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Whether you’re preparing for your next board meeting, a team check-in, or even a city council meeting, having a well-structured meeting agenda helps to ensure that time is spent productively.
A meeting agenda is how you set expectations for the purpose of a meeting and the topics it will cover. Planning that in advance — and sharing it in advance — means everyone arrives prepared and on the same page. That also means less time wasted getting everyone up to speed.
Factors like setting a purpose for the meeting, deciding on discussion topics, and inviting appropriate attendees are all keys to success. But having one collaborative place to plan and document those factors is also important — and that’s where a meeting agenda template and a tool like Fellow come into play.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at why meeting agendas are effective for productive meetings, how to structure a meeting agenda, and share 18 examples and templates you can try.
Never take manual meeting notes againFellow auto-joins your video calls to get you the most accurate transcripts, summaries, and action items from your meetings.
Why meeting agendas are core to effective teams
Meetings are so important for effective collaboration, decision-making, and brainstorming. But without some form of structure, participants in these calls may not know how to jump into a discussion or in what order they should approach topics. This leaves a lot of room for ambiguity and risks the meeting going off-topic or over time.
Instead, meeting agendas provide a clear structure for what to talk about, who is responsible for each point, and how much time is allocated to discuss each topic.
On the topic of the importance of meeting agendas, Roger Schwarz from the Harvard Business Review says,
“An effective agenda sets clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting. It helps team members prepare, allocates time wisely, quickly gets everyone on the same topic, and identifies when the discussion is complete. If problems still occur during the meeting, a well-designed agenda increases the team’s ability to effectively and quickly address them.”
Who owns the agenda of a team meeting?
Alright, now that you know why having a meeting agenda is so crucial, you might be wondering: who’s in charge of creating one?
The owner of the meeting agenda is the meeting organizer. It’s up to this person (or a team of people) to create the template, but remember that it’s everyone’s responsibility to add talking points and various action items that need to be discussed.
If only the manager takes the time to add talking points, it will only be the manager talking. Not only is this not productive or a good use of everyone’s time, but chances are also good there will be some yawns from meeting attendees.
How to structure a meeting agenda: 9 sections to consider
If you’re the meeting organizer and it’s up to you to create the agenda, here are some must-haves that you’ll need to include to make the meeting agenda as comprehensive as possible:
Title of the meeting: Clearly state the purpose or main topic
Date, time, and duration: Specify when the meeting will start and end
Main objective: Briefly describe the main goal of the meeting
Talking points: Break down the meeting into specific topics or segments
Supporting documents: List any reports, data, or other materials attendees should bring or review beforehand
Decisions: A segment to determine what decisions were made or not made
Action items: Assign and document what actions need to be taken post-meeting
Follow up: If it is a recurring meeting, confirm if it is necessary to meet again or confirm the next meeting date and time
Feedback: Provide a way for attendees to give feedback on the meeting for continuous improvement
How in-depth you go into each of these components will vary depending on the type of meeting you’re holding, but the agenda should cover these elements throughout. Remember, the agenda should be distributed in advance to give attendees enough time to prepare.
10 tips for creating an effective meeting agenda
State the meeting purpose and objectives
Every agenda for a meeting should outline a clear purpose—this is known as your meeting purpose statement. It’s for helping the rest of your invited group of participants understand what the call’s goal is! Including this meeting purpose statement in your meeting invitation is also important as it allows attendees to quickly identify if the meeting is relevant to them or not. If you’re using a meeting management tool like Fellow, you can embed the purpose statement directly into every invite so you don’t forget!
Incorporate AI for agenda optimization
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have come a long way in automating work! When incorporated into meeting planning, AI tools can help optimize your agenda by recommending new topics, sorting the order of talking points, and transcribing the notes at the end of your call. When you leverage AI to take care of some of these challenging or mundane administrative tasks, you’ll grant yourself more time to focus on other growth drivers for your team!
Prompt attendees to add talking points
It can be difficult to find innovative ways to get your participants more involved in meetings. But you don’t actually have to go that far out of the box to find successful virtual engagement strategies in your team calls. One simple prompt is to request that team members add their own talking points to the meeting agenda. You can add talking points as questions that they need to answer, such as, “What are some blockers that you need help overcoming this week?” This will spark collaboration and ensure that the meeting topics are highly relevant to your team’s needs.
Attach relevant material
Any documents that will be discussed during the meeting should be linked directly to the meeting agenda. Not only does this help your attendees review content ahead of time to come prepared for the call, but it also allows you to quickly pull up the necessary documents mid-meeting to discuss them with the group.
Pro Tip: Using Fellow, create an action item with multiple assignees at the top of the agenda prompting people to check off the task as they read the material before the meeting!
Assign facilitators for each topic
Facilitators are the people who are responsible for each section. They might be doing a presentation on that topic, moderating the conversation, or just ensuring that the discussion doesn’t go off the rails or over the allocated time limit. A helpful way to quickly coordinate and assign facilitators for each topic is through Fellow’s Sections automation. A feature like this makes it easy to visually identify whose section is coming up next and what topics will be presented by that person.
Allocate time for each section
When people show up late or have technology issues, your meeting will be at risk of going over time. This can trigger the rest of everyone’s schedules to be delayed for the day, which isn’t an effective use of time. To avoid this, have at least five minutes at the start of the call for set-up and icebreakers. Then, allocate time for every other section and add this to your agenda. Knowing how much time is dedicated to each topic will help your facilitators plan their segments. In case you have guest speakers jumping into the meeting at a specific point, having a predetermined timetable will also help them know when to connect.
Prioritize talking points strategically
A recent study showed that social relationships in the workplace can actually become strained by too many meetings and meetings that aren’t organized effectively. As a solution, the study suggests organizing meeting talking points so that there is a small amount of time for social conversation before jumping into the business talk. This allows attendees to ease into the conversation and feel more heard at work.
From there, try to organize the meeