to the taxonomy.

This doesn’t mean that meetings in general work great and that there’s no problem to solve here. It just means that there isn’t a singular meeting problem that has a simple meeting solution .

This is a challenge for us!

At Lucid, we work to help our clients get meaningful business results from their meetings, and to do this, we have to get specific. The coaching we provide for our committee clients is not the same advice we give to leadership teams .

Mr. Jenkins correctly points out that when you invite 20 people to a meeting designed for 5, it doesn’t work anymore. Well, duh. His conclusion is that meetings don’t work. A more useful conclusion is that if you’re going to invite 20 people, you should run a meeting designed to work for 20 people. That’s entirely doable, but it’s also a very different meeting.

In brief: the solution to a meeting problem depends on the kind of meeting.

Which raises the question: what are the different kinds of meetings? If it isn’t useful to provide guidelines for all meetings, is it at least possible to establish useful guidelines for a certain type of meeting? Or do we really need to look at each and every single meeting as if it was totally unique and special?

This question has driven much of our work over the past 10 years.

We found that there is a core structure underlying all successful meetings , acting as a kind of skeleton. Every meeting needs bones, but after that, the kind of animal you get on top of those bones can vary wildly. A fish is not a bird is not a kangaroo, despite the fact that they all have a head and a tail.

We found that meetings work together , and that looking at individual meetings in isolation leads to misunderstandings. It’s like studying a single bee; the drone’s dance doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you know that there are other bees watching. Meetings are designed to beget action that is evaluated and built upon in subsequent meetings, and the sequence and cadence at which these meetings occur drives the momentum of that action. Looking only at a single meeting means you miss the clues that lead to the honey.

We work with facilitators and experts to design agendas and guidebooks for running specific meetings . We’ve seen where the structures look the same, and where they differ. There are lots of specific ways to run a status meeting, but even though there’s a lot of variety between them, every status meeting still looks way more like every other status meeting than it does like any strategic planning session. Mammals are more like other mammals than any of them are like an insect.

And of course we work with clients and hear concerns about all those things that the experts don’t talk about, like how to lead a decent meeting when the group thinks meetings aren’t cool, or how to prepare in advance when your goal is to “wow” everyone during the meeting. We know people worry about how to walk those fine lines between inclusiveness and efficiency, and between appropriate framing and facilitation on the one hand, and manipulation on the other. We hear how they experience specific meetings in the context of getting real work done, and can see how priorities shift between getting the content right and getting people connected.

A Taxonomy for Meetings

From all of this, we’ve developed a taxonomy for meetings that we use to help answer these questions:

• Assessing Meeting Performance Maturity : Which kind of meetings does an organization run, and which ones does it need to know how to run well? How well does it run those meetings?
• Meeting Design : If I need to design a new meeting, is there a core pattern I can build on? What factors of the design have the greatest impact on success for this kind of meeting?
• Meeting Problem Diagnoses: If there is a problem with a meeting, are there common requirements for that kind of meeting that I can check first? Are there things going on in that meeting that might work in other meetings, but are incompatible with success in this one?
• B.S. Filter: Is the advice I’m hearing or reading relevant to the success of this meeting, or is it meant for another sort? Or worse, is it generic B.S.?

Background Work: Forming the Hypothesis

We’re not the first to propose a meeting taxonomy. If you search for “types of meetings” and if you read any books on meetings, you’ll find many ways to break down meetings by type. Most lists include between 4 and 6 different types; things like Issue Resolution meetings and Decision Making meetings.

To build our taxonomy, we started with a set of 6 types and a list of all the different kinds of meetings we could think of, then tried to match them up.

This was frustrating. No matter which list we started with, within a few minutes we always found an example that didn’t fit.

For example, Google highlights this list of the 6 Types of Meetings by MeetingSift as the definitive list. It’s very similar to many of the other lists out there.

• Status Update Meetings
• Information Sharing Meetings
• Decision Making Meetings
• Problem Solving Meetings
• Innovation Meetings
• Team Building Meetings

So – you tell me. Which one of those does the board meeting fit into? How about the project retrospective? The answer is that meetings like the ones that you might actually find on your calendar can fit into several of these types.

Whenever we found a meeting that didn’t fit, we set it aside and asked “why?” What is it about that meeting which meant it should be treated differently than these others?

Because we are focused on driving tangible business results, we found we needed to get more specific. In the end, we found that there were three major factors that impact how to approach a meeting.

• The Meeting Intention
• The Meeting Format

The Expected Participation Profile

Our current taxonomy uses these factors to describe 16 distinct meeting types, and gives a nod to a significant 17th that falls outside of our scope.

The Differentiators: Intention, Format and Participation Profile

Before we dive into the specific types, let’s take a look at the factors that make them distinct in more detail.

Meeting Intention

The intention behind a meeting is most often expressed as the meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes. In other words, why do people run this kind of meeting? What is it meant to create?

There are two major outcomes for any meeting: a human connection and a work product. We found that many attempts to categorize meetings dealt only with the work product, which often led to bad advice.

For example, the intention of a decision making meeting is:

• A decision (the work product) and
• Commitment to that decision from the people in the room (a human connection outcome)

It is very easy to run a decision making meeting that achieves 1 (a decision) but fails to achieve 2 (commitment), and therefore will fail to deliver the expected business result. If you have ever been in a meeting where you’re discussing a decision you thought had already been made, you know this to be true.

Our taxonomy attempts to look at both kinds of outcomes when describing the meeting intention.

When we first started looking at meeting format, we used a standard breakdown of “formal” and “informal” to help distinguish between the board meetings and the team meetings, but we abandoned that pretty quickly because it didn’t hold up in practice.

In practice, we found that while boards have rules that they must follow by law, and they do, this didn’t necessarily mean that the majority of the meeting followed any very strict structure. Many board meetings actually include lots of free-form conversation, which is then briefly formalized to address the legal requirements.

By contrast, we would have considered an Agile team’s daily stand-up meeting as an informal meeting. Heck, we run those and I don’t always wear shoes. But despite this casual, social informality, the daily stand-up runs according to a very clear set of rules. Every update includes just three things, each one is no longer than 2 minutes, and we never ever ever problem solve during the meeting.

It turns out that formal and informal told us more about a participant’s perception of social anxiety in a meeting than it did about the type or format of a meeting. I experience stand-ups and interviews as informal, largely because I’m in charge and am confident of my role in these meetings. I doubt everyone I interview considers it an informal chat, though, and I imagine our stand-up may feel pretty uptight to someone who wasn’t used to it.

Instead of formal and informal, we found that the strength of the governing rituals and rules had a clearer impact on the meeting’s success. By this measure, the daily stand-up is highly ritualistic, board meetings and brainstorming sessions abide by governing rules but not rigidly so, and initial sales calls and team meetings have very few prescribed boundaries.

This still didn’t quite explain all the variation we saw in meeting format, however. When we looked at the project status update meeting, we realized it shared some characteristics with the board meeting, but these project meetings aren’t governed by rules and laws in the same way. And while the intention for project updates is always the same—to share information about project work status and manage emerging change—there’s a ton of variation in how people run project status updates. Some teams are very formal and rigid, while others are nearly structure free. This means our “governing rituals” criteria didn’t work here.

The format characteristic all project status update meetings do share, and that you’ll also see with board meetings, is a dislike of surprises. No project manager wants to show up to the weekly update and get surprised by how far off track the team is, or how they’ve decided to take the project in some new direction. Board members hate this too. For these meetings, surprises are bad bad bad!

Surprises are bad for project updates, but other meetings are held expressly for the purpose of finding something new. The innovation meeting, the get-to-know you meeting, the problem solving meeting all hope for serendipity. Going into those meetings, people don’t know what they’ll get, but they try to run the meeting to maximize their chances of something great showing up by the time they’re done.

So, when categorizing meetings based on the meeting format, we looked at both:

• The strength of governing rules or rituals
• The role of serendipity and tolerance for surprise

Last but not least, we felt that who was expected to be at a meeting and how they were meant to interact had a major impact on what needed to happen for the meeting to succeed.

The question behind these criteria is: what kind of reasonable assumptions can we make about how well these people will work together to achieve the desired goal?

Remember: every meeting has both a human connection outcome and a work outcome.

This has many significant design impacts. For example, in meetings with group members that know each other already, you can spend less meeting time on building connection. We don’t do introductions in the daily huddle; we assume the team handled that outside the meeting.

In meetings where the work product is arguably far more important than the human connection, it’s not always necessary for people to like one another or even remember each others’ names as long as the meeting gets them all to the desired goal efficiently. A formal incident investigation meeting does not need the person under investigation to know and like the people on the review board to achieve its goal.

By contrast, some meetings only go well after the team establishes mutual respect and healthy working relationships. The design of these meetings must nurture and enhance those relationships if they are to achieve the desired outcomes. Weekly team meetings often fail because people run them like project status updates instead of team meetings, focusing too heavily on content at the expense of connection, and their teams are weaker for it.

After much slotting and wrangling, we found there were three ways our assumptions about the people in the room influenced the meeting type.

• A known set of people all familiar with one another. Team meetings fit here.
• A group of people brought together to fit a need. Kickoffs, ideation sessions, workshops all fit here.
• Two distinct groups, with a clear us-them or me-them dynamic, meeting in response to an event. Interviews fit here, as do broadcast meetings and negotiations.
• The expected leadership and participation styles. Every type of meeting has a “default” leader responsible for the meeting design; usually the boss or manager, a facilitator, or the person who asked for the meeting. Most also have an expected interaction style for participants that, when encouraged, gets the best results. Some meetings are collaborative, some very conversational, like one-on-ones, and some are very formal – almost hostile. Still others, like the All-Hands broadcast meeting, don’t require any active participation at all.
• The centrality of relationships. Finally, we looked at whether the meeting’s success depended on the group working well together. Nearly every meeting that teams repeat as part of their day-to-day operations works best when team members get along, and becomes torturous when they don’t. Outside of regular team meetings, there are also meetings designed explicitly to establish positive relationships, such as the first introduction, interviews, and team chartering workshops. In all these cases, a successful meeting design must take relationships into account.

Criteria We Considered and Rejected

There are lots of other factors that influence how you plan and run any given meeting, but we felt that they didn’t warrant creating a whole new type. Here are some of the criteria that impact meeting design, but that we didn’t use when defining types.

