How many hours a week do you spend in meetings? How valuable are such meetings? How many of your meetings require a follow-up meeting?
Reflect on these questions for a minute.
There’s a good chance that you spend more than twenty hours a week on meetings. There’s also a high chance that you dislike attending them.
Unstructured meetings are energy drainers. The good thing is that with a bit of discipline, you can get out of the draining meeting trap. This article will help you write an effective meeting agenda to keep you and your team on track.
What is a meeting agenda?
A meeting agenda defines the session and how it will be conducted. It sets expectations and brings structure, avoiding confusion and optimizing efficiency. Setting a meeting agenda is simple.
In general, meetings have:
- A reason for taking place
- Participants
- A common objective
- An agreed approach to reaching the objective
Although the above might be obvious, sometimes it becomes unspoken, and that’s where the problem lies. However, a simple meeting agenda can get you out of it.
Types of meeting agenda
Meetings share common traits, but are not all the same. Some sessions are creative, whereas others strategic or operational. There are two main types of meeting agendas — ideation 90 and board meeting 120.
Ideation: 90 minutes
For ideation, after exploring the problem space of a particular domain, the team gets together to come up with ideas. The meeting agenda might look something like this:
- Context: 10 minutes — The product manager shares the learnings from the discovery
- Problem understanding: 15 minutes — The product manager shares which problem the team is supposed to solve and opens for questions
- Silent ideation: 10 minutes — Each team member reflects on ideas to solve the discussed problem
- Present ideas: 30 minutes — Each member presents their ideas to everyone
- Cluster: 10 minutes — The team clusters similar ideas to facilitate prioritization
- Prioritize: 5 minutes — Each team member votes on three ideas they like most
- Next steps: 10 minutes — The team agrees on the next steps to test the prioritized ideas
Board meeting: 120 minutes
With a board meeting, every week, the board gets together to align on the most critical operational issues to address and act accordingly. You could write up an agenda like this:
- Review actions: 15 minutes — The board reviews the previously agreed actions and defines if further action is needed
- Prioritize topics: 10 minutes — Given the topics on the agenda, the board prioritizes what’s most important and allocates the time they want to invest in each topic
- Discussion: 80 minutes — Based on the prioritization, the board discusses each topic respecting the timebox assigned
- Define actions: 15 minutes — Based on the discussions, the board creates action to ensure issues are solved and the company progresses in the right direction
Note that both meetings are pretty different. The ideation session structures what happens, whereas for the board meeting, topics are prioritized during the session. It’s important to understand the goal of the meeting and then define the best-fitting agenda for it.
How to write meeting agendas
Preparing for meetings can be pretty simple when a format is followed throughout the company. Over the years, I’ve learned that bad meetings share common characteristics. They tend to lack an objective, and participants are unaware of how the meeting will unfold.
To write good meeting agendas, make sure to cover the following:
- Goal — Define the goal of the meeting. What would be the desired outcome by the end of the meeting?
- Context — Help participants understand why the meeting is taking place. Where are you coming from?
- Topics — Define the structure to reach the desired goal. How are you going to achieve the set outcome?
By doing the above, participants will be aware of what to expect. Ideally, you would share the meeting agenda at least a day before so participants have time to reflect. In recurrent meetings, the topics are often set dynamically. In this case, it’s fine to add topics by the end of the day before the meeting takes place so all the participants have a chance to look at the agenda beforehand.
Meeting agenda template
To help simplify the process of creating a meeting agenda, you can use this template that I developed:
The template focuses on the critical aspects of most meetings. By feeling it out, you can reach a minimum level of clarity that reduces the chances of having draining sessions.
Before the meeting, you won’t have notes for each topic or action, but you can add key notes for each topic during the meeting.
Formats for meeting agendas
Nowadays, you can have multiple meeting agenda formats. You can have a more traditional approach where you document everything separately and then share it with participants for approval, or you can also have it digitally available for everyone whenever they want.
The agendas that work best focus on structure and cohesion. I like using Google Docs or Confluence because of the search function. Whenever I want to find something, I can quickly search and refresh my memory.
3 tips for effective meeting agendas
Energy-draining meetings are mainly avoidable. Here are three tips to make your meeting agendas engaging and valuable:
- Achievable goal – Set an attainable goal within the time you allocate to the meeting. It’s better to set a humble goal and over-achieve it than to set an audacious goal and miss it
- Limit attendance — The more people you get in the room, the less interactive the meeting becomes. Only invite people who are key to reaching the meeting goal. Otherwise, respect the person’s time by not inviting them
- Reduce topics — Don’t pack the session. Trying to squeeze all your topics into one meeting will create pressure and lead to poor results. Prioritize what matters most and focus on that
Key takeaways
Bad meetings are avoidable and good meetings are plannable. When you take the time to do your homework, you save a lot of time for everyone. Just by implementing a simple meeting agenda, you can save energy and time.
Here are the takeaways from this article:
- Ensure every meeting has a goal. If you cannot define a goal for the meeting, refrain from having it
- Share the meeting agenda with participants before the session
- Keep a minimum meeting agenda structure to help participants understand why they are there, what you’re set to achieve, and how the meeting will unfold
- Less is more. Humble goals and a short agenda are your allies, not enemies
Featured image source: IconScout
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