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• Meeting agenda examples: How to plan, w ...

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

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

Everything you need to know about waterfall project management

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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Project Management

16 meeting agenda examples & free templates.

Evan Gerdisch

Content Strategist

March 25, 2024

We’ve all been a part of team meetings where most participants are clueless about the purpose of the meeting, and the speakers steer the discussion off-track. 

What follows is a true catastrophe. 

You’d find your team clocking in many unproductive hours because of the ‘said meeting’ without achieving any objective.

Good news! 

A meeting agenda can help you avoid this and be the answer to all your woes. ✌

An effective meeting agenda is a plan you share with your meeting participants. It’ll help your team set clear expectations of what needs to happen before, during, and after the meeting. 

In this article, we’ll discuss what a meeting agenda is and learn the five key steps involved in writing one. We’ll also look at 16 meeting agenda template options and explore the reasons why your entire team needs a meeting agenda. 

Benefits of an Effective Meeting Agenda

How to write a meeting agenda 5 key steps, how to use ai for meeting agendas, team meeting agenda examples, 1. weekly 1-on-1 meeting agenda template by clickup, 2. all hands team meeting agenda template by clickup, 3. scrum meeting agenda template by clickup, 4. meeting notes agenda template by clickup, 5. project post mortem template by clickup, 6. meeting minutes template by clickup, 7. sprint retrospective brainstorm meeting template by clickup, 8. team meeting agenda template by meeting booster, 9. board meeting agenda template by template lab, 10. project kickoff meeting agenda template by docket, 11. meeting dashboard template by clickup, 12. brainstorm meeting agenda template by owl labs, 13. board of directors meeting minutes template by clickup, 14. hr meeting agenda template by where, 15. marketing meeting agenda template by hugo, 16. project management meeting agenda template by hypercontext, who benefits from using a meeting agenda, cross-off stress from your work life with team meeting agendas.

If you’re more of a visual learner check out this vlog on meeting agendas!

Let’s get started.

Sitting through a meeting that doesn’t have an agenda is pretty similar to setting out on a treasure hunt without a map. 

A meeting agenda allows your team to set the meeting’s cadence , prepare for the meeting topic, ensure that everyone is on the same page, and keep them on track to hit their objectives. 

Meeting agendas:

• Give the meeting a clear purpose
• Help you stay on track
• Help define responsibilities

It consists of a list of topics, action items , and activities you want to discuss during the meeting. 

A simple meeting agenda could be a short bulleted list. More detailed agendas include descriptions for each agenda item, reference material, and expected outcomes for each discussion topic. 

Formal agendas also include timing and presenter information for each agenda item.

An example of a formal agenda can be a city council agenda used in a state’s city council meeting. These agendas can have an open forum section that makes time for public comment. 

But formal meeting agendas aren’t restricted to the government. 

You can use them in your company’s meetings too. You just have to choose the agenda that suits your team the best . 

Now that you know what a meeting agenda is, let’s look at how you can write one. ✍

Here are the five easy steps you can follow to create the right meeting agenda for your team:

1. Establish the meeting type

Not informing your team about the type of meeting they’d be attending can cause a lot of confusion. 

Imagine a team member attending a regular meeting only to find out that it’s their performance review . 

The horror! 😱

To avoid catching people off-guard, make sure you all know what the meeting is about.

Meetings can be of several different types, including:

• Team meeting: also referred to as a staff meeting, these are opportunities for your team to discuss various business aspects
• Board meeting: a formal meeting among your organization’s board of directors. They’re generally held at regular intervals to review team performances and policy issues
• Executive session: held by board members regularly before their routine board meetings
• Recurring meeting: daily, weekly, or monthly meetings that repeat regularly
• Project kickoff meeting : conducted at the beginning of every new project to inform the team about project objectives, deliverables, and timelines
• Brainstorming meeting: used to flesh out a new idea with your teams in a conducive brainstorming session
• Feedback meeting: hosted to gather constructive feedback from your team regarding new projects and processes
• Agile meeting : a special meeting used to hold hyper-focused discussions for agile teams to conduct sprint reviews, share valuable project information, customer feedback, project updates, etc.
• Scrum meeting: uses a scrum meeting agenda that may include sprint planning, daily standups, product backlog refinement, sprint reviews, etc.
• Retrospective meeting: held after project completion to discuss what went well and what didn’t
• Onboarding meeting : help new hires understand professional expectations in their work environment
• Committee meetings: help a subgroup of team members from your company form a committee to achieve any special function. 

2. State the objective of the meeting

What are the top reasons you’re having a meeting with your team? 

Do you want to update them about a project? Do you want their insights on something? 

Clearly stating the meeting objective gives your team a heads-up on what’s coming their way. At the very least, they’ll know whether to bring a project report or a beer to the meeting.

3. Identify specific meeting topics

Once you have a clear meeting goal, make a list of discussion topics you want your team to cover.

We’re going to let you in on our secret to make your meetings more engaging.

Make sure to pick discussion topics that affect everyone in the meeting. 

This way, you’ll have all your team members willing to participate in the discourse. 

Related: Our remote guide to Virtual Meeting Etiquette !

4. Allocate time to discuss each topic

Meetings are expensive and can be difficult to organize. They’re only productive when they can utilize time effectively. 

That’s why it’s important to allocate a certain amount of time to discuss each meeting topic. And you won’t end up straying and spending all your available time on a single topic. 

Using a consent agenda is another time-saving trick for your meetings. A consent agenda groups recurring discussion topics into a single agenda item that you can easily cross-off. 

These measures will make sure your meetings don’t become a time-suck and a calendar clogger. 👀

5. Include a list of necessary documents

Let’s say you hold a meeting with your project stakeholders . 

One way to make the meeting more productive is to share all project documents through your team meeting agendas ahead of the meeting. 

Think of this as one of the pre-reading activities your teacher would ask you to do back in school. 🤓 This practice sets the right context for every participant in the meeting and empowers them to contribute to the discourse. 

Now that you know what to do, let’s look at some meeting agenda examples to help you see what these steps look like in action. 

Bonus: Conference agenda templates !

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can significantly streamline meeting management, turning every gathering into an efficient and productive experience. By integrating AI with project management tools like ClickUp Brain , teams can leverage automation to handle routine tasks and enhance meeting productivity. Here’s how AI can assist:

• AI-powered Meeting Agendas : ClickUp’s AI capabilities can draft personalized meeting agendas based on the participants’ roles, previous meeting notes, and ongoing project demands. By analyzing prior meeting notes and objectives, AI can help ensure that each meeting covers all critical points without missing a beat.
• Smart Summarization : Post-meeting, AI can condense hours of discussion notes into succinct, actionable summaries. This feature enables participants to swiftly get the gist of the meeting and review any points they may have missed, ensuring everyone is aligned and informed.
• Instant Action Items Creation : ClickUp AI can identify potential tasks from your notes and automatically create action items in ClickUp. This seamless transition from discussion to execution means that follow-ups are clear, time-bound, and less likely to be overlooked or forgotten.