Location and Resources

Face-to-face or remote, walking or sitting, sticky notes or electronics documents; there’s no question that the meeting logistics have an impact. They don’t, however, change the underlying goals or core structure for a meeting. They simply modify how you execute on it.

A design workshop for creating a new logo will deal with different content than one for developing a new country-sponsored health plan or one for creating a nuclear submarine. At the human level, however, each of these design workshops needs to accomplish the same thing by engaging the creative and collaborative genius of the participants in generating innovative solutions. Similarly, project meetings in every field look at time, progress, and budget. The content changes, but the core goals and format do not.

This one is like logistics. You absolutely have to change how you run a meeting with 20 people from how you led the same meeting with 5. But again, the goals, the sequence of steps, the governing rituals – none of that changes. In general, smaller meetings are easier to run and more successful on a day-to-day basis. But if you legitimately need 20 people involved in that decision, and sometimes you do, that is an issue of scale rather than kind.

Operating Context

What comes before the meeting and what’s happening in the larger ecosystem can have a huge impact on how a team approaches a meeting. A decision-making meeting held in times of abundance feels radically different than one you run to try and figure out how to save a sinking ship. Even so, the underlying principles for sound decision making remain the same. Some situations absolutely make it way harder to succeed, but they don’t, in our opinion, make it a fundamentally different kind of meeting.

Now, given that extended lead up, what types did we end up with?

The 16 (+1) Types of Meetings

I’ve broken our list into three main groupings below and provided details for each type. Then, at the end, you’ll find a table with all the meeting types listed for easy comparison and a spreadsheet you can download.

Quickly, here’s the list. Details are below.

Team Cadence Meetings

• Progress Updates

One-on-Ones

• Action Review Meetings

Governance Cadence Meetings

• Idea Generation Meetings

Planning Meetings

• Decision Making Meeting

Sensemaking

• Introductions

Issue Resolution Meetings

• Community of Practice Meetings

Training Sessions

Broadcast meetings.

Want to learn more about this chart? See the follow-up post on the Periodic Table of Meetings .  

We Review, Renew, Refine: Meetings with Known Participants and Predictable Patterns

As we do the work of our organizations, we learn. The plans we made on day one may work out the way we expected, but maybe not. New stuff comes up and before too long it becomes obvious that we need to adjust course.

Organizations use these type of meetings to review performance, renew team connections, and refine their approach based on what they’ve learned.

All of these meetings involve an established group of people, with perhaps the occasional guest. Most happen at regular and predictable intervals, making up the strategic and operational cadence of the organization.

These meetings all follow a regularized pattern; each meeting works basically like the last one and teams know what to expect. Because the participants and the format are all known, these meetings often require less up-front planning and less specialized facilitation expertise to succeed.

The meeting types in this group are:

• Ensure group cohesion
• Drive execution
• the Weekly Team Meeting
• the Daily Huddle
• the Shift-Change Meeting
• a Regular Committee Meeting
• the Sales Team Check-In Meeting

Expected Participation Profile

These meetings are typically led by the “boss” or manager, but they can be effectively led by any team member. The best results happen when everyone invited engages collaboratively. Healthy relationships are important to meeting success.

Meeting Format

Team cadence meetings follow a regular pattern or standard agenda, which can be very ritualistic. Team meetings should surface new information and challenges, but big surprises are not welcome here. (Unless they’re super awesome!) These meetings are about keeping an established team personally connected and moving towards a common goal, and not about inspiring major change.

To learn more, visit our Team Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

Back to the list of types ⇧

Progress Checks

• Maintain project momentum
• Ensure mutual accountability
• the Project Status Meeting
• the Client Check-In

Project managers and account managers lead these meetings, and everyone else participates in a fairly structured way. In many ways, these meetings are designed to inform and reassure people that everyone else on the team is doing what they said they’d do, or if not, to figure out what they all need to do to get back on track. Functional relationships matter, but it’s not as important to the overall result that these people enjoy each other’s company. Because these meetings are mostly designed to “make sure everything is still working”, which matters to project success and the organization’s ability to plan, they can often be very boring for the individual contributors who already know what’s going on with their work.

Project updates follow a regular pattern. Some are very strict, others less so; this varies by the team and the kind of work they do. Surprises are entirely unwelcome. Any major surprise will cause a meeting failure and derail the planned agenda.

To learn more, visit our Progress Check Meetings Resource Center.

• Career and personal development
• Individual accountability
• Relationship maintenance
• the Manager-Employee One-on-One
• a Coaching Session
• a Mentorship Meeting
• the “Check In” with an Important Stakeholder

These meetings involve two people with an established relationship. The quality of that relationship is critical to success in these meetings, and leadership may alternate between the participants based on their individual goals. While these meetings may follow an agenda, the style is entirely conversational. In some instances, the only distinction between a one-on-one and a plain ol’ conversation is the fact that the meeting was scheduled in advance to address a specific topic.

One-on-ones are the loosey goosiest meetings in this set. Experienced and dedicated leaders will develop an approach to one-on-ones that they use often, but the intimate nature of these meetings defies rigid structure. People tend not to enjoy surprises in one-on-ones, but they infinitely prefer to learn surprising news in these meetings rather than in a team or governance cadence meeting. If you’re going to quit or fly to the moon or you’ve just invented the cure to aging, you’re way better off telling your manager privately before you share that with the board.

To learn more, visit our One-on-One Meetings Resource Center.

Action Reviews

• Learning: gain insight
• Develop confidence
• Generate recommendations for change
• Project and Agile Retrospectives
• After Action Reviews and Before Action Reviews (Military)
• Pre-Surgery Meetings (Healthcare)
• Win/Loss Review (Sales)

These meetings are led by a designated person from the team. When run well, action reviews demand highly engaged and structured participation from everyone present. Because action reviews are so structured, they don’t require the individuals involved to form great interpersonal relationships. They do, however, require professionalism, focus, and strong engagement. Action reviews that happen too infrequently or too far away in time from the action tend to become more conversational and less powerful.

Action reviews are highly ritualistic; these are the kind of meetings that inspire the use of the word “ritual”. The action review is a tool for continuous learning; the more frequently these are run and the tighter the team gets, the faster they learn and improve. Teams can and will change how they run these meetings over time based on what they’ve learned, and this avid pursuit of change for the better is itself part of the ritual. Action reviews take surprise in stride. The whole point is to learn and then refine future action, so while huge surprises may cause chagrin, they are embraced as lessons and used accordingly.

Can you tell these are some of my favorite meetings?

To learn more, visit our Action Review Meetings Resource Center.

• Strategic definition and oversight
• Regulatory compliance and monitoring
• Board Meetings
• Quarterly Strategic Reviews
• QBR (a quarterly review between a vendor and client)

The teams involved in governance meetings are known in advance, but don’t necessarily work together often. Nor do they need to; these aren’t the kind of meetings where everyone has to be pals to get good results. These meetings are led by a chair or official company representative, and participation is structured. This means that while there are often times for free conversation during a governance meeting, much of the participation falls into prescribed patterns. These are often the kind of meetings that warrant nicer shoes.

Governance cadence meetings are highly structured. When run professionally, there is always an agenda, it is always shared in advance, and minutes get recorded. Governance meetings are NOT the time for surprises. In fact, best practice for important board meetings includes making sure everyone coming to that meeting gets a personal briefing in advance (see Investigative or One-on-Ones) to ensure no one is surprised in the meeting. A surprise in a governance cadence meeting means someone screwed up.

To learn more, visit our Governance Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

The Right Group to Create Change: Meetings with Participants and Patterns Customized to Fit the Need

New ideas, new plans, projects to start, problems to solve and decisions to make—these meetings change an organization’s work.

These meetings are all scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals. They succeed when following a thoughtful meeting design and regularly fail when people “wing it”.

Because these meetings are scheduled as needed with whomever is needed, there is a lot more variation in format between meetings. This is the realm of participatory engagement, decision and sense-making activities, and when the group gets larger, trained facilitation.

Idea Generation

• Create a whole bunch of ideas
• Ad Campaign Brainstorming Session
• User Story Brainstorming
• Fundraiser Brainstorming

Idea generation meetings often include participants from an established team, but not always. These meetings are led by a facilitator and participants contribute new ideas in a structured way. While it’s always nice to meet with people you know and like, established relationships don’t necessarily improve outcomes for these meetings. Instead, leaders who want to get the widest variety of ideas possible are better off including participants with diverse perspectives and identities. Relationships are not central here; ideas are.

These meetings start with the presentation of a central premise or challenge, then jump into some form of idea generation. There are loads of idea generation techniques, all of which involve a way for participants to respond to a central challenge with as many individual ideas as possible. Unlike workshops or problem solving meetings, the group may not attempt to coalesce or refine their ideas in the meeting. Here, idea volume matters more than anything else. Organizations run these meetings when they aren’t sure what to do yet; the whole meeting is an entreaty to serendipity. As such, there are few governing principles beyond the rule to never interfere with anyone else’s enthusiasm.

To learn more, visit our Idea Generation Meetings Resource Center.

• Create plans
• Secure commitment to implementing the plans
• Project Planning
• Campaign Planning (Marketing)
• Product Roadmap Planning
• and so on. Every group that makes things has a planning meeting.

Planning meetings often involve an existing team, but also involve other people as needed. Depending on the size and scope of the plans under development, these meetings are led by the project owner or by an outside facilitator. Participants are expected to actively collaborate on the work product. They may or may not have established relationships; if not, some time needs to be spent helping people get to know each other and understand what each of them can contribute. That said, these meetings are about getting a job done, so relationships don’t get central focus.

Planning meetings vary depending on the kind of plan they’re creating, but generally start with an explanation of the overall goal, an analysis of the current situation, and then work through planning details. Planning meetings end with a review and confirmation of the plan created. Planning meetings are not governed by rules nor do they follow specific rituals; the meeting format is dictated more by the planning format than anything else. Because planning meetings happen very early in an endeavor’s life cycle, successful meetings design for serendipity. Anything you can learn   during this meeting   that makes the plan better is a good thing!

To learn more, visit our Planning Meetings Resource Center.

