Recurring meeting agenda
Ah, another meeting..!?
Who doesn't love spending time in a meeting room, or a Zoom call, listening to a bunch of people giving updates which you forget an hour later?
It doesn't have to be the case. Meetings can be productive!
Purpose of meetings and why do they usually suck?
You can group meetings in a multitude of ways, but generally speaking, they can be classified based on their purpose:
Informative (status-update, All-hands, stand-ups)
Actionable (strategic planning, problem-solving)
Persuasive (pitch, interviews)
Educational (AMAs, training, external speakers)
Continuous improvement (retrospective, ideation)
Team building
Regardless of the purpose of the meeting, you might encounter participants moaning and complaining, or even worse, they are completely checked out. The same usual problems cause these symptoms:
The meeting is too long or is repeating too frequently
Wrong participants, either by role or by the amount
Facilitation is missing or inadequate
There's no clear goal and a lack of general structure
Recurring meetings tend to suck more than others. It is unfortunate to all of us, as we all have a few of these clogging our calendar every week. The most common reasons are that we fall into a routine and that we lose sight of a clear structure and purpose.
Meeting Agenda Template for recurring meetings
There are probably a dozen ways to structure a meeting, and no one template is the answer to all your problems. The following template is just one way for you to become more deliberate in getting to a better and more productive meeting experience. Feel free to use the principles illustrated here and craft your own agenda structure, or take this suggestion as is.
The premise of this meeting format is the notion that we should move away from focusing on updates and move towards decision-making. With this in mind, updates that aim to “put everyone on the same page” should be delivered via an asynchronous channel, such as email, Slack, a "living" slide deck, or a recorded video clip.
This meeting agenda template consists of 5 parts and is guaranteed to help you drive an effective meeting.
It will promote positive meeting culture, focusing on pressing matters, strategic decisions, and driving operational excellence. The template was created in a Google Doc but can be copied to or recreated in any software you already use, such as Google Sheets or Excel, Notion, Confluence, or Miro. The template is linked at the bottom of this article.
Here are the 5 stages in this agenda template:
1. KPIs and check-ins
Recurring meetings typically are a tool to help teams, organic or cross-functional, progress efficiently when working towards goals. These goals can be evergreen (i.e increasing revenue) or they could be event-based (i.e launch a new product or campaign).
As such, the first thing on the agenda is to pull everyone back onto the topic. Starting with KPIs helps to ensure the team is tieing everything you are about to discuss during the gathering to the impact you're trying to achieve, rather than your to-do list.
Presenting KPIs can be done via graphs or Gantt charts, screenshots, bullet points, navigating to a dashboard, and any other means. Keep in mind that this is not the time to discuss why the trend is going that well/bad, but get a snapshot of the status quo. This part of the meeting should take no more than 5 minutes, so if a discussion is needed, it should get added to the topics in part #3 of the agenda for further elaboration.
Figure 1 - KPIs and check-ins
If the meeting is an evergreen "team meeting" such as a meeting of an organic team, or a recurring meeting for managers of the same department, this would be a good time to do a quick check-in round. Remember, you have 5 minutes for this part of the meeting, so if you do decide to check in, make sure it's quick and postpone any discussions that come up to the meaty third part of the meeting.
2. Updates
If we decided to move updates to asynchronous channels, how come they are part of our meeting agenda?
Well, the truth is that informative updates should be delivered asynchronously, but we often encounter crucial questions that may affect the majority of attendees. These should be clarified synchronously, or "online", to avoid misunderstandings. How do we balance the two? You combine them.
Part two of the meeting agenda requires attendees (and those who should but can't make it) to fill out their updates ahead of the meeting. The deadline to fill in the topics can be, for example, the end of the previous business day or the time the meeting starts. The end of the previous business day guarantees that updates are not superficially squeezed in at the last minute and also allows the other attendees time to read through the updates before the meeting. Using the meeting start time as the deadline gives more flexibility and takes the pressure off of people, and might be better fitting for a meeting schedule early on Mondays, for instance.
When this part of the meeting starts, the entire team reads the updates simultaneously and silently, either on a shared screen or on their own devices. Yes, it may look foolish to have a room full of people staring at a screen silently for 5 minutes, but it takes considerably less time than go through them out loud. It also helps balance different personalities in the team and how each of them presents.