Embedding AI in your meeting processes not only saves time but also enhances the quality of your meetings. It helps to maintain focus, track progress against objectives, and foster a culture of accountability by automating routine yet crucial aspects of meeting management.

Here’s a couple simple meeting agenda example for your reference:

Design Team Meeting

Date: 02/07/24

Time: 09:00 am – 09:45 am

Meeting Participants: @SpongeBob, @Patrick, @Mr.Krabs, @Squidward

Meeting’s Purpose:

• Develop a new website page for product testimonials

a. Before the meeting:

• Every attendee must review the document on product testimonials

b. Discussion topics:

• Review product testimonials document (10 min)
• Discuss the content you want to include on the web page (10 min, @Name)
• Present sample designs for the web page (15 min, @Name)
• Share suggestions and vote on the website design (10 min)

c. Action items:

• Create a timeline for design deliverables – @SpongeBob
• Share first cut of the web page design – @Patrick
• Schedule and make an itinerary for a second meeting to finalize design – @Mr.Krabs

Sales Team Weekly Review Meeting

Date: 04/14/24

Time: 02:00 pm – 02:45 pm

Meeting Participants: @Alice, @Bob, @Charlie, @Dana

• Evaluate weekly sales performance and discuss strategies for improvement
• Each participant should update the CRM with the latest sales data
• Review weekly sales figures and trends (15 min)
• Discuss obstacles in the sales pipeline and solutions (10 min, @Alice)
• Brainstorm strategies for upcoming sales campaign (10 min, @Bob)
• Set goals for the next week (10 min)
• Compile a report of weekly sales metrics – @Charlie
• Draft a preliminary plan for the sales campaign – @Dana
• Organize a training session on new sales software – @Alice

HR Monthly Planning Meeting

Date: 04/21/24

Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Meeting Participants: @Emma, @Liam, @Noah, @Olivia

• Plan HR activities for the next month and update on current employee initiatives
• Review employee feedback from the previous month
• Analyze employee satisfaction survey results (20 min)
• Update on the status of current recruiting efforts (15 min, @Emma)
• Plan employee engagement activities for the next month (15 min, @Noah)
• Discuss updates to HR policies (10 min)
• Implement changes based on employee feedback – @Liam
• Finalize recruitment schedule and process – @Olivia
• Prepare the schedule for upcoming engagement activities – @Emma

These samples should give you an idea of how you want to design your meeting agenda. To help you further, let’s look at some meeting agenda templates from the most popular online meeting tools .

16 Team Meeting Agenda Templates

Here are 16 meeting agenda templates that you can use to create your next agenda:

One-on-one meetings are your chance to connect and align with the people you manage in the most effective way possible. ClickUp’s 1:1 meeting template keeps all of your agendas—tailored for each individual—in one organized place.

ClickUp’s all-hands meeting template helps to keep communication open across the company, and ensures everyone is aligned and up to speed with individual and group goals. All hands meetings give room to share information from updates to announcements about future agendas and encourage collaboration and alignment throughout the team.

This scrum meeting agenda template by ClickUp will make daily meetings a breeze. Daily status meetings about tasks for projects help to ensure that a team is aware of the progress on their front.

ClickUp’s meeting note-style agenda template is the perfect place to keep all event meeting notes, key takeaways and action items.

Projects don’t always go to plan. Use this project post-mortem template by ClickUp to set new goals and keep your team heading in the right direction.

This collaborative meeting minutes template is a ClickUp Doc designed to provide the perfect outline for a successful meeting summation.

ClickUp’s Meeting Minutes Template  includes pre-built pages for organizing teams, individual meeting notes , and instructions for getting the most out of your meeting with this template!

Turn your meeting notes into a newsletter with newsletter templates !

Save time and gain valuable insights with this simple Sprint Retrospective Template . Whether you are running an agile team meeting or a project management meeting, this template will help you build a crystal-clear picture of what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what to change moving forward.

The main objective of team meetings is to share important information with team members, align on goals, and call out any blockers. This team meeting agenda template helps the team stay focused on the goals of the meeting.

Board meetings tend to run over time. Use a schedule template for your next board meeting using this board meeting agenda to stay on track and finish your meeting on time.

It’s important to set the tone for a new project from the start. Use this project kickoff meeting agenda template to facilitate a successful project launch!

Use this ClickUp meeting dashboard template as an agenda for your next meeting. This template makes it easy to see the status of different tasks during a meeting.

This creative brainstorming meeting agenda is a great way to keep your brainstorming meetings on track from week to week. This template makes it easy to run your meeting and stay focused on brainstorming.

Create structure with this ClickUp Board of Directors Meeting Minutes Template . Record and tag your attendees, organize agenda action items, and take detailed notes for each agenda.

HR departments have a lot to keep track of. This HR meeting agenda template will give your HR team a way to come together for a productive meeting that isn’t complicated or stressful.

Use this marketing meeting agenda to bring your marketing department together to celebrate wins, align on goals, and identify project blockers.

This project management meeting agenda template will help you identify objectives, risks, and deadlines for your next team project.

When it comes to planning a meeting, creating a thorough and well-organized agenda is crucial for ensuring that the meeting runs smoothly and achieves its objectives. Here are some of the key beneficiaries of using a meeting agenda:

• Project Managers: Project managers often have to lead team meetings and having a well-planned agenda helps them to stay on track, cover all necessary topics, and keep the meeting focused.
• Project Status Meeting Agenda
• Project Coordinators Meeting Agenda
• Lessons Learned Meeting Agenda
• Post Mortem Meeting Agenda
• Leadership Teams: Meeting agendas are also beneficial for leadership teams, such as executive boards or management teams. They can help to ensure that important topics are discussed, decisions are made efficiently, and everyone is on the same page with regards to company goals and strategies.
• Leadership Offsite Meeting Agenda
• Executive Leadership Meeting Agenda
• Board of Trustees Meeting Agenda
• Executives Meeting Agenda

An effective meeting agenda will make team collaboration seem like a cakewalk. 

And when collaboration becomes easy, your team can focus on amping up their productivity and getting their creative juices flowing. 

With the help of a project management tool like ClickUp, writing effective meeting agendas and managing meetings are easier than ever!

ClickUp lets you document every meeting, manage agendas, take down effective meeting minutes , assign comments to your team, and so much more.  

Ready to watch your team ace teamwork and hit all their objectives? 

Get ClickUp for free today and say goodbye to meeting disasters. 👋

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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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Productivity

Productivity tips

8 meeting agenda examples and templates—and how to use them to write your own

Meetings are the backbone of effective collaboration. But let's be honest—without a solid plan, they can descend into chaos faster than you can say, "Can everyone see my screen?" A well-crafted meeting agenda can help you keep your eye on the prize and set clear expectations for your team. 

In this post, I'll share a handful of agenda examples and templates that will help you streamline your meetings—so you can give your team "a little bit of their day back." 

The purpose of a meeting agenda

Think of a meeting agenda as the blueprint of a building; without it, your meeting could wind up delayed, directionless, or devolving into a debate over who forgot to add stairs. A thoughtful agenda does several things:

Provides an overview of the main discussion points: This helps participants prepare mentally and practically for the meeting, ensuring they come equipped with the necessary information and contributions.