• Group formation
• Commitment and clarity on execution
• One or more tangible results; real work product comes out of workshops
• Project, Program and Product Kickoffs
• Team Chartering
• Design Workshops
• Value Stream Mapping
• Strategy Workshops
• Team Building workshops

Groups are assembled specifically for these meetings and guided by a designated facilitator. These meetings put future work into motion, so the focus may be split equally between the creation of a shared work product (such as a value stream map or charter document) and team formation, since successful team relationships make all the future work easier. Workshops often incorporate many of the elements you find in other types of meetings. For example, a workshop may include information gathering, idea generation, problem solving, and planning all together.

Because they attempt to achieve so much more than other meetings, workshops take longer to run and way longer to plan and set up. Most workshops expect participants to actively engage and collaborate in the creation of a tangible shared result, and a lot of effort goes into planning very structured ways to ensure that engagement. When it comes to business meetings, these are also often as close to a working party as it gets.

Smaller kickoffs may follow a simple pattern and be held in the team’s regular meeting space, but many workshops take place in a special location; somewhere off site, outside, or otherwise distinct from the normal work environment. All these meetings start with introductions and level-setting of some kind: a group exercise, a review of the project goals, and perhaps a motivational speech from the sponsor. Then, the team engages in a series of exercises or activities in pursuit of the work product. Since these meetings are long, coffee and cookies may be expected. Workshops conclude with a review of the work product, and often a reflective exercise. That said, while the basic pattern for a workshop is fairly standard, these are bespoke meetings that do not adhere to any particular rituals. The people who plan and facilitate the meeting work hard to create opportunities for serendipity; they want the team to discover things about each other and the work that inspire and engage them.

To learn more, visit our Workshops Resource Center.

Problem Solving

• Find a solution to a problem
• Secure commitment to enact the solution
• Incident Response
• Strategic Issue Resolution
• Major Project Change Resolution

These meetings involve anyone who may have information that helps the group find a solution and anyone who will need to implement the solution. Depending on the urgency of the situation, the meeting will be led by the person in charge (the responsible leader) or a facilitator. Everyone present is expected to collaborate actively, answering all questions and diligently offering assistance. Tight working relationships can help these meetings go more easily, and participants that establish trust can put more energy into finding solutions since they worry less about blame and personal repercussions. That said, these meetings need the participation of the people with the best expertise, and these people may not know each other well. When this happens, the meeting leader should put extra effort into creating safety in the group if they want everyone’s best effort.

Problem solving meetings begin with a situation analysis (what happened, what resources do we have), then a review of options. After the team discusses and selects an option, they create an action plan. We’ve all seen the shortest version of this meeting in movies, when the police gather outside of the building full of hostages and collaborate to create their plan. Problem solving meetings follow this basic structure, which can be heavily ritualized in first responder and other teams devoted to quickly solving problems. These strict governing procedures get looser when problems aren’t so urgent, but the basic pattern remains.

In a problem solving meeting, the ugly surprise already happened. Now the team welcomes serendipity, hoping a brilliant solution will emerge.

To learn more, visit our Problem Solving Meetings Resource Center.

Decision Making

• A documented decision
• Commitment to act on that decision
• New Hire Decision
• Go/No-Go Decision
• Logo Selection
• Final Approval of a Standard

Often a decision-making meeting involves a standing team, but like problem solving meetings, not always. These meetings may also include people who will be impacted by the decision or have expertise to share, even if they aren’t directly responsible for implementing the decision. Decision making meetings may be led by a designated facilitator, but more often the senior leader or chair runs them. People participate in decision making meetings as either advisers or decision makers. If the decision under discussion is largely a formality, this participation will be highly structured. If, on the other hand, the group is truly weighing multiple options, the participation style will be much more collaborative. Established relationships are not central to decision making meetings, but the perceived fairness and equanimity of the discussion is. When the group behaves in a way that makes it unsafe to voice concerns, these concerns go unaddressed which then weakens commitment to the decision.

Decision making meetings involve the consideration of options and the selection of a final option. Unlike problem solving meetings that include a search for good options, all that work to figure out the possible options happens before the decision making meeting. In many cases, these meetings are largely a formality intended to finalize and secure commitment to a decision that’s already been made. Ritual is high, and surprises unwelcome. In other situations, the group is weighing multiple options and seeking to make a selection in the meeting. There still shouldn’t be any big surprises, but there’s a whole lot more flexibility. For example, corporate leadership teams run decision-making meetings when faced with unexpected strategic challenges. Many of these teams revert to a structure-free conversational meeting approach; just “talking it out” until they reach a decision. Unfortunately for them, teams make the best decisions when their meetings follow a formal decision-making methodology .

To learn more, visit our Decision Making Meetings Resource Center.

Efforts to Evaluate and Influence: Meetings Between Us and Them, with Info to Share and Questions to Answer

These meetings are all designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another. They are scheduled by the person who wants something with the people they want to influence or get something from.

At the surface, that sounds Machiavellian, but the intention here is rarely nefarious. Instead, these meetings often indicate a genuine interest in learning, sharing, and finding ways to come together for mutual benefit.

Because each of these meetings involves some form of social evaluation, the format and rituals have more to do with etiquette than regulations or work product, although this is not always the case.

• To learn things that you can use to inform later action
• To gain an understanding of the current state of a project, organization, or system
• Job Interviews
• Project Discovery Meetings
• Incident Investigations
• Market Research Panels

Expected Participant Profile

These meetings are led by an interviewer or facilitator. Participants include the people being interviewed and sometimes a set of observers. Engagement in sensemaking meetings may feel conversational, but it always follows a clear question-response structure. Most interviewers work to develop a rapport with the people they’re interviewing, since people often share more freely with people they perceive as friendly and trustworthy. That said, many sensemaking meetings work fine without rapport, because the person sharing information is expecting to benefit from it in the future. For example, if a doctor asks a patient to describe his symptoms, the patient does so willingly because he expects the doctor will use that information to help him feel better.

Many interviews are governed by rules regarding privacy, non-disclosure, and discretion. These formalities may be addressed at the beginning or end of the session. Otherwise, there are no strong patterns for a sensemaking session. Instead, people regularly working in these meetings focus on asking better questions. Like idea generation meetings, information gathering meetings delight in serendipity. Unlike idea generation meetings, however, the goal is not to invent new solutions, but rather to uncover existing facts and perspectives.

To learn more, visit our Sensemaking Meetings Resource Center.

• Learn about each other
• Decide whether to continue the relationship
• the First Meeting Between Professionals
• the Sales Pitch
• the Sales Demo
• the First Meeting with a Potential Vendor
• the Investor Pitch

Introduction meetings are led by the person who asked for the meeting. The person or people invited to the meeting may also work to lead the discussion, or they may remain largely passive; they get to engage however they see fit because they’re under no obligation to spend any more time here than they feel necessary. People attempt to engage conversationally in most introductions, but when the social stakes increase or the prospect of mutual benefit is significantly imbalanced, the engagement becomes increasingly one-sided.

There are no strict rules for meetings of this type as a whole, but that doesn’t make them ad-hoc informal events. On the contrary, sales teams, company founders, and young professionals spend many long hours working to “hone their pitch”. They hope this careful preparation will reduce the influence of luck and the chances of an unhappy surprise. The flow of the conversation will vary depending on the situation. These meeting can go long, get cut short, and quickly veer into tangents. It’s up to the person who asked for the meeting to ensure the conversation ends with a clear next step.

To learn more, visit our Introduction Meetings Resource Center.

• A new agreement
• Commitment to further the relationship
• Support Team Escalation
• Contract Negotiations and Renewals
• Neighbor Dispute

These meetings are led by a designated negotiator or, if a neutral party isn’t available, by whomever cares about winning more. All parties are expected to engage in the discussion, although how they engage will depend entirely on the current state of their relationship. If the negotiation is tense, the engagement will be highly structured to prevent any outright breakdown. If the relationship is sound, the negotiation may be conducted in a very conversational style. Obviously, relationship quality plays a central role in the success of a negotiation or issue resolution meeting.

The format for these meetings is entirely dependent on the situation. Formal treaty negotiations between countries follow a very structured and ritualistic format. Negotiations between individual leaders, however, may be hashed out on the golf course. These meetings are a dance, so while surprises may not be welcome, they are expected.

To learn more, visit our Issue Resolution Meetings Resource Center.

Community of Practice Gatherings

• Topic-focused exchange of ideas
• Relationship development
• The Monthly Safety Committee Meeting
• The Project Manager’s Meetup
• The Lunch-n-Learn

The people at these meetings volunteer to be there because they’re interested in the topic. An organizer or chair opens the meeting and introduces any presenters. Participants are expected to engage convivially, ask questions and engage in exercises when appropriate, and network with each other when there isn’t a presentation on. These meetings are part social, part content, and the style is relaxed.

Most of these meetings begin with mingling and light conversation. Then, the organizers will call for the group’s attention and begin the prepared part of the meeting. This could follow a traditional agenda, as they do in a Toastmaster’s meeting, or it may include a group exercise or a presentation by an invited speaker. There’s time for questions, and then more time at the end to resume the casual conversations begun at the meeting start. People in attendance are there to learn about the topic, but also to make connections with others that create opportunities. Many hope for serendipity.

To learn more, visit our Community of Practice Meetings Resource Center.

• To transfer knowledge and skills
• Client Training on a New Product
• New Employee On-Boarding
• Safety Training

The trainer leads training sessions, and participants follow instructions. Participants may be there by choice, or they may be required to attend training by their employer. There is no expectation of collaboration between the trainer and the participants; these are pure transfers of information from one group to the next.

Training session formats vary widely. In the simplest form, the session involves the trainer telling participants what they believe they need to learn, and then participants ask questions. Instructional designers and training professionals can make training sessions way more engaging than that.

To learn more, visit our Training Meetings Resource Center.

• To share information that inspires (or prevents) action
• the All-Hands Meeting

Broadcast meetings are led by the meeting organizer. This person officially starts the meeting and then either runs the presentation or introduces the presenters. People invited to the meeting may have an opportunity to ask questions, but for the most part, they are expected to listen attentively. While they include presentations in the same way a Community of Practice meeting does, they do not provide an opportunity for participants to engage in casual conversation and networking. These are not collaborative events.

