Keep Your Meetings Structured and On-Topic With a Team Meeting Agenda
Do you and your team sometimes struggle with keeping your meetings on-topic? We all know meetings are a crucial part of effective team collaboration, but we also know how important it is to make meetings feel like a good use of time for everyone involved. A team meeting agenda template can help you prepare for meetings, align priorities, and discuss relevant information with your team members.
We’ve all been there. Meetings where the participants come unprepared, unsure about the topics, which ultimately cause the discussion to get side-tracked, with no advance being made, wasting precious time for people involved.
Meetings are an essential part of effective project collaboration, and, as project managers, making the time for your team is important to align priorities, discuss issues and solutions, and move in the right direction together. A meeting agenda is an effective tool that can help you make the most of your time.
What is a meeting agenda? It can be defined as a list of activities that participants are hoping to accomplish and discuss during their scheduled meeting. A team meeting agenda helps you plan and execute your meetings, which allows better cross-functional collaboration.
Benefits of a Team Meeting Agenda
One of the most important benefits of working with meeting agendas is that they provide structure to your predefined time slot, and they help you focus on the information you need to share with your team. Meeting agendas also help your team to agree on goals, action items, and next steps.
Taking the time to work with a meeting agenda can easily prevent unproductive meetings, which will ultimately save you and your team a lot of meaningful time. Some of the most relevant benefits a team meeting agenda usually provide are:
Meeting agendas helps you recognize individual efforts and celebrate milestones.
They help you set clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting.
Keep participants focused on the topic that needs to be discussed.
Discuss productivity or progress roadblocks and potential solutions
Set the pace of the meeting but also remind everyone that you only have a certain amount of time scheduled for the discussion of crucial matters.
Review progress against team objectives and key results.
Share relevant project updates.
Brainstorm for new ideas and solutions.
What to Include in a Meeting Agenda
An effective team meeting agenda will include:
Planning details like the date, time, location, and who needs to attend.
A person to lead the meeting
Topics to discuss
Action items, issues, or roadblocks
It’s also relevant that you discuss and agree with your team on the ideal time for these types of meetings. Also, make sure you check in with your team before the meeting to get feedback on the most relevant talking points, this way, everyone feels heard and acknowledges that they’ve contributed to the meeting agenda.
In regards to the topics for your meeting agenda, these will depend on the purpose of the meeting and also on the most relevant issues you’re facing during your project’s lifecycle. However, most meeting agendas will include:
Information items, which can include any updates or data you need to share with your team members.
Action items, which refer to the tasks your team should complete during or after the meeting.
Discussion items. These will be the topics you want your team to provide feedback on. Discussion items also include issues or possible bottlenecks.
To make your meetings even more productive, include additional helpful details such as who will be presenting each topic and how much time each presenter will have to discuss their action items.
How to Write an Effective Meeting Agenda
Meeting agendas can easily be customized for any type of project, function, or department. You can create agendas that will help you discuss anything from metrics to sprint planning, to upcoming projects. Here are some tips for planning the best agenda for your next team meeting:
Meeting objectives must be clear:
You must be able to provide an overview of what the meeting will cover without going into specific agenda items. To achieve this, offer clarity on the goals of the meeting and what will be expected of everyone who attends.
List agenda topics as questions or tasks:
Vague agenda items are your enemy. Your meetings will be more productive when you make the purpose of the discussion clear immediately. Make sure to add supporting questions or tasks so that your team shows up ready for discussion.
Clarify expectations and responsibilities:
If you usually struggle with participants showing up unprepared for certain key topics, you’re probably not being clear enough on who is responsible for each topic. Let your team know in advance who will be responsible for each topic so that they can prepare in advance.
Estimate a realistic amount of time for each discussion topic:
Your meetings shouldn’t feel rushed, every item of discussion should be equally important. Make your to consider how much time it would take to introduce and discuss each topic, and estimate a realistic amount of time for your entire meeting before you schedule it.
Create and Centralize Your Meeting Agendas with Instagantt
Whether you work with large or small teams, or your meetings are more of a casual discussion than formal events, an agenda is the best way to stay focused and make good use of everyone’s time, because, when designed correctly, a meeting agenda can prevent unproductive meetings for good.
Now that you understand what a meeting agenda is and how they work, it’s time to choose the right tool to create your own. Sure, you could use Microsoft Word to write your agenda, but you could easily end up forgetting where you wrote it and ultimately misplace your information. It would make much more sense to create your meeting agendas and keep them organized and accessible in one single place - and you can quickly achieve this by using Instagantt.
Instagantt is an online Gantt chart software for project management that helps teams all around the world plan, coordinate, schedule, and execute their projects, from beginning to end. Teams can rely on Instagantt to create professional-looking Gantt charts in a matter of minutes and to manage their work efficiently by being able to visualize relevant project-related information such as deadlines, resources, and budget, and to keep tasks, conversations, and documents in a single, centralized location.