Establishes a timeline: By defining the start and end times, as well as allocating specific durations to each topic, the agenda respects participants' time and helps maintain focus, reducing the likelihood of the meeting overrunning.

Sets expectations: An agenda communicates to attendees what will be discussed and what is expected of them, reducing ambiguity and setting a clear direction for the meeting.

Keeps meetings focused: With a predetermined list of topics, the agenda acts as a roadmap, guiding the discussion and preventing side-tracks.

Encourages collaboration: By outlining topics for discussion and inviting input on the agenda before the meeting, participants feel more engaged and prepared to contribute.

Ensures all stakeholders are included: The agenda-setting process involves identifying and inviting all necessary participants based on the topics at hand. This ensures that all relevant stakeholders are aware of the meeting and can contribute, reducing the risk of miscommunication or the need for follow-up meetings.

Meeting agenda format

Name or goal for the meeting:  Identifying the primary goal sets the tone and direction, ensuring everyone is aligned from the get-go.

Meeting start and end times: Time is a nonrenewable resource. Specify the start and end times to respect everyone's schedules.

Team members included: Listing who needs to be there helps make sure all necessary stakeholders are involved and that no one wastes their time if they don't need to be there.

Discussion points: Outline the key topics you plan to cover. This serves as the agenda's backbone, guiding the meeting's flow and ensuring all critical issues are addressed.

Team member leading each topic: Assign a leader for each discussion point. This clarifies who's responsible for steering the conversation.

Estimate of durations for each talking point: Allocate time slots for each topic to manage the meeting's pace and ensure a balanced discussion across all items.

Links to necessary resources: By providing access ahead of time, you enable participants to come prepared.

Space for notes and next steps: This is what transforms the agenda into a living document that can serve as official minutes and encourage follow-up.

8 meeting agenda examples and templates

I've put together eight meeting agenda examples catering to various meeting types, from daily check-ins to comprehensive reviews. These templates are designed to be customizable, so tweak them to make sense for your meetings.

1. Daily Scrum meeting

The daily Scrum meeting template is your team's espresso shot—quick, energizing, and effective. It keeps everyone aware of what's done and what's next without the dreaded meeting drag. Use it to cut through the clutter, highlight hurdles, and get a project moving. It's ideal for those who like their updates quick and their action items quicker.

2. Weekly one-on-one meeting

The weekly one-on-one meeting template is an opportunity to dive deep into the nitty-gritty of progress and challenges, minus the formalities of larger team meetings. It's perfect for managers and team members keen on forging stronger connections and cultivating an environment where feedback flows freely and growth opportunities are seized. Use this template to ensure no one feels left adrift and everyone's on course for success.

3. Monthly all-hands meeting

The monthly all-hands meeting template is the corporate equivalent of a family reunion—with a lot more PowerPoint. Think of it as the monthly check-up where successes are toasted, kudos are tossed around like confetti, and the roadmap gets a little clearer for everyone. It's ideal for companies that value transparency and camaraderie and are serious about celebrating the wins while gearing up for what's next. Use this template to keep your company culture thriving and everyone in the loop.

4. Remote team meeting

The remote team meeting template is tailored for teams spread across different locations, ensuring everyone stays aligned and connected, regardless of where they are in the world. It focuses on the essentials of remote collaboration: sharing project updates, identifying opportunities for better teamwork, and tackling challenges unique to remote environments.

This template is particularly useful for teams that rely on digital tools to bridge the geographical gap, promoting a sense of unity and keeping the team's momentum going. It's ideal for remote teams that want to make distance a non-issue while keeping spirits high.

5. Project kickoff meeting

The project kickoff meeting is where everyone gears up for the journey ahead. It's critical to clarify the project's vision, define everyone's roles, and set clear expectations—ensuring the entire team is rowing in the same direction. This template is especially valuable for ensuring all team members, from project managers to stakeholders, have a shared understanding of the project scope, timelines, and resources. It's the perfect tool for teams aiming to start strong, with a solid foundation built on clarity and mutual agreement. 

6. New client kickoff meeting

The new client kickoff meeting template is your first step toward building a strong and productive relationship with new clients. It's where you form first impressions and lay project foundations. This template covers the essential stages of understanding client expectations, defining the project's scope, and setting clear communication paths. It's particularly useful for aligning both teams on project goals and deliverables right from the start, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

7. Post-mortem meeting

The post-mortem meeting template serves as a critical reflection point for teams to evaluate a project's lifecycle after its completion. It encourages a culture of openness, where successes are celebrated and challenges are scrutinized without finger-pointing. This template is ideal for teams committed to continuous improvement and learning.

8. Performance review meeting

The performance review meeting template is a focused, 30-minute discussion aimed at evaluating an employee's recent performance, celebrating achievements, and identifying areas for growth and development. It's a prime opportunity to implement the SMART goal-setting framework to outline clear, attainable objectives for the upcoming period. Employing such frameworks can enhance the effectiveness of the performance review process, making goals more tangible and actionable. 

How to write a meeting agenda effectively

Hosting an effective meeting is both an art and a science. Here's how to create an agenda that finds the golden ratio, striking the perfect balance between structure and flexibility.

Step 1: Define the purpose (and necessity)

First, ask yourself the obvious question: could this meeting be an email? Are you giving quick and easy instructions, or will the content you're covering need a more personal touch? 

If you decide that a meeting is necessary, start with a clear, concise statement of purpose at the top of your agenda to keep everyone focused. Is it decision-making, brainstorming , updating, or team building? This goal will be the foundation for the rest of your agenda.

Step 2: List and prioritize topics

What are the must-discuss items? Make a list, then order it by significance. The high-priority topics get top billing because—let's face it—sometimes you don't get through everything. 

Step 3: Delegate talking points

Assign clear roles for each agenda item, and match topics with each team member's expertise or responsibilities. Send them a reminder to prepare, specifying the time they have to speak and any particular aspect they should focus on to maintain a productive pace during the meeting. This not only prepares speakers but also keeps the meeting moving.

Step 4: Create realistic timelines

Set aside specific times for each action item. Estimate the time needed for each topic based on its complexity and importance, then add a 10% buffer to the total meeting time to account for unexpected discussions or deeper dives into certain subjects. Remember, overrun is the enemy of engagement, so keep things concise—but with a schedule that has a little cushion. 

Step 5: Round up context

Gather all necessary documents, reports, or any relevant background information into a single shared folder. Share this folder with all participants at least 48 hours before the meeting, suggesting they review materials beforehand to come prepared for a more informed discussion. Pre-meeting prep leads to in-meeting productivity.

Step 6: Finalize with co-leaders

Two (or more) heads are often better than one. If you're co-hosting, conduct a pre-meeting meeting with other leaders. Divide and conquer, assigning specific sections to each leader based on their expertise. And don't forget to clarify who will handle potential questions. 

This meeting is also an opportunity to consolidate overlapping topics for a more streamlined discussion. This collaborative effort enhances the meeting's structure and engagement and solidifies a unified approach, guaranteeing a coherent and efficiently managed session.