Broadcast meetings start and end on time. They begin with brief introductions which are followed by the presentation. Questions may be answered periodically, or held until the last few minutes. Because these meetings include announcements or information intended to inform later action, participants often receive follow-up communication: a copy of the slides, a special offer or invitation, or in the case of an all-hands meeting, a follow-up meeting with the manager to talk about how the big announcement impacts their team. The people leading a broadcast meeting do not expect and do not welcome surprises. The people participating often don’t know what to expect.

To learn more, visit our Broadcast Meetings Resource Center.

Frankly, I hesitated to include broadcast meetings and training as types, since both encompasses such a broad range of experiences. Also, these meetings aren’t collaborative nor generative in the way that other meetings are; they don’t create new outcomes for everyone involved. They stretch the definition of what I’d consider a meeting.

That said, I have heard people call broadcasts and training sessions “meetings” on multiple occasions. The all-staff meeting is often just announcements, but people call it a meeting. Project folks will schedule a “meeting to go over the new system” with a client, and that’s basically a lightweight training session.

And if we look at meetings as a tool we use to move information through our organizations, create connections between the people in our organizations, and drive work momentum, broadcast meetings and training sessions certainly fit that bill (as we’ll see in the story below).

Table: All 16 Meeting Types in the Taxonomy of Business Meetings

Now that you’ve seen the details, download this table as a spreadsheet .

Why a spreadsheet?

I expect people to use the taxonomy in one of these ways.

• Take inventory of your organization’s meetings. Which of these do you run, and which should you run? If you’re running one of these kinds of meetings and it isn’t working, what can you see here that may point to a better way?
• Make the taxonomy better. At the end of the day, our list of 16 types is just as arbitrary as MeetingSift’s list of 6 types. What did we miss? What doesn’t work? Let us know. Comments are welcome.

Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity. George Box in 1976 Journal of the American Statistical Association

Or, stated more economically, “ All models are wrong, but some are useful. ” We’ve tried to hit a mark that’s useful in a way that simpler lists were not. We invite your feedback to tell us how we did.

The 17th Type: BIG Meetings and Conferences

Just when you think you’ve really broadened your horizons and been very thoroughly inclusive, you meet someone who sets you straight. I recently had the pleasure of meeting  Maarten Vanneste , who is also a dedicated advocate for meeting design and the meeting design profession . It turns out that while we are using the same words, Maarten works in a very different world where a “meeting” might be a multi-day conference with dozens of sessions and a highly paid keynote speaker or 10. In that world, meeting planners handle logistics, room reservations, lighting requirements, branding, promotions… a wealth of detail that far exceeds anything we might worry about for even the most involved strategic planning workshop.

This is so different, why even mention it?

Because it’s another example of how using a generic word like “meeting” leads to bad assumptions . In case it isn’t clear, at Lucid when we talk about meetings and meeting design, we’re talking about the 16 types of day-to-day business meetings listed above. Professional meeting planning is a whole different kettle of fish.

How Different Types of Meetings Work Together: A Tale of 25 Meetings

To illustrate how the different kinds of meetings work together, let’s look at a typical sequence of meetings that you might expect to see in the first year of a company’s relationship with a major new client.

This is the story of two companies: ACME, makers of awesome products, and ABC Corp, a company that needs what ACME makes, and all the people working in these two companies that make their business flow.

Sam, a manager at ABC Corp, registered for the ACME company’s webinar about their exciting new product. Sam liked what he saw, and after the webinar, indicated that he’d like a call from the sales team.

Sam likes what he saw in the webinar.

Peter, ACME’s inbound sales representative, calls Sam the next day. After introducing himself, he asks Sam about ABC Corp and how ACME’s products might work for them. Peter learns that ABC Corp is very interested, and that this could be a big deal for ACME. He and Sam agree to set up a demonstration call with representatives from both companies.

Peter calls Sam and they schedule a demo meeting.

In the weekly sales meeting, Peter tells the team about the ABC Corp deal. Peter’s boss Jill knows that this deal could make the team’s quarter, and wants to make sure they do their best. She and Peter schedule a time to prepare and rehearse before the client demo.

Peter tells Jill and the sales team about the upcoming demo with Sam at ABC.

Jill, Peter and Henri (a solutions expert from ACME) meet to prepare for the demo. They begin by discussing everything they know about ABC Corp, about Sam, and about the other people coming to the demo. They review the presentation they plan to give and rehearse the demonstration, paying special attention to who will do what, and stopping to refine their presentation with examples that relate directly to ABC Corp’s business. They end the meeting with a quick recap of the key points they want to make during the demo.

Peter, Jill and Henri prepare before the demo with Sam at ABC.

Peter and Henri meet with Sam and his boss Ellen. After brief introductions, Peter confirms the agenda with Ellen and Sam. Then, Henri leads the demonstration, making sure to hit the key points they prepared earlier. Ellen and Sam are impressed, interrupting with both questions and quick comments about how the ACME product could work in their business. At the end of the demonstration, Ellen asks the ACME team to prepare a quote.

     Peter and Henri give a demo to Sam and Ellen. Ellen is impressed and asks for a quote.

Jill shares the news about the potential deal with ABC Corp in the weekly leadership meeting. For a big client like this, ACME will need to get a project team working on customizing and installing the product if the deal comes through. These projects can take months to complete, and the implementation team will have to schedule the resources. The legal team knows they’ll be called to help work on the contract (there are always redlines), and finance begins to look at how a deal like this will impact cash flow. Finally, the product team lead knows that big clients often demand special treatment, so he begins to review the roadmap and production schedule to see how they might work in any changes they’ll need to make.

Jill tells the CEO and the rest of the leadership team about the big ABC deal her sales team is working so everyone can prepare.

Peter sent an estimate and draft contract to Ellen, and she’s looking for changes. First, she wants a better price. Second, she wants a change to the product. Third, her legal team wants additional insurance on the deal and full release of liability. Fourth, her security team wants to conduct a security audit of ACME’s operations.

Peter goes over all the requests in his meeting with Ellen to make sure he understands them, but he’s in no position to authorize those changes. After the meeting, he takes the requests back to Jill.

Peter discusses the contract with Ellen. Ellen wants a better contract.

ACME’s leadership team reserves time on their calendar for tackling hard decisions each month, and this month, the ABC Corp contract is the topic. Before the meeting, each department reviews how they could respond to the ABC contract with its special demands, and comes prepared to discuss the options. Even though everyone comes prepared, the discussion still runs a full two hours as they debate the relative risks and opportunity in this contract. When they’re done, they are agreed on how they’ll respond in the next round of contract negotiations, and on how much farther beyond that they’ll go to win the deal.

The leadership team meets to decide how to respond to Ellen’s contract demands. And they do!

Several more negotiation meetings and a security review later, and the deal is signed!

Now that the contract is signed, it’s time to get the project team involved. Peter arranges a meeting between Ellen and Sam and the customer team from ACME: Gary the project manager, Henri the solutions analyst, and Esme the account manager. Going forward, Gary, Henri and Esme will handle all the communication with Sam from ABC Corp. Before the meeting ends, the ACME team schedules a trip to visit ABC Corp the following week.

     Peter introduces Sam and Ellen to the ACME team: Gary, Henri, and Esme.

Every two weeks, the ACME sales team reviews all the deals that closed and try to identify why they either lost or won the deal. When they find something that worked well, they plan to test it on other deals that haven’t yet closed, and if it works well there too, they’ll make that part of their standard sales approach. They also try to identify mistakes they made that either lost them the deal, or in cases like ABC corp, made the deal more complicated and risky than they’d like. The whole team then reviews the deals they’re working to make sure they aren’t repeating those same mistakes.

Jill, Peter and the sales review the lessons they learned closing the ABC deal.

The ACME team, Gary, Henri and Esme, arrive for a day at ABC Corp. Sam greets them, and gives them a tour of the main office. They will spend the morning giving a short demo and project overview to ABC’s leadership team. Then, in the afternoon, they’ll meet with the people on Sam’s team who will be using ACME’s product at ABC and handling the set up work on their side. Esme focuses on learning names and getting to know people. Gary connects with Sam’s project lead and starts working on the project timeline to incorporate any important dates from the ABC calendar. Henri asks everyone questions about how they work, the problems they run into on a day-to-day basis, and how they think the ACME product will help them. It’s a long exhausting day, and the team comes away with a ton of new information that they discuss on the trip back.

Sam escorts Gary, Henri, and Esme through a day of discovery meetings at ABC Corp.

Back at ACME, Henri, Esme, and Gary meet with the product deployment and customization team. Esme starts by quickly sharing a bit about what ABC Corp does and their goals. Then, Henri talks about the customer’s requirements: what they need, the special challenges they face, and anything that will have to be customized. After that, Gary shares the high-level project constraints, including how much time and budget the team gets to work with.

With the background set, everyone works together to draft the project plan. People from the implementation team suggest ways they can easily handle some requirements, and identify items that will require extra time and creativity. They begin a list of issues to solve and one of risks to manage. Starting from the desired end date and working backwards, they work together to build out a draft timeline that shows the critical path, times when they’ll need committed resources from ABC, and places where they just aren’t sure yet what they’ll find. When they feel they understand how the project will go as best they can, they review their draft plan and assign action items. Gary will work on the project timeline, matching their draft plan with available resources and factoring in holidays. Henri will contact Sam to go over questions from the implementation team, and Esme will schedule the kickoff meeting with the client team.

Gary, Henri, and Esme meet with the implementation team members to draft a project plan.

The ACME team finished the project plan and now it’s time to get started. The kickoff meeting marks the official beginning of the project. Esme has facilitation experience, so she’s guiding this initial meeting between the ACME implementation team and the people they’ll be working with at ABC. After a quick round of introductions, Sam and Ellen share a presentation about how important this project is for ABC and how it will make life better for everyone when it’s done. Then, Ellen leaves the group to work through the rest of the meeting without her, promising to return at the end to answer any questions that come up.

Next, both teams dig into the details. They go over the project plan ACME created and suggest changes. They establish performance goals for how they expect to use the product, making it clear what a successful implementation will look like. They talk about how they’ll communicate during the project and schedule a series of project update meetings. They take breaks and get to know each other, and share cookies. Then they get serious and talk about what might go wrong, and outline what they can do now to increase their odds of success.