Figure 2 - updates
Once the silent review is through, anyone can ask questions regarding the updates. Any question gets directed at the team member who wrote the update, not at the team leader, thus ensuring more participation during the meeting. This supports a better collaboration between colleagues even beyond the meeting room walls.
The meeting's facilitator doesn't have to be the team lead. In any case, I'd encourage the same person to facilitate over at least a quarter (for weekly meetings) or a year (for quarterly meetings) to allow rhythm to form, expertise to get developed, and improvements to kick in. If you are the facilitator or leading one, here are a few pitfalls to pay attention to during this part:
Be strict with questions that don't affect the majority of attendees by skipping them, leaving time for more important questions
Make sure answers are straight to the point and if the answer drags, ask for an "offline" follow-up
Any update that turns into a discussion during this part should be added as a discussion point for the next part, or discussed outside of this meeting, either in other channels/meetings or in the next occurrence (depending on how pressing the matter is)
Here are two examples of how this could be adapted for a different team structures or business fields:
Figure 3 - example for how a management team can structure the updates section
Figure 4 - example for how a project team, delivery team or an organic team can structure the updates section
3. Discussion
This is the part that should take about 50%-70% of the meeting time. A meeting scheduled for one hour should leave time for about 30-45 minutes of discussions.
But what if we have no topics to discuss?
If that is the case, just skip this part and shorten the meeting, everyone will be thankful, you can be sure. Having said this, if this is a recurring matter, make sure to evaluate why there are no topics. A few reasons could be:
The meeting is not actually needed
Team members don't feel psychologically safe
Uncertainty around what constitutes a discussion topic (you can communicate that this time is also for sharing an overview of a project a team member worked on or going through a presentation that was shared before)
The team could potentially benefit from having additional stakeholders pop in to share, present or teach about a topic in their respective domain of expertise
Figure 5 - discussion
Sometimes the issue is that you have too many topics which makes choosing where to start challenging. One way to solve it is by assigning a priority to topics by the person who has entered them into the agenda. In the example above (figure 5) I'm using "Normal" and "High" priorities to separate pressing matters from the rest, but you can use virtually any type of scale.
Another solution can be to do a quick round of voting where each team member has a few votes (for example, by adding 'x' next to the topic name) that they can use to prioritize the topics. If you opt for this route, just make sure to timebox the voting with 1-2 minutes and don't open it up for a discussion. If you set a deadline for getting the agenda ready for the previous business day, then voting can then be done asynchronously before the meeting.
4. Decisions and action items
We are humans after all. We tend to forget, to be out sick or to be distracted, and to miss something critical from the meeting that just happened. To allow us to make the time in the meeting contribute the most to the day-to-day work, we should always strive to put things in action and follow up on open topics.
Noting down decisions that were taken during the meeting and action items to follow up on helps making sure everyone on the team is on the same page. Writing the topics in this section should be done throughout the meeting, either by anyone who is attending, the facilitator, team lead, or any other attendee which was pointed to be a note-taker for the meeting.
Figure 6 - decisions and action items
Everything other than the topic can be filled out asynchronously, in which case the team lead or facilitators are in charge of making sure it's done, or it can be filled out at the end of the meeting by using no more than 5 minutes.
Each action item or decision must have an owner who's responsible for it. That person tagged in the "responsible" column will be in charge of following up and making sure the thing happens, but not necessarily in charge of executing themselves. A good use case for this is when an action item is assigned to a management team member, but then their team members are the ones executing.
The results of the topics can and should be revisited in the next occurrences to make sure the team holds themselves accountable for their actions. It's the facilitator's job to check previous agenda documents and carry over any outstanding topic into a next meeting's agenda, either in form of an update or a discussion topic.
5. Appendix
If you read through the entire article, good job. Now is the easy part - the appendix is used for attaching screenshots, images, or any other asset that shouldn't take visual space in earlier parts, but is still referred to in the meeting. Any links should not be listed here, as they are typically better placed inline as hyperlinks in the earlier parts of the meeting. It's completely fine if in most cases this part is left empty or if you decide to take it out completely.
Figure 7 - appendix
Access the template
To check out the complete template for free, along with some examples based on the type of team, follow this link.