Step 7: Leave space for questions and notes

A Q&A slot isn't just courteous—it's necessary. You'll also want to leave a space for notes; it'll be invaluable when you're trying to remember who said what.

Automate your meeting agenda

Meetings are the perfect candidates for a little digital optimization. For starters, you can use AI to craft your meeting agenda based on the type of gathering you're hosting. Any generative AI tool worth its salt can suggest topics, set the tempo, and even chime in with those repeat agenda items you might've overlooked. 

You can also apply automation to the more tedious aspects. For example, you can automate calendar reminders to ensure everyone is aware and prepared for upcoming meetings. Or you might use automation to distribute minutes and action items immediately after the meeting concludes, keeping momentum going. Learn more about how to automate your meeting processes , or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Get messages in Microsoft Teams for upcoming Microsoft Outlook calendar events

Get SMS alerts for new approaching Google Calendar events

Add new Google Calendar events to Todoist as tasks

Append new Google Calendar event info to Google Docs

Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with 6,000+ apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization's technology stack. Learn more .

Meetings are the workshops where your team's best ideas are hammered and shaped. By automating relevant workflows , you free up your craftspeople to focus on the craft, not the setup. In the age of digital abundance, you can use these tools to make every meeting worthwhile—or decide when an email will do the trick.

Related reading:

7 strategies for running effective remote meetings 

The best AI meeting assistants

4 things you shouldn't use meetings for

How to make your meetings better with asynchronous techniques

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Michael Kern

Michael's a content marketer and copywriter residing in the bustling mega-metropolis of Mexico City. With a knack for making the complex seem simple, he crafts fresh, accessible content that stands out. When the screens are off and the keyboards are quiet, you might find him trawling through old-school print ads for inspiration or enjoying downtime with his daughter.

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Work Life is Atlassian’s flagship publication dedicated to unleashing the potential of every team through real-life advice, inspiring stories, and thoughtful perspectives from leaders around the world.

Contributing Writer

Work Futurist

Senior Quantitative Researcher, People Insights

Principal Writer

How to write an effective team meeting agenda (with templates!)

Because if there’s no agenda, there shouldn’t be a meeting in the first place.

Managing Editor, Products & News

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5-second summary

• Team meeting agendas help you prioritize important topics and keep things running smoothly and efficiently, so your team walks away from the meeting feeling motivated and aligned.
• All agendas are not created equal; read our tips to learn what to include on every agenda, and how to tailor your agenda depending on the goals of your meeting.
• Templates are a helpful jumping-off point, and can be tailored to meet the needs of your particular meeting.

Imagine you’re knee-deep in work, laser-focused, and ready to tackle the next task on your lengthy list. Nothing can stand in your way…except for the meeting you have in 10 minutes. Now imagine that you come out of that meeting inspired and motivated – exhilarated, even. And despite that dreaded context-switching , you’re able to pick up right where you left off with even more gas in the tank. This is how productive and effective meetings should make you feel. But how do you get there?

Your secret weapon might just be a team meeting agenda. Too often relegated to an afterthought, this handy tool can go a long way to help you run more effective in-person or virtual meetings. It helps with managing time, setting expectations, and staying on the task at hand. Agendas ensure that you have a clear purpose and that you can achieve the goals you set, whether you’re plotting your quarterly budget or creating a project timeline – real, shareable results. Team meeting agendas also help you prioritize the things you want to talk about, so you can guide your team through the most important topics of the week.

Leading productive, fruitful meetings doesn’t always come naturally – and that’s okay. Follow these helpful tips for creating an effective team meeting agenda, including a few free templates to get you started and a video with tips on how Atlassian approaches meeting agendas, taken from Atlassian University’s course How to Run Effective Meetings .

What is a team meeting agenda?

A team meeting agenda is an organized and scheduled list of topics and action items that you plan to discuss with your team during a meeting. It’s there to help you prioritize the most important topics and keep things running smoothly and efficiently so your team walks away from the meeting feeling motivated and aligned. But it’s not enough to jot down a simple list of topics and put a time stamp next to each one; it actually takes a fair amount of thought and effort to organize an effective team meeting agenda.

5 tips for creating an effective team meeting agenda

How to run effective meetings in the era of hybrid work

The most effective team meeting agendas are well-planned, clear, and concise. Here, it really helps to take a step back and put yourself in your team’s shoes. Be sure to consider your audience and what they already know; the purpose of your meeting (are you trying to solve a problem, brainstorm ideas, or make a decision; and how you can make your meeting as engaging and memorable as possible?

After skimming the agenda items, all team members should understand the purpose of the meeting and their roles within it, as well as anything they need to prepare for like questions about a certain project or deadline. This kind of preparation eliminates distractions and keeps the momentum going, leading to a more productive meeting. Here are five ways to create an effective team meeting agenda.

• Tailor your agenda to each meeting. Not all meetings are created equal, and not all agendas should be either. Maybe your weekly team meeting agenda needs a space for wins and shoutouts, but your workshop meeting agenda doesn’t. Because there are many types of meetings, do your best to format your agenda in a way that’s appropriate for your meeting and your team.
• Prioritize your agenda items. They’re the meat of your entire meeting – the reason(s) you’ve decided it was worthwhile to pull everyone away from their work and discuss each topic. That’s why it’s absolutely necessary to prioritize each item from highest priority to lowest priority, with the understanding that you’ll push the lowest-priority items to the next meeting if you run out of time.
• Include an icebreaker or other team-building activity . Icebreakers set a more casual tone (if that’s what you’re going for), and serve as a way to engage each person on the team. But keep in mind the size of your team and the length of your meeting. A complex icebreaker with 20 participants could take up your whole meeting.
• Hold enough time for questions and discussion. A well-planned meeting holds more than a measly 60 seconds for questions at the end. Reserve enough time to discuss the items on your agenda and encourage participation. Instead of asking, “Do you have any questions?” Try rephrasing it as “What questions do you have?” It’s a lot easier to shake your head “no” and get on with your day rather than thinking about questions for the agenda items. This could also spark healthy debate and spars.
• End on a positive note. Saving a few minutes to give team members some kudos will leave them feeling valued and motivated – when’s the last time you got an appreciative shoutout and did less work afterward? Whether it’s calling out people individually or thanking everyone as a group, your team will see that their hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.

On a more granular level, here are some characteristics at the core of most or all team meeting agendas.

What should all team meeting agendas include?