At the end, Ellen rejoins them and the group shares their updated project plan with her. They explain changes they made and concerns they still have, and ask a few questions. Finally, they go over exactly who does what next, and set clear expectations about how and when everyone will see progress. With the kickoff complete, they all adjourn to the local pub to relax and continue getting acquainted.

Esme and Ellen lead team members from both companies through the project kickoff

Work is underway, and once per week Gary and the other project managers meet with the implementation team to review progress. Since the implementation team works on several projects at once, a problem with one project can impact progress across several others. To keep these meetings focused and efficient, and to help everyone visualize how all the pieces interact, the group meets in a room with a full wall devoted to charting project activity. People move tasks around on the wall to show progress, and mark new risks or issues with red dots. In less than 30 minutes, the group creates an updated status dashboard that anyone in the company can now review when they walk by.

Happily for Gary, the ABC project is right on schedule. For now.

Gary, the other ACME PMs, and the ACME implementation team discuss project progress every week.

Every two weeks, Gary and the implementation team from ACME meet with Sam and his team at ABC. They discuss what’s been done, and confirm the plans for the coming two weeks. They also talk through any questions that have come up since they last met. Gary leads the meeting, and this week he expects it to be pretty routine. But then Sam speaks up: there’s been a change. The ABC board decided to replace the CEO and Sam’s group is getting re-organized. Ellen is gone. Sam isn’t sure if he’ll still be involved in the project, or if his team will even still exist once the dust settles. For now, everything at ABC is on hold.

Surprise, Gary! Gary hates surprises.

Sam tells Gary there’s been a major shake-up at ABC, and the project is on hold. Oh no! What will Gary do?

Gary is freaking out, and schedules a meeting with his boss Belinda. He knows how important this project is to ACME, and he knows that the contract says they can’t send the final invoice until the work is complete. He doesn’t know how to complete the project, though, and had no idea what to tell the rest of the team. Should they stop work? Should they renegotiate the contract? Should they continue and hope it all works out?

Belinda can’t answer those questions, but she helps Gary relax and promises to get a team together who can give him the guidance he needs.

Gary meets one-on-one with his boss Belinda, and they make a plan.

Belinda, Gary, and several people from the leadership team meet to figure out how to handle this upset to the ABC project. A representative of the finance team talks about how a major delay will impact the company, and the implementation lead offers several suggestions for how they might rearrange the schedule and team members to handle a delay. While no one wants to be whipped around by these problems that aren’t their fault, the CEO is very clear that maintaining a positive relationship with the ABC people (whoever that turns out to be) is the highest priority. ACME wants this to be a profitable long-term relationship, so they can’t let a hiccup in the launch derail that. By the meeting’s end, they decide to continue work, completing everything they can do without ABC’s help. Then, if the ABC situation doesn’t resolve within the next two weeks, they’ll put a hold on the project. Gary leaves with clear instructions, and everyone understands how they’ll handle the situation in their departments.

Belinda, Gary, and the leadership team meet find a solution to the problems with the ABC project.

The shake-up at ABC corp took more than two weeks. In the end, Sam and his team stayed on the project. Hurrah! But because of the delay, ACME stopped work and reassigned the implementation team to other projects. The new (interim) CEO at ABC doesn’t care about ACME’s resource challenges; she just wants the project shipped and shipped on time. Sam’s in a tricky spot and Gary’s in a tricky spot. Gary enlists Esme’s help: as the account manager, she has negotiating options Gary doesn’t have, and perhaps together they can figure something out that helps Sam with the ABC CEO and doesn’t hurt the ACME team too badly.

When Gary, Esme, and Sam meet, they each share their constraints and goals, then focus on those places where they seem to be at an impasse. 90 minutes of back and forth, and they reach a deal. The project deadline will move out 2 weeks because of the delay at ABC, but in recompense for the missed deadline, ACME will provide 4 additional training sessions at no charge for all the people at ABC that were just reassigned and need to be brought up to speed. It’s not perfect, but it works and the project gets back on track.

Esme and Gary meet with Sam to negotiate how they’ll finish the project.

The project is nearly complete! It’s time to get the ABC people familiar with the new system and ready to put it to use. ACME product trainers run ABC employees through multiple training sessions. When an ABC employee asks a question, the trainer writes it down to share with the implementation and product teams. Sometimes these questions are easy to answer, but other times they reveal that something isn’t quite right in the product setup, or that one of the product features doesn’t work as expected. While the main goal of the training session is to educate the ABC employees, ACME trainers seize every chance they get to learn something that will help improve ACME products in the future.

ACME trainers teach the ABC team how to use the product.

What was supposed to be a 45 day project turned into an 87 day project, but now it’s done. The product is installed, it’s been tested, the training is complete: it’s time to go live.

Gary, Esme and the ACME team, along with Sam and the ABC team, meet with the ABC leadership group. They present their progress, sharing slides with graphs of tasks complete and milestones met. The leadership team asks questions along the way, making sure they understand the implications of the upcoming product launch. When everyone is satisfied, they turn to the CEO who is the decision maker in this meeting.

The launch is approved, and the new system goes live.

    Gary, Esme, Sam and their teams ask the new ABC CEO to approve the project. She does!

The ACME teams run regular after-action reviews throughout their projects, and then one larger retrospective after the final launch. For this one, they’ve reserved the whole afternoon. Everyone involved in the ABC project, from Peter on the initial sales call to the trainers who ran the last training session, all participate. This is a lot of people covering a lot of content, so they bring in a facilitator who wasn’t involved in the project to lead the meeting.

Everyone agrees that, for the most part, this was a successful project. The client is happy, the product works well, and they made money. Still, there are lessons to learn. Peter and Henri realize that they saw signs that the situation at ABC wasn’t stable in those first few conversations, but they were so eager to win the client that they dismissed them. In the future, they’ll know to pay attention more closely. Gary and the implementation team discovered ways they could keep the project running even when the client isn’t responding, and they’ll build that into their next project plan. At the end of the meeting, the group walks away with a dozen key lessons and ideas for experiments they can try to make future projects even better.

The ACME team meets to discuss what they learned from the ABC project.

The success and challenges of the ABC deal are a topic of discussion at the quarterly board meeting. The CEO sees the success of the project as an indication that ACME is ready to pursue more big clients in ABCs industry, which would be a significant strategic shift for the company. After much discussion, the board recommends investing a trial amount of marketing money to target the new market, and several board members agree to reach out to their networks to find people who might be able to help the ACME team navigate this new space.

The ACME CEO talks about the ABC project with the ACME Board, and gets approval to pursue a new market.

Sam and Esme meet to talk about how the first 3 months with ACME’s product have gone. After they spend a few minutes catching up about their kids and the weather, Esme brings up a presentation she’s prepared. It shows charts and graphs of how ABC’s product usage compares to the goals they defined before the project began. She also shows a list of the issues ABC employees have reported, and how quickly each was resolved. While not perfect, the results are better than Sam actually expected them to be. More importantly, the new CEO is happy, and that’s a huge relief for Sam. Esme and Sam spend a few minutes talking through one outstanding issue the teams are still working through, then define new performance goals for the coming quarter. The meeting goes so well, Esme asks if Sam would be willing to provide a case study for ACME’s marketing team. Sam agrees.

Esme reviews how the product is working out for the ABC team with Sam in the Quarterly Business Review.

The day after meeting with Esme, Sam gets a call from ACME’s marketing team. Together they spend 20 minutes talking about Sam’s experience. The marketing rep asks: how did you hear about us? What problem were you trying to solve? What else did you consider before deciding to go with ACME? and a host of similar questions. Of course, the call is recorded. At the end, the marketing rep thanks Sam for his time and promises to send a copy of the case study for him to review before it’s published.

This case study becomes a central piece of content in the new marketing campaign approved earlier by ACME’s board.

The ACME marketing team interviews Sam about his experience with their products for a case study.

One year later and it’s time to renew ABC’s contract. The working relationship between the two companies remains strong, so there’s little doubt that ABC will renew. Esme expects to work with Sam again on this contract, but Sam has news. ABC has just hired a new head of procurement, and she has lots of questions for Esme before they sign anything. Esme shoots the leadership team a heads-up, and settles in for a challenging meeting.

Sam tells Esme she’ll need to renew the contract with the new head of procurement. Esme gets ready.

Phew! What a journey.

We’ve talked about why it’s important to get specific about the kind of meeting you’re in, and then we looked at our taxonomy for classifying those meetings. Then, we explored how different types of meetings all work together to keep people connected and move work forward in the story of ACME and ABC.

In many ways, the story of Gary and Sam and Esme and the gang is just a story of people doing their jobs. A lot of people work on projects that run like the one described here. Sometimes everything works fine, other times they freak out; nothing unusual there. What you may not have paid much attention to before, and what the story works to highlight, is how often what happens on that journey is determined by the outcome of a meeting. The other thing we can see is that, while those guys on the implementation team may have thought the few meetings they attended were a waste of time, their contributions during meetings that helped make the ABC project a success ended up having a major impact on the direction of the company. When we show up and participate in meetings, we connect with people who will then go on to different types of meetings with other people, connecting the dots across our organization and beyond.

With that in mind, let’s close by revisiting Simon Jenkins’ gripping headline:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted.

Is it possible to run meetings that crush morale and kill productivity? Yes, of course it is. That doesn’t mean, however, that meetings are simply a useless addiction we can’t kick.

It means that some people are running the wrong kind of meetings, and others are running the right meetings in the wrong way. Not everyone does everything well. Have you ever eaten a sandwich from a vending machine? If so, you know that people are capable of producing all kinds of crap that does not reflect well–neither on them nor on the larger body of work their offering represents.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity.

Seems like a pretty nice benefit to me, and hopefully this taxonomy helps us all get there. 

General FAQ

Why do meeting types matter.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity. But if you’re running the wrong meeting, you’re pushing a heavy rock up a tall mountain.

What are the three main categories of meetings?

• Cadence Meetings – the regularly repeated meetings that make up the vast majority of the meetings held in the modern workplace.
• Catalyst Meetings – scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals.
• Learn and Influence Meetings – designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another.

What are examples of Cadence Meetings?

• Team cadence meetings
• Progress check meetings
• One-on-One meetings
• Action review meetings
• Governance cadence meetings

What are examples of Catalyst Meetings?