Every team meeting agenda should include the following basic elements to keep everyone in the loop:

• Date, time, and location: These details are especially important for dispersed teams. Be mindful of where everyone is and specify which time zone you’re in. As for the location, these days it might be a Zoom link or another chat channel instead of a physical location, so don’t forget to include that as well.
• Objective and goals: Use this as your North Star. Ask yourself, “What type of meeting is this? What am I trying to get out of it?” Be straightforward with everyone else about it so everyone’s on the same page and stays focused on the task at hand.
• Facilitator and attendees: You don’t necessarily have to take attendance, but keeping track of who’s running the show can orient team members about who to notify in case they can’t make it to the meeting or if they have something to add to the agenda.
• Agenda items: The purpose of agenda items is to make it crystal clear to the team what topics you’ll be discussing, what you want to accomplish within that item, and any action that needs to be taken. Keep it brief and avoid using jargon so everyone has a crystal-clear understanding of what’s to come.
• Time for each topic: Indicating an estimated time for each agenda item is crucial to keeping your meeting on track and on pace.
• Team check-in: Whether or not you do an icebreaker, find time to check in with your team members and their well-being. It’s important to show compassion and make sure they know you also care about factors that might be affecting them outside of work. Check-ins also ease your team into the meeting before diving right into business.

It’s also worth noting that agendas need to be circulated to all participants at least a day before the meeting. Doing so ensures that your team has had a chance to review what projects and assignments will be covered so that they come prepared for discussion. You might also welcome some feedback from your team in case you missed a thing or two.

Atlassian’s approach to team meeting agendas

Curious about how we approach meeting agendas at Atlassian? Check out this clip from Mark Cruth, Atlassian’s resident Modern Work expert and evangelist. Focused on practice over theory, Mark spends his days coaching both Atlassian and customer teams on new ways of working.

For more practical tips, enroll in the How to Run Effective Meetings course from Atlassian University – it’s completely free.

Team meeting agenda templates to get you started

6 types of meetings that are worth your time (and 3 that aren’t)

You might be wondering whether it’s worth your time to create an agenda. Although it can be a lot of work upfront, the amount of time you put into making a clear agenda can be compensated for by the efficiency of your now-wildly-productive meeting.

There are tons of free templates to choose from online – don’t hesitate to tailor them to your meeting’s particular needs. To start, check out our top team meeting agenda Confluence templates (downloadable with a free account) and explore how you can make each one your own.

• All hands meeting agenda template
• Remote team meeting agenda template
• Workshop meeting agenda template
• Brainstorming meeting agenda template
• Problem-solving meeting agenda template

Advice, stories, and expertise about work life today.

How to Plan a Meeting

By Kathleen Costanza | February 9, 2015

Think back to the most productive meeting you’ve had recently. What made it so helpful? When you carefully plan a meeting with a clear set of objectives, attendees leave feeling motivated and informed. When you don’t, attendees can unfortunately walk away empty handed or overwhelmed. 

Research finds the quantity of meetings has increased across the board since the 2020 pandemic, largely due to the remote work. With calendars more packed than ever, it’s critical to plan meetings with thoughtful goals and strategy. Here are the basics to keep in mind when planning a meeting.

• Determine the meeting’s purpose The more specific the better. Hone in on the goals. Good: The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the new logo. Better: The purpose of the meeting is to gather feedback on the new logo from decision makers and decide what needs to be changed. Best: The purpose of the meeting is to gather feedback on the new logo from three key decision makers. We will create a list of revisions and confirm the timeline for next steps. 🚩 Red Flag: If your purpose ends up only being “to inform,” or, “to give a status update on,” you may not need to meet. Move on to step number two.
• Sensitive information
• Brainstorming
• Decision making
• Relationship building (teambuilding, etc)
• Complex or nuanced information

• Decide who needs to attend Who needs to be in the room? In general, larger meetings that need consensus can become unwieldy. Streamline your attendee list as much as is reasonable. Invite people who absolutely need to be present. For people whose participation isn’t critical to the success of the meeting, consider inviting them as “optional” so they can decide whether to attend. Deciding who needs to attend will give you an idea of other preparations you need to take. For example, is it a high-stakes, executives only meeting? You may need to reserve a different room or invite additional people than if it’s a more casual, team meeting. Sometimes, meetings are large or high-stakes enough, you may consider professional meeting planning services to take the bulk of the logistics off your plate.
• Plan how to record information If you’re facilitating, will you also be able to take notes? See if you can split this responsibility with another colleague so you can stay focused on steering the conversation. Consider recording the meeting if it’s on Zoom or another meeting platform, so if you need to stop taking notes to steer the discussion, information won’t get lost. Don’t worry about capturing every detail said — focus on the main ideas.

• Invite attendees (and send prep materials!) Over communicate! Explain to attendees exactly what the goals are, and what (if anything) they need to review or prepare. Include any Zoom / virtual meeting links, or the room where the meeting will be held. Don’t forget to send prep materials. If you need a few more days to prepare prep materials, give attendees an ETA when you’ll be sending them.
• K eep the meeting moving! Plan what you’ll do if an agenda item goes over its allotted time. If you need to resolve that agenda item to move on, note that you’re going over time, and you may need to push some of the remaining items to email or a follow-up meeting. If you don’t need that agenda item resolved to move on, suggest you move to the next item but offer a next-step for the unresolved item. For example, “Let’s find the answers to the questions raised here, and confirm after this meeting. But I want to cover as much as we can with our time, so I’m going to suggest we move on to the next item.”
• Send post-meeting follow-up After your meeting, follow-up as soon as possible with a short summary of your group’s decisions and the agenda and notes. Include the next action-items, and who is assigned which item. This is a helpful reference to look back to, or forward to other parties who couldn’t attend.

Are you looking for a team to help plan your high-stakes meeting, conference, gala, or other corporate event? We offer full service event planning nationwide. Don’t hesitate to reach out!

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Meeting Planning Steps: How to Plan a Meeting

It’s understandable why people often moan at the prospect of a meeting. They can be long and not very effective uses of one’s time. But meetings are important. They’re a great way to communicate with a group and get that group to work better together. To remove the stigma attached to meetings, learn meeting planning.

What Is Meeting Planning?

Meeting planning sets the agenda for the meeting. It includes who will be in attendance, when and where the meeting will take place as well as what will occur during and after the meeting. It structures the meeting to avoid wasting anyone’s valuable time and can also create guidelines for when one can speak, who will lead the meeting and who takes the meeting minutes.

Using ProjectManager , award-winning project management software, can not only capture the meeting agenda and share it among the attendees but list the action items created during the meeting. These tasks can be added to a task list, kanban board or calendar view, assigned to individuals with due dates, priority and notes. You can even attach files to the task so when everyone leaves the meeting, they can hit the ground running. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

Why Is Meeting Planning Important?

Meetings are a great vehicle for delivering information efficiently to a group of people. There are other ways, of course, such as email or documentation, however, a meeting provides a space for questions and feedback . This ensures that everyone is on the same page before the meeting breaks. Meetings can also help build bonds in teams that will foster greater collaboration.

Meetings are key means to communicate in projects , but they often waste time, not add efficiency. Jennifer Bridges, PMP, shows you how to plan a productive meeting.

Here’s a shot of the whiteboard for your reference!

Meeting Planning Steps

When planning for a productive meeting you have to ask yourself the who, what why, where and how questions more commonly associated with journalism. Here are the steps to effective meeting planning:

1. Determine the Purpose of the Meeting

Don’t set up a meeting without first understanding why there should be a meeting. If there’s no good reason to meet, don’t meet. But if there is, then that purpose should be clearly defined and focused. You don’t want to bite off more than you can chew in a meeting.

2. Set Goals for Your Meeting

Meetings should get a group of people from one point to another, whether that’s just making them clear on some topic or assigning work to individuals. Make sure you have a goal in mind before setting up the meeting. That way you can make sure that goal has been accomplished before the meeting breaks.

3. Identify Who Should Attend the Meeting

Not everyone needs to attend every meeting. Don’t invite people that have no interest in involvement in what the meeting is going to discuss. Keep the attendance of those who are involved in some manner with the subject of the meeting.

4. Notify Attendees in Advance

The meeting should be announced with enough time so that everyone can make sure they have scheduled time on their calendar. Never spring a meeting on people without notice. They might not be able to attend and, even if they can, they’ll be upset by the abruptness. It shows a lack of concern for their time.

5. Prepare the Content for Your Meeting

Have an agenda written prior to the meeting. This will provide an outline of what will be discussed during the meeting. If you need any supporting documentation to hand out, be sure to have it printed prior to the meeting. The last thing you want to do is be unprepared. It’s not professional.

6. Define the Duration of Your Meeting

Meetings can have a tendency to go on and on. To avoid a meeting that never ends, set a time limit. How much time do you realistically need to do what the meeting calls for? That’s the duration of the meeting.

7. Create a Meeting Agenda

We’ve already mentioned the need for an agenda. Now you can write it. Start with an icebreaker to get everyone comfortable and then list the topics, including any takeaways or action items that will need to be completed before the next meeting.

8. Write Meeting Minutes

A secretary should be selected to keep meeting minutes, which are a short summary of the main points made during the meeting. This can include what was said by the meeting leader and those in attendance as well as any action items that will be executed before the next meeting.

Lastly, it’s important to create meeting minutes to make sure you and your team members don’t forget key points about your meeting. Our free meeting minutes template is a great tool to help you with this process.

Do all these things and team members won’t moan every time you call a meeting, but actually, get marching orders and feel excited about what to do next.

Challenges of Meeting Planning

Meetings can be the bane of a team member’s existence, Jennifer said. It’s not that project meetings aren’t important, it’s just that they are sometimes more of a problem, such as:

• Having the wrong people in the wrong meetings
• Having a lack of communication about the meeting
• Having a lack of clarity during the meeting
• Having a lack of planning for the meeting

That last item, Jennifer noted, if planned properly will resolve all the other issues she brought up. That’ll make a productive meeting and a happy team. Monitoring the health and happiness of your team may not seem like a priority, but if you want to have a successful project you have to do just that.

Free Meeting Planning Templates

ProjectManager has many free project management templates for Excel and Word that you can download right now. There are templates that cover every phase of a project, including these three that can help you have a more successful meeting.

Meeting Minutes Template

To make taking minutes easier, use our free meeting minutes template for Word. If has space to capture who was in attendance, the meeting agenda and any takeaways from the meeting as well as when the next meeting will occur.

Action Plan Template

Most meetings end with action items that are assigned to those in attendance to complete before the next meeting. Use our free action plan template for Excel to list all these tasks, who’s assigned, the timetable for completing them and more.

Task Tracker Template

Once you have started to execute the tasks on your action plan, it’s important to use our free task tracker template for Excel to make sure they’re done as scheduled. You can monitor the status of your work and make sure you’re staying on track.

If you’re looking for more guidance or you’re interested in trying project management software, take a free 30-day trial today!

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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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Your Strategy Planning Meeting Agenda (with Template)

Have you been asked to pull together a strategy planning meeting agenda? And you’re wondering what other people do in their strategic planning sessions… I’ve been there!

In this article, I’ll explain what a strategic planning meeting can cover and share a sample agenda you can customize for your strategy sessions.

Strategy planning doesn’t just happen. You can’t put people in a room and expect there to be a 3-year plan at the end of it. The conversations need a structure to help keep the pace and ensure the meeting runs smoothly. And that’s where the agenda comes in, as part of your pre-meeting prep.

What should a strategic planning meeting include?

A strategic planning meeting should include:

• A review of organizational objectives
• An assessment of how you are doing against those objectives
• Decisions around what needs to be sped up, slowed down, started or stopped in order to better align activity with the objectives.

If you think about the point of having a strategy discussion, it’s really to either define the strategy or to decide if you are on track with delivering the strategy . What you need to include in the meeting has to tie back to those points.

In other words, what do you want to get out of your strategic planning process? Is it a new strategic plan? An update to the last one because something drastic has changed? A review with some ‘light editing’ to ensure decisions are being taken that keep you on track to meet your goals?

What goes into your meeting (and therefore, your agenda) will very much depend on where you are in the strategy planning cycle.

When do strategic meetings happen?

There’s no fixed cadence for strategy conversations. Some businesses use quarterly meetings. Some might do a lot of planning during the existing structure of board meetings. As long as sufficient time is put aside for strategic thinking, you can set whatever frequency of meeting you like.

I would recommend quarterly review sessions, with a longer goal-setting session once a year, but do whatever works for you. If you are putting together your first strategy or doing a complete overhaul, you’ll need to spend a lot more time on it to get the strategic process set up and the relevant data collected.

Planning a successful virtual strategy meeting

Strategy meetings tend to be quite long. You might put a full day or even two aside for your planning, perhaps another full day the following week for the follow up.

For that reason, it’s often better to do them in-person instead of remote, but do what works best for you and the team.

Personally I would prefer to meet in person as in my experience you get better engagement with the process.

If you have to hold the workshop remotely, with people dialling in, make sure you schedule enough screen breaks. I put a break in at least after every 90 minutes — people just can’t focus for that long.

You can also use breakout rooms to set people up to work in small groups (in person or remotely using your collaboration software) so they can interact more easily.

Sample strategy planning meeting agenda template

Every effective meeting needs an agenda, and the great thing about strategic sessions is that you can tailor the agenda to cover the topics that would be the most valuable to wherever you are in the planning cycle. The strategic planning agenda below assumes you are meeting in-person, and is suitable for a strategic review session.

9.30am: Welcome

Use this time for introductions. Do an ice breaker exercise if your attendees won’t think it is cheesy (mine would).

I start by sharing the meeting objectives and making it clear this is a strategic meeting so people don’t get carried away with the detail. Discuss ways of working e.g. who is capturing what actions, what you’ll do if there is a stalemate for a decision, what decision-making tools you are using.

You might want to introduce ground rules for the session such as

• No taking calls in the room
• Take space, make space
• Share your experience

etc. I think my delegates would find this a little patronizing as they have all worked together for many years, but I can also see that there would be circumstances in which it is appropriate to refresh expectations.

If you think they would value having some guardrails for acceptable behavior during the conversations, then by all means add time for that into the agenda at this point.

10am: Big picture strategy

Present the overall roadmap, for example, a timeline for the 5 year plan. Make sure everyone is clear on where the organization is going and what big chunks make that up. For example, perhaps you have a couple of different portfolios that support the strategy.

You can use this time to talk about the current situation, the company’s strategy and how your department fits into that. This section should answer the question: where are we now?