• Idea generation meetings
• Planning meetings
• Problem solving meetings
• Decision making meetings

What are examples of Learn and Influence Meetings?

• Sensemaking meetings
• Issue resolution meetings
• Community of Practice meetings
• Training meetings
• Broadcast meetings

To explore each of the 16 Meeting Types in more detail, visit our Interactive Chart of Meeting Types

Want More? Check out our Online Meeting  School!

Categories: meeting design

Elise Keith

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Business Meeting Planning Checklist: How to do it right and fast

There is one universal trait that unifies all types of meetings – people spend their time communicating to find a solution for the problem or achieve certain goals. You must prepare whether you are planning a meeting with new business partners or doing a routine gathering of the team members engaged in a project. Careful planning is the key to conducting efficient meetings that solve problems. Our business meeting planning checklist is designed to help plan meetings quickly and correctly.

Meeting preparation: Why would I waste time on that?

You might think that this process is very tiresome and complicated. It can be when you have loads of materials to prepare, key aspects to emphasize, etc. But keep your main goal above it all – if everything goes as planned, you will get to work faster and finish your current tasks sooner. Also, when it comes to how to prepare for a meeting , there are many things to consider, including building a hierarchy of the tasks at hand, setting time limits for discussing each one of them, and quickly assigning duties within the team. To make this process less tiresome and complicated, creating a business meeting planning checklist is ideal for meeting preparation.

There are tons of articles and materials explaining how to prepare for a meeting, but most of them describe typical psychological tips. Modern times require technical solutions such as automation of the information gathering routines, advanced meeting planning software , etc. When everything is implemented right, you will be saving a lot of time in the long run. Your meetings will become shorter, and you will need them less because everything will be structured and precise.

Every meeting should have its set duration based on the number of questions to discuss. This way, you won’t have to waste time on “talking” instead of “doing.” When your time bank is empty, and you still haven’t come up with a good idea, better cross out the question from the agenda for now and discuss it at the next meeting. Remember that it gets hard to find an adequate solution when everyone’s fixated on the same thing. Such little tips can also give a good insight on how to prepare for a meeting and keep your workflow efficient.

When it comes to business meetings involving several departments and multiple participants, you will need to plan even more to make every minute count. Going to a serious event without meeting preparation is the first step to failure. Here is a short-list of “nice-to-haves:”

• Checklist for the meeting.
• Prepared agenda.
• Information to support and develop the agenda.
• Distributable feedback forms to gather reviews from meeting attendees

The most important idea you must understand is that the time spent preparing is an investment. Any meeting preparation must be well-balanced so that you won’t spend hours preparing for short gatherings. Optimize your time as it is the most important resource we have in our possession. Incorporate additional planning meeting tools into your strategy to improve your time-management skills, boost working productivity, and even save some money on canceled meetings you no longer need. This alone is already a good enough motivation to learn how to prepare for a meeting.

Our Complete Business Meeting Planning Checklist

Without a well-thought-out structure, your session with the team will slide into chaos, leaving you with questions unanswered and time wasted. Furthermore, an unsuccessful meeting can interrupt the normal workflow by shifting the focus to less relevant aspects (in the current scenario). That is why you need to plan your meetings.

Every host wants to be sure that their meetings are efficient but not very time-consuming. Here we gathered the most popular tips from managers in small business and big corporations. Consider reading them to understand how to organize a meeting.

• Coordinate schedules: When you are hosting a meeting, coordinate the schedule of all meeting members.
• Prepare materials: as the meeting organizer, prepare all the needed materials to share with the team.
• Determine the purpose: Set the main goals for the session. For example, decide whether you want to inform the employees about the newest updates or need to get a solution for the concrete problem.
• Develop an agenda: Develop the appropriate agenda depending on the previous paragraph. If you intend on having a meeting that will require more time than usual, inform all attendees beforehand. Don’t forget to include bathroom breaks and time for refreshment breaks.
• Arrange a place to meet: Make all necessary arrangements to reserve a meeting room big enough to host attending people comfortably. Be sure that the schedule is suitable for all main speakers expected to participate in the meeting.
• Time & Location: Share information about the time and location of your meeting.
• Double-check the equipment you will be using during the session. A digital presentation, for example, will require a laptop, powerful projector, and a big screen. All these devices must be ready before you start, so all you will need to do is connect your computer and push the button to start presenting.
• Prepare visuals: Prepare other visual materials, print them if necessary. It is also recommended to bring handouts with the most important information, so every participant will have a chance to make their notes in a structured way.
• Simulate the beginning of the meeting: This tip is optional, but we still recommend following it. When all preparations are done according to the business meeting planning checklist, do a quick test to simulate the beginning of the meeting. Hassle-free start allows you to get right to the point of the meeting faster.
• Send a reminder: The day before the meeting, send a reminder to all attendees. Everyone needs to be at the location before the meeting, organize them gently.

Download our Full Business Meeting Planning Checklist

According to the statistics, there is one reason across the board that consumes and wastes working time on all kinds of projects like no other. It is called “too many meetings” (learn more about how to reduce unnecessary meetings ). Research shows that employees and managers in big corporations participate in 70 meetings monthly spending more than one-third of their time talking and listening instead of doing actual work.

Don’t get the wrong idea here. Meetings are important, and you need them to keep your team updated. The problem is having ineffective meetings. However, there is a simple and elegant solution to this. Download our business meeting planning checklist free of charge. Following these guidelines will help you conduct more efficient meetings that will save your resources, time, and money.

It is a good example proving that you can keep everything neatly organized. By performing the recommended actions from this meeting checklist, you will optimize the meeting routines for your team. So, no one will be feeling exhausted from emotional burnout after discussing the same project over and over again. Print our checklist or save it on your mobile device for the next meeting and see for yourself. In the long run, the effectiveness of your meets with the team will increase inevitably. Sign up for the free trial of yoyomeeting for a more advanced approach inside your Outlook 365.

Friendly advice and our conclusion

Now you understand the importance of planning and meetings preparations. To make things easier for you, we have the tool that will be of great help in your business and daily routines. It is a universal instrument for managing meetings in all aspects imaginable. Facilitate the creation of meeting minutes, meeting agendas, and assign action items with the yoyomeeting add-in for Office 365.  Start your free trial now!

Improve your meetings with yoyomeeting for Outlook

With all these tips, you might be already great at planning a meeting. But to make life easier, you might want to read how our meeting management software can help with the meeting management process .

Apart from the Outlook add-in, we offer a lot more content on meeting management with hacks on how to improve your meeting culture. So follow us on Facebook  or connect to our   LinkedIn company profile  to stay in the loop and to get the latest on meeting management excellence.

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How To Write Effective Meeting Minutes (with Templates and Samples)

New to writing meeting minutes.

Whether you’ve been tasked with taking notes for a committee or you’ve been appointed Secretary to the Board of your organization, preparing meeting minutes doesn’t have to be an arduous task. Here are some tips and ideas that will help you get started with writing and preparing effective meeting minutes, as well as a meeting minutes sample and a meeting minutes template that you can follow.

This guide on how to write meeting minutes was prepared by WildApricot to help the volunteers and/or staff of small non-profits and membership organizations who may be new to the task of taking and preparing minutes of meeting for committees or Boards of Directors.

Please note that since the format, style and content requirements for meeting minutes varies depending on the organization and the type of committee or Board, this article offers only general guidelines to help get you started.

What Are Meeting Minutes?

Meeting minutes, or mom (for minutes of meeting) can be defined as the written record of everything that’s happened during a meeting. They’re used to inform people who didn’t attend the meeting about what happened, or to keep track of what was decided during the meeting so that you can revisit it and use it to inform future decisions.

What Should You Include When Writing Meeting Minutes?

The five steps that you must include are:

• Pre-Planning
• Record taking – at the meeting
• Minutes writing or transcribing
• Distributing or sharing of meeting minutes
• Filing or storage of minutes for future reference

For more detail on each step, read on!

Read more: 13 Meeting Minutes Templates for More Productive Nonprofit Board Meetings

What Is the Purpose of Meeting Minutes?

You shouldn’t be intimidated by the term “minutes”, since it’s actually a little misleading. After all, your committee or Board doesn’t want or need a record of its meeting proceedings minute by minute!  But it is important to capture the essence of the meeting, including details such as:

• decisions made (motions made, votes, etc.)
• next steps planned
• identification and tracking of action items

Minutes are a tangible record of the meeting for its participants and a source of information for members who were unable to attend. In some cases, meeting minutes can act as a reference point, for example:

• when a meeting’s outcomes impact other collaborative activities or projects within the organization
• minutes can serve to notify (or remind) individuals of tasks assigned to them and/or timelines

Download our Meeting Minute Checklist for Associations and Nonprofits with examples and learn how to take better minutes. 

Why Are They Called Minutes of a Meeting?

According to Today I Found Out , the “minutes” of “meeting minutes” don’t refer to the minute measurement of time, but to the “minute” (my-newt) notes taken during meetings.

What’s Involved With Meeting Minutes?

As mentioned above, there are essentially five steps involved with meeting minutes:

1. Pre-Planning Meeting Minutes:

A well-planned meeting helps ensure effective meeting minutes.  If the Chair and the Secretary or minutes-taker work together to ensure the agenda and meeting are well thought out, it makes minute taking much easier. For example, depending on the meeting structure and the tools you use, the minutes-taker could work with the Chair to create a document format that works as an agenda and minutes outline as well.

What Is the Agenda of a Meeting?

Meeting agenda = outline:

At the very least, it’s important to get a copy of the meeting agenda and use it as a guide or outline for taking notes, setting up your mom format, and preparing the minutes – with the order and numbering of items on the minutes of meeting matching those of the agenda.

In addition, the agenda and/or meeting notice also provides information that will need to be included in the minutes, such as:

• the names of all the meeting attendees, including guests or speakers
• documents that are sent out with the agenda or handed out in the meeting – copies (digital or hard copy) of handouts should be stored with the meeting minutes for future reference and for sharing with those who were unable to attend the meeting (and others as determined by the meeting’s Chair).