10.30am: Coffee break

Give people time for a bathroom break and to get something to drink. Bonus points if you provide the coffee!

10.45am: Progress review

Have each executive or leader in the room share their area’s progress against their area of the strategic plan. They can bring in team members to present specific topics if that would help, and if their expertise is needed as part of the debate.

These presentations don’t necessarily need to be formal, but they should cover what objectives the department is working to, how they link to the big picture strategy and whether they are on track. Talk about whether milestones are on track to be hit. Present the budget figures related to the area and the confidence levels around meeting those.

This section of the agenda might be long, depending on how many leaders you have to get round, so adjust the rest of the agenda to fit your timings. I’d suggest everyone gets 30 minutes but it depends on what you think they have to share and how much discussion there will be about each area. If possible, timebox the updates so you keep the meeting moving.

Alternative session: Where do we want to be?

If you haven’t got strategic progress to report, use this time to:

• Brainstorm where you want to be
• Agree where you are going
• Create a vision for the next 3 years
• Document the vision and mission.

12.45pm: Lunch break

Schedule in some time to eat and return calls. I think people get back to the meeting more quickly if you provide lunch in the room.

1.30pm: Key issues

It’s worth parking the discussion of any major issues that affect multiple areas until after everyone has had a chance to present their updates, because then it’s easier to see the bigger picture and what might be affected.

Use this time to review anything that dropped out of the morning’s conversations. There might be new opportunities, challenges, resource constraints, market changes and more.

This section of your day should answer the question: what might stop us from getting where we want to go? Think about the values, skills, culture and risks that might block your progress.

2.30pm: Revise plans

After you’ve discussed the challenges or opportunities that present themselves, go back to the plans and see how that information affects what you are committing to do for the next period.

Agree changes as required. This part of your agenda answers the question: what do we need to do? If you do need to do anything differently in order to get back on track or head off in the right direction, this is where you should be discussing and agreeing.

3.30pm: Action planning

I like action planning! Strategy meetings should be all about decision-making, so you should ring-fence some time to talk about how to turn those decisions into action items . List out what needs to be done and allocate owners and timescales to each.

One thing that should definitely be on the action list is how you are going to communicate the decisions made today to everyone else in the team. Add them to the decision log . Make sure someone is responsible for creating and circulating meeting minutes .

This is an important part of the strategy meeting and it answers the question: how will we do it?

4.30pm: Any Other Business

Use this time for the ‘one last thing’ that people want to bring up. If you’ve had a parking lot up on the wall, check that all the topics have follow up actions planned so the conversations can continue outside of the room.

5pm: Wrap up and close

Finally, wrap up the meeting, draw it to a close and if you are going to meet again, put the date in the diary. Then go down the pub!

Tailoring the strategy agenda

As you’ve probably realized, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy meeting agenda that will suit every need. If you are starting from scratch and are using the time to write your strategy, you’ll need to put time aside for brainstorming new ideas, a presentation of market research analysis or feedback from customer focus groups.

If you are reviewing the projects that make up the strategy, you might bring each project manager in to present their project, before discussing as a team what initiatives need to be brought into the portfolio to ensure the strategic goals can be met.

The important thing is to always go back to the why: why are you meeting and what do you want to get out of the time? You can’t go wrong if you start there.

5 Considerations for a strategy planning workshop

So you’re ready to draw up that meeting agenda. Here’s what to consider before you get going.

1. Set the objective

I like to write the objective for any meeting at the top of the agenda. It helps focus people’s minds and keeps the conversation on track. Think about what you are meeting for and what the leadership teams are expecting to get out of it. Here are some examples:

• To define the 5-year growth plan for the organization
• To establish the projects we want to focus on to meet our strategic goals for the next 12 months
• To review the new products we intend to bring to market in the next 3 years
• To set the IT agenda for the next 24 months

You can hold strategic planning workshops for departments, teams or for the business overall. You can plan for the long term or adopt a rolling wave planning approach to plan ongoing. So which is it for you?

2. Let people know what is going to happen

Set expectations for the meeting. Let people know what contributions are expected from them. What do they need to prep in advance? Ask them for their agenda items – you might not include them as ‘real’ agenda items but it would help to know what talking points they intend to bring up.

Share any papers, timelines, business cases, strategy documents etc that make useful background reading. The more ready people are to contribute, the more you will get done during the meeting.

3. Prepare for conflict

As the meeting facilitator, you’ll have a good idea of the topics that will come up. And the potential flashpoints. For example, there are always conversations about budget. Doing anything strategic seems to cost a lot, and investing in one area means another area doesn’t get the investment.

Try to spot any sources of potential disputes in advance so you have pre-meeting conversations to manage expectations and ensure everyone comes to the session with an open mind (and the data to support their case). Healthy debates are to be encouraged!

Think about how to resolve conflict as a team if you can’t get to consensus. There are several group decision-making techniques you could try. In my experience, it’s often the most senior person in the room who makes the final call – strategy is not always a team game. It might not feel fair, but there are often political, economic, commercial and environmental reasons for decisions that might not always be clear to everyone in the room.

Whatever you think the outcome might be, have a few phrases to help facilitate the debate if it seems attendees are getting stuck. For example:

“Ultimately, it’s Fiona’s decision. Fiona, what do you want us to do?” “Let’s continue this conversation for another 10 minutes and if we aren’t able to reach a decision at that point, I suggest that Henry and Priya book some time to review and come back to us with a recommendation next week.” “IT are the guardians of that process. Do you agree to that approach?”

4. Prepare to go off script

I’ve been in strat planning meetings where we started with an agenda and then went totally off script… and the output was all the better for it. It’s great to have an agenda, and the template above gives you a starting point, but if it feels like the right thing to do is to delve into a particular area, then do it.

Strategy is too important to shortcut. If it feels like the meeting is taking longer, just say: “This feels like an important topic. Is everyone OK with staying with it for a little longer?” or “That isn’t something we were going to cover today but it sounds like it’s important that we get into it. Does everyone agree?”

Talk about what needs to be talked about. Strategy work takes time. The agenda is there as a guide but sometimes you just need to get it all out on the table.

5. Define success

What would a successful meeting look like? Sometimes it’s going to be OK to just talk and debate until you get to the heart of your strategy. Other times you might want to go all in on a brainstorming session and success will look like 20 new ideas.

It might be that you want to gain agreement on three new projects or prepare an update to go to the next board meeting. Think about what would constitute a successful outcome and try to guide people towards that.

Your next steps

• Agree the goals of your strategy meeting
• Write the agenda
• Socialize some of the ideas
• Adequately prepare for the session so you feel ready to facilitate it

In this article you learned what to include in your strategy planning meeting agenda and what considerations go into planning a successful strategy workshop. Don’t forget to grab a free action log template to record all the good stuff that comes out of your meeting. I hope it goes really well for you!

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Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years. Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects .

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Buffett talks succession plan, pays tribute to Munger at annual meeting

Buffett said he would support berkshire hathaway trusting greg abel, his designated successor as ceo, handling investment allocations.