Clarifying Expectations:

When you take on a new role as minutes-taker or Secretary, be sure to ask the Chair of the committee or Board what their expectations are of your role during the meeting, as well as the type of detail he/she expects in the minutes.  For example, if your Board or committee will be dealing with motions, or voting on items/issues, be clear on whether you need to offer names of those making motions, seconding, etc. If you will be dealing with this type of procedures, you (and your Chair) may want to refer to Robert’s Rules of Order .

2. What Should Be Included in Meeting Minutes?

Before you start taking notes, it’s important to understand the type of information you need to record at the meeting. As noted earlier, your organization may have required content and a specific mom format that you’ll need to follow, but generally, meeting minutes usually include the following:

• Date and time of the meeting
• Names of the meeting participants and those unable to attend (e.g., “regrets”)
• Acceptance or corrections/amendments to previous meeting minutes
• Actions taken or agreed to be taken
• Voting outcomes – e.g., (if necessary, details regarding who made motions; who seconded and approved or via show of hands, etc.)
• Motions taken or rejected
• Items to be held over
• New business
• Next meeting date and time

You can find more templates and details on formatting meeting minutes here.

Tips that might help your note taking:

• Create an outline – as discussed earlier, having an outline (or template) based on the agenda makes it easy for you to simply jot down notes, decisions, etc. under each item as you go along. If you are taking notes by hand, consider including space below each item on your outline for your hand-written notes, then print these out and use this to capture minutes.
• Check-off attendees as they enter the room – if you know the meeting attendees, you can check them off as they arrive, if not have folks introduce themselves at the start of the meeting or circulate an attendance list they can check-off themselves.
• Record decisions or notes on action items in your outline as soon as they occur to be sure they are recorded accurately
• Ask for clarification if necessary – for example, if the group moves on without making a decision or an obvious conclusion, ask for clarification of the decision and/or next steps involved.
• Don’t try to capture it all – you can’t keep up if you try to write down the conversation verbatim, so be sure to simply (and clearly) write (or type) just the decisions, assignments, action steps, etc.
• Record it – literally, if you are concerned about being able to keep up with note taking, consider recording the meeting (e.g., on your smart phone, iPad, recording device, etc.) but be sure to let participants know they are being recording. While you don’t want to use the recording to create a word-for-word transcript of the meeting, the recording can come in handy if you need clarification.

Download our Meeting Minute Checklist for Associations and Nonprofits with sample minutes taken at a meeting and learn how to take better minutes. 

Meeting Minutes Template:

Here’s a simple template you can refer to next time you need to take meeting minutes.

You can also find more meeting minutes templates made for Microsoft Word here.

Meeting Minutes Sample:

Still wondering if you’re taking notes correctly? Here’s a sample of what meeting minutes at a board meeting might look like.

3. The Minutes Writing Process

Once the meeting is over, it’s time to pull together your notes and write the minutes. Here are some tips that might help:

• Try to write the minutes as soon after the meeting as possible while everything is fresh in your mind.
• Review your outline and if necessary, add additional notes or clarify points raised. Also check to ensure all decisions, actions and motions are clearly noted.
• For Board of Director’s minutes in particular, we recommend including a short description of each action taken, as well as the rationale behind the decision
• If there was a lot of discussion before passing a motion, write down the major arguments for and against
• Edit to ensure brevity and clarity, so the minutes are easy to read
• Be objective
• Write in the same tense throughout
• Avoid using names other than to record motions and seconds.
• Avoid personal observations — the minutes should be solely fact-based
• If you need to refer to other documents, don’t try to summarize them. Rather, simply indicate where they can be found or attach them as an appendix

4. Do Meeting Minutes Have To Be Approved?

Before you share your meeting minutes, make sure that the Chair has reviewed and either revised and/or approved the minutes for circulation. They are not an official record of a meeting unless this has taken place. Depending on your Board, minutes may also be formally approved at the beginning of the next meeting.

5. Distributing or Sharing Meeting Minutes

As the official “minutes-taker” or Secretary, your role may include dissemination of the minutes.

Online sharing

The method of sharing or distribution will depend on the tools that you and your organization use. Since minutes and other documentation can create a pile of paper, it’s great if you can use a paperless sharing process. For example, if you are using a word processing tool (e.g., Microsoft Word) that doesn’t offer online sharing, you might want to create a PDF of the document and send this and the other attachments or meeting documentation via email. Alternately, if you are all using Google docs – for meeting invitations, agenda and additional document sharing – you can simply “share” the document with that group once it has been finalized. Committee or Board members can simply read the documents online and save a few trees!

Sharing in the Cloud?

If your organization is using a cloud-based membership management system (like WildApricot ), you can publish the minutes as a web page and give access only to the committee or Board members, depending on your organization’s needs. Through members-only webpages, you can create a secure online Intranet for your Board and committees.

Tools Specifically For Meeting Minutes:

If you are wondering about the types of tools you might use specifically for meeting minutes, here are some tools that organizations we’ve worked with have found helpful:

• Google Docs:  Also supports collaborative note taking. [Here are some meeting minute sample templates in Google docs.  If you send out a meeting request using Google Calendar, you can attach a Google doc agenda outline. Once minutes are crafted (using the outline), you can simply share the document with the group using their email addresses.]
• OneNote :  (if you are a Microsoft user) – Very fast and allows for organization of notes.  Also support audio recording with corresponding note time-stamping.
• Lucid Meetings: Fantastic meeting-tool to automate your meeting processes like notes, attendance, and organization.
• Evernote :  Great note taking tool.
• Agreedo : supports creation of meeting minutes and tracking the results.
• minutes.io :  allows you to quickly take meeting minutes with hotkey shortcuts and the ability to work online or offline.

6. Filing/Storage of Meeting Minutes

Most committees and Boards review and either approve or amend the minutes at the beginning of the subsequent meeting. Once you’ve made any required revisions, the minutes will then need to be stored for future reference. Some organizations may store these online (e.g., in Google docs or SkyDrive) and also back these up on an external hard drive.  You may also need to print and store hard copies as well or provide these to a staff member or Chair for filing.

And… If You’re a Nonprofit with Regular Board and Member Meetings

If you’re a nonprofit with regular board and member meetings and you want to save time and money managing your organization, get a free trial of WildApricot , an all-in-one membership management software which allows you to:

• Easily schedule online events with instant online payment processing and automated invoices.
• Create a stunning website with online member applications.
• Access an easy-to-search and filter contact database.
• Send out professionally-designed newsletters and emails.
• and much more.

Find out all the features of WildApricot’s free membership management software here .

WildApricot is also the the #1 rated membership management software used by over 20,000 organizations every day. Get your free trial now .

Additional Resources

• Watch this free Expert Webinar by Dr. Richard Lent on Leading Great Board Meetings: How to Structure Yours for Success
• Seven Secrets for Successful Board Meetings
• 8 Best Practices for Creating Meeting Minutes
• The Dos and Don’ts of Meeting Minute Templates
• The Top 11 Online Payment Service Providers in 2021

In Closing…Enjoy Your New Role!

Meeting minutes are important – after all, they capture the essential information of a meeting. But taking and preparing minutes doesn’t have to be a daunting task. We hope this article helps meeting minutes newbies in getting started in creating effective meeting minutes for your organization.

Thank you for reading our guide on how to write meeting minutes!

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Know Labs to Present Clinical Research at the 2024 American Association of Clinical Endocrinology Annual Meeting

The Company’s oral abstract presentation features results from its clinical study that demonstrate the accuracy and medical application of its proprietary sensor.

Know Labs, Inc. (NYSE American: KNW), an emerging developer of non-invasive medical diagnostic technology, today announced it has been selected for an oral abstract presentation at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology (AACE) Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 9, 2024 from 11:15 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. CDT.

The Company will present an abstract titled, “ Efficacy of a Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitor for Diabetes Management Using a Radiofrequency Sensor and Machine Learning .” Know Labs first announced these interim results in March of this year from its clinical research protocol involving people with diabetes, using venous blood as a comparative reference and a machine learning model trained on data collected in a lab setting.

During 2024, as the Company continues on the path toward FDA clearance, Know Labs will deploy the KnowU™, its wearable, non-invasive continuous glucose monitor (CGM) in large-scale, external clinical trials while advancing model techniques and making refinements to the device. These new studies will help determine the technology’s performance throughout continuous wear, in more real-world environments, and within more extreme glycemic ranges (below 70 mg/dL and above 350 mg/dL). To stay updated on the latest results, visit www.knowlabs.co/research-and-development .

About Know Labs, Inc.

Know Labs, Inc. is a public company whose shares trade on the NYSE American Exchange under the stock symbol “KNW.” The Company’s platform technology uses spectroscopy to direct electromagnetic energy through a substance or material to capture a unique molecular signature. The technology can be integrated into a variety of wearable, mobile or bench-top form factors. This patented and patent-pending technology makes it possible to effectively identify and monitor analytes that could only previously be performed by invasive and/or expensive and time-consuming lab-based tests. The first application of the technology will be in a product marketed as a non-invasive glucose monitor. The device will provide the user with accessible and affordable real-time information on blood glucose levels. This product will require U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance prior to its introduction to the market.

Safe Harbor Statement

This release contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements appear in a number of places in this release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of Know Labs, Inc., its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) financing plans; (ii) trends affecting its financial condition or results of operations; (iii) growth strategy and operating strategy; and (iv) performance of products. You can identify these statements by the use of the words “may,” “will,” “could,” “should,” “would,” “plans,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “continue,” “estimate,” “project,” “intend,” “likely,” “forecast,” “probable,” “potential,” and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Know Labs, Inc.’s ability to control, and actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. These risks and uncertainties also include such additional risk factors as are discussed in the Company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2023, Forms 10-Q and 8-K, and in other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. These documents are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor Relations section of our website at www.knowlabs.co . The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made.

For Know Labs Media Inquiries: Matter Health Abby Mayo [email protected] Ph. (617) 272-0592 Know Labs, Inc. Contact: Jordyn Hujar [email protected] Ph. (206) 629-6414

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240509350016/en/

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How Warren Buffett, set to turn 94 this year, is thinking about his age and his business

• Warren Buffett made several jokes about his age during Saturday's annual shareholder meeting.
• Buffett will be turning 94 this year and has already made plans for a successor.
• "I shouldn't be taking on any four-year employment contracts," Buffett joked, per CNBC.

Warren Buffett is very aware that he won't be at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway forever.

The 93-year-old Berkshire Hathaway Chairman took the stage on Saturday at the company's annual shareholder meeting to reflect on how the company should operate when he no longer calls the shots.

Buffett, who took over the investment company in 1965, has long expressed the desire to keep making decisions at Berkshire Hathaway for as long as he can — he said during the meeting that "anybody that wants to retire at 65 would be disqualified from being CEO of Berkshire."

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But the multi-billionaire acknowledged, humorously at times, that he does have his limits.

Buffett expressed thoughts about how the company will move forward without him — though the nonagenarian said he felt "fine" at his age.

"I know a little bit about actuarial tables and I would say this: I shouldn't be taking on any four-year employment contracts like several people are doing in this world," Buffett said, per CNBC.

Buffett said that Greg Abel, his hand-picked successor and former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, would take control of investing decisions when he passed.

"I would leave the capital allocation to Greg and he understands businesses extremely well," Buffett said during the meeting's Q&A portion, per CNBC. "If you understand businesses, you'll understand common stocks."

Beyond his own mortality, Buffett also reflected on the death of his longtime business partner and friend, Charlie Munger , who died in November of last year. During Saturday's presentation, the chairman accidentally referred to Abel, his new right-hand man, as Munger.

Abel took it in stride, calling it a "great honor" to be mistaken for Munger.

Buffett also discussed his decision to slash the company's stake in Apple , aired his concerns about AI and deepfakes , and articulated his hope to keep going long enough for next year's shareholders meeting.

"I not only hope you come next year, but I hope I come next year," Buffett said in his sign-off. Representatives for Buffett did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Watch: How NYC's oldest chocolate house survived a century

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Fed leaves rates unchanged, flags 'lack of further progress' on inflation

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• Policy rate remains in 5.25%-5.50% range
• Fed policymakers concerned by recent inflation data
• Markets take 'dovish' view of Fed chief's remarks

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Reporting by Howard Schneider; Additional reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir, Michael S. Derby and Ann Saphir; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Paul Simao

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Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on Sunday he expected this week's federal budget would help ease the country's stubbornly high inflation, as many Australians continue to grapple with cost-of-living pressures.

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Fed Holds Rates Steady, Noting Lack of Progress on Inflation

The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged for a sixth straight meeting and suggested that rates would stay high for longer.

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By Jeanna Smialek

Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged and signaled that they were wary about how stubborn inflation was proving, paving the way for a longer period of high borrowing costs.

The Fed held rates steady at 5.3 percent on Wednesday, leaving them at a more than two-decade high, where they have been set since July. Central bankers reiterated that they needed “greater confidence” that inflation was coming down before reducing them.

“Readings on inflation have come in above expectations,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said at a news conference after the release of the central bank’s rate decision.

‘Lack of Further Progress’ on Inflation Keeps Interest Rates High

Jerome h. powell, the fed chair, said that the central bank needed “greater confidence” that inflation was coming down before it decided to cut interest rates, which are at a two-decade high..

Today, the F.O.M.C. decided to leave our policy interest rate unchanged and to continue to reduce our securities holdings, though, at a slower pace. Our restrictive stance of monetary policy has been putting downward pressure on economic activity and inflation, and the risks to achieving our employment and inflation goals have moved toward better balance over the past year. However, in recent months, inflation has shown a lack of further progress toward our 2 percent objective, and we remain highly attentive to inflation risks. We’ve stated that we do not expect that it will be appropriate to reduce the target range for the federal funds rate until we have gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent. So far this year, the data have not given us that greater confidence. In particular, and as I noted earlier, readings on inflation have come in above expectations. It is likely that gaining such greater confidence will take longer than previously expected.

The Fed stands at a complicated economic juncture. After months of rapid cooling, inflation has proved surprisingly sticky in early 2024. The Fed’s preferred inflation index has made little progress since December, and although it is down sharply from its 7.1 percent high in 2022, its current 2.7 percent is still well above the Fed’s 2 percent goal. That calls into question how soon and how much officials will be able to lower interest rates.

“What we’ve said is that we need to be more confident” that inflation is coming down sufficiently and sustainably before cutting rates, Mr. Powell said. “It appears that it’s going to take longer for us to reach that point of confidence.”

The Fed raised interest rates quickly between early 2022 and the summer of 2023, hoping to slow the economy by tamping down demand, which would in turn help to wrestle inflation under control. Higher Fed rates trickle through financial markets to push up mortgage, credit card and business loan rates, which can cool both consumption and company expansions over time.

But Fed policymakers stopped raising rates last year because inflation had begun to come down and the economy appeared to be cooling, making them confident that they had done enough. They have held rates steady for six straight meetings, and as recently as March, they had expected to make three interest rate cuts in 2024. Now, though, inflation’s recent staying power has made that look less likely.

Many economists have begun to push back their expectations for when rate reductions will begin, and investors now expect only one or two this year. Odds that the Fed will not cut rates at all this year have increased notably over the past month.

Mr. Powell made it clear on Wednesday that officials still thought that their next policy move was likely to be a rate cut and said that a rate increase was “unlikely.” But he demurred when asked whether three reductions were likely in 2024.

He laid out pathways in which the Fed would — or would not — cut rates. He said that if inflation came down or the labor market weakened, borrowing costs could come down.

On the other hand, “if we did have a path where inflation proves more persistent than expected, and where the labor market remains strong, but inflation is moving sideways and we’re not gaining greater confidence, well, that could be a case in which it could be appropriate to hold off on rate cuts,” Mr. Powell said.

Investors responded favorably to Mr. Powell’s news conference, likely because he suggested that the bar for raising rates was high and that rates could come down in multiple scenarios. Stocks rose and bond yields fell as Mr. Powell spoke.

“The big surprise was how reluctant Powell was to talk about rate hikes,” said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan. “He really seemed to say that the options are cutting or not cutting.”

Still, a longer period of high Fed rates will be felt from Wall Street to Main Street. Key stock indexes fell in April as investors came around to the idea that borrowing costs could remain high for longer, and mortgage rates have crept back above 7 percent, making home buying pricier for many want-to-be owners.

Fed officials are planning to keep rates high for a reason: They want to be sure to stamp out inflation fully to prevent quickly rising prices from becoming a more permanent part of America’s economy.

Policymakers are closely watching how inflation data shape up as they try to figure out their next steps. Economists still expect that price increases will start to slow down again in the months to come, in particular as rent increases fade from key price measures.

“My expectation is that we will, over the course of this year, see inflation move back down,” Mr. Powell said on Wednesday. But he added that “my confidence in that is lower than it was because of the data that we’ve seen.”

As the Fed tries to assess the outlook, officials are likely to also keep an eye on momentum in the broader economy. Economists generally think that when the economy is hot — when companies are hiring a lot, consumers are spending and growth is rapid — prices tend to increase more quickly.

Growth and hiring have not slowed down as much as one might have expected given today’s high interest rates. A key measure of wages climbed more rapidly than expected this week, and economists are now closely watching a jobs report scheduled for release on Friday for any hint that hiring remains robust.

But so far, policymakers have generally been comfortable with the economy’s resilience.

That is partly because growth has been driven by improving economic supply: Employers have been hiring as the labor pool grows, for instance, in part because immigration has been rapid.

Beyond that, there are hints that the economy is beginning to cool around the edges. Overall economic growth slowed in the first quarter, though that pullback came from big shifts in business inventories and international trade, which often swing wildly from one quarter to the next. Small-business confidence is low . Job openings have come down substantially.

Mr. Powell said Wednesday that he thought higher borrowing costs were weighing on the economy.

“We believe that our policy stance is in a good place and is appropriate to the current situation — we believe it’s restrictive,” Mr. Powell said.

As the Fed waits to make interest rate cuts, some economists have begun to warn that the central bank’s adjustments could collide with the political calendar.

Donald J. Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee, has already suggested that interest rate cuts this year would be a political move meant to help President Biden’s re-election bid by pumping up the economy. Some economists think that cutting in the weeks leading up to the election — either in September or November — could put the Fed in an uncomfortable position, drawing further ire and potentially making the institution look political.

The Fed is independent of the White House, and its officials have repeatedly said that they will not take politics into account when setting interest rates, but will rather be guided by the data.

Mr. Powell reiterated on Wednesday that the Fed did not and would not take into account political considerations in timing its rate moves.

“If you go down that road, where do you stop? So we’re not on that road,” Mr. Powell said. “It just isn’t part of our thinking.”

Jeanna Smialek covers the Federal Reserve and the economy for The Times from Washington. More about Jeanna Smialek

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Before You Start Collaborating with Someone, Talk About Your Work Styles

• Anke Thiele

Having an explicit conversation about your preferences will set the relationship up for success.

When you’re working with new people, spending time upfront to have an explicit and open conversation about each other’s work styles and preferences can prove to be one of the best time investments. This “style alignment” conversation can lay a foundation for trust and understanding and help you set agreements for how to successfully work together. Yet, many people shy away from having these conversations for two reasons. First, they worry that it will take up too much time. Second, they fear that it might make style differences more obvious and aren’t sure how to bridge those. By having open and deep conversations about style and preferences, something powerful happens. If you better understand where someone is coming from, you don’t just react to their behavior and feel annoyed by making potentially false assumptions about why someone is behaving a certain way. Instead, you can bring more compassion and less reactivity into your work relationships and maybe even preempt work conflict.

After two consecutive reorganizations, my coaching client, Kara, an experienced product group manager, found herself in a new reporting relationship with the chief product officer. Throughout her career, Kara had worked under managers with different leadership styles and, with experience, had gotten a better sense of her own over the years. While she was eager to start with her new boss, she wanted to make sure not to lose some of the unique ways she had been able to share her ideas and gain support for her teams. Kara wondered what she could do to set a strong foundation for a productive work relationship with her manager, how to effectively work together with people who may have different work styles, and reduce the likelihood of misunderstandings right from the beginning.

• Anke Thiele , MBA, MS Psych., MCC, is an executive coach and leadership consultant who works with senior leaders and their teams. She is the founder of The Human Link , a psychologist and certified meditation teacher, who has taught mindfulness at tech companies including Google for many years. She also works as a team coach and extended faculty at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Connect with her on LinkedIn .

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