Warren Buffett's 2024 annual letter gave me chills: Charles Payne

‘Making Money’ host Charles Payne reflects on Warren Buffett's annual shareholder note prasing Charlie Munger.

Warren Buffett discussed his succession plans for Berkshire Hathaway and paid tribute to his longtime business partner and friend Charlie Munger at the conglomerate's annual meeting Saturday in Omaha, Nebraska.

Buffett, 93, appeared alongside Vice Chairman Greg Abel, 61, and Vice Chairman Ajit Jain, 72, and answered roughly five hours of questions posed by Berkshire Hathaway shareholders from around the world. It marked the 60th meeting Buffett has held since he took over the company in 1965, and the billionaire was energetic in his responses despite having handed off many responsibilities to Abel and Jain.

"I don't really do much, and I don't operate at the same level of efficiency that I would have 30 or 40 years ago," Buffett said. "When you've got somebody like Greg and Ajit, why settle for me? It has worked out extremely well.

"The number of calls I get from managers is essentially awfully close to zero, and Greg is handling those. I don't know quite how he does it, but we've got the right person, I can tell you that," he added. Buffett said he feels "fine" but joked he shouldn't take on four-year employment contracts.

BUFFETT EXPLAINS BERKSHIRE'S REDUCED STAKE IN APPLE AT ANNUAL COMPANY MEETING

Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger at the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

In reference to Berkshire Hathaway's future capital allocation decisions , Buffett said, "If I were on that board and making that decision, I would probably, knowing Greg, I would leave the capital allocation to Greg. He understands businesses extremely well, and if you understand businesses you understand common stocks."

Abel, who was designated to eventually succeed Buffett as Berkshire CEO in 2021, said, "As we go through any transition, it's important to know that the capital allocation principles that Berkshire lives by today will continue to survive Warren."

Jain also weighed in and noted that he, as head of Berkshire's insurance business, isn't irreplaceable and that Apple CEO Tim Cook's succession of Steve Jobs showed that no executive – even those as iconic as Buffett or Jobs – is irreplaceable.

WARREN BUFFETT BLASTS GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS IN ANNUAL LETTER

An attendee holds a cardboard cutout of Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., inside the CHI Health Center during the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Neb. (Dan Brouillette/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Buffett also paid tribute to the late Charlie Munger , who died in November at the age of 99, hailing him as the "architect of today's Berkshire."

"The architect is the person who dreams of and designs and finally supervises the construction of great structures. The carpenters and the beavers — that's me — are needed, but the architect is the genius of Berkshire," Buffett said. He added that Munger's design "lives beyond his lifetime and will live far beyond mine."

The company kicked off the meeting with a tribute video of the two friends who first met in 1959 and spent decades working together. It also sold copies of Munger's book, "Poor Charlie's Almanack," a collection of Munger's wit and wisdom, at the convention.

WARREN BUFFETT PAYS TRIBUTE TO FRIEND, CHARLIE MUNGER AS 'ARCHITECT' OF BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY

A cardboard cutout of Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., welcomes visitors on the exhibition floor during the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting. (Dan Brouillette/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

"Charlie, in all the years we worked together, not only never once lied to me, ever, but he didn't even shape things so that he told half lies or quarter lies to sort of stack the deck in the direction he wanted to go," Buffett said.

Given the prominence of succession and tributes to Munger's legacy at the first annual meeting since his friend's death, Buffett also spoke broadly about his outlook on life.

"You don't know where the paths of life go. You can't beat yourself up. You try and do the things important to you. I enjoy managing money for the people who trust me. I like the feeling of being trusted. I am not looking to change much. I believe in trying to find what you're good at and what you enjoy. I think the one thing you can aspire to be is be kind," Buffett said.

Bobbleheads depicting Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and former Vice Chairman Charlie Munger on display at a shareholder meeting. | Getty Images

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"Thank you very, very much for coming, and I not only hope that you come next year. But I hope that I come next year," Buffett joked to the packed arena at the end of the question-and-answer session.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Former las vegas casino executive to be sentenced in bookmaking money laundering case.

Christopher Weber And Ken Ritter

Associated Press

© Las Vegas Review-Journal 2022

Resorts World Las Vegas President Scott Sibella speaks at the Resorts World Boring Company station, July 11, 2022, in Las Vegas. Former top executive at Las Vegas Strip casinos, Sibella, faces a judge in Los Angeles on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, and possible federal prison time after pleading guilty to violating federal anti-money laundering rules. (Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

LOS ANGELES – A former top executive for major Las Vegas casinos was set to appear before a federal judge on Wednesday after admitting he allowed an illegal bookmaker to gamble millions of dollars at the MGM Grand and pay off debts in cash.

Scott Sibella pleaded guilty in January to violating federal anti-money laundering rules that require casinos to file reports of suspicious transactions. He faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

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Following Sibella's guilty plea, the MGM Grand and nearby Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas settled a related U.S. Justice Department money laundering probe . The resorts agreed to pay a combined $7.45 million, submit to an external review and step up their compliance programs.

Sibella's attorneys, Jeffrey Rutherford in Los Angeles and John Spilotro in Las Vegas, were seeking leniency and a sentence of probation from U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles. They submitted testimonial letters of support to the judge on Friday, including one from Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill, the elected head of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

Rutherford and Spilotro did not respond Tuesday to email messages from The Associated Press.

The bookmaker central to Sibella's case, Wayne Nix , is a former minor league baseball player who lives in Newport Coast, California. He's awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in April 2022 to operating an illegal gambling business and filing a false tax return.

According to his plea agreement with the government, Sibella allowed Nix to gamble at MGM Grand and affiliated properties with illicit proceeds generated from the illegal gambling business without notifying the casinos' compliance department.

Sibella told federal investigators in January 2022 “that he had ‘heard that Nix was in the booking business’ and he ‘couldn’t figure out how he had all the money he gambled with.’”

“I didn’t want to know because of my position,” Sibella told investigators. “I stay out of it. If we know, we can’t allow them to gamble. I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to know I guess because he wasn’t doing anything to cheat the casino.”

Sibella was president and chief operating officer of the MGM Grand for eight years and then president of Resorts World Las Vegas until 2023. Federal prosecutors say Ippei Mizuhara , Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter , transferred money he stole from the Japanese superstar to Resorts World in a scheme to pay off debts to illegal bookmakers. Sibella is not implicated in that case, which also is part of the broad federal investigation into sports gambling.

Separately, Nevada casino regulators are considering revoking or suspending Sibella's state gambling license and fining him up to $750,000. A complaint filed April 30 by state Gaming Control Board investigators has not yet been considered by the Nevada Gaming Commission.

Sibella held top executive positions at The Mirage and Treasure Island casinos on the Las Vegas Strip before becoming president of the more than 6,800-room MGM Grand in 2011. He left the company in February 2019 and joined Resorts World Las Vegas before Malaysia-based Genting Group opened the $4.3 billion, 66-floor resort in June 2021 .

He was dismissed by Resorts World in September 2023 after the company said he "violated company policies and the terms of his employment.”

Ritter reported from Las Vegas.

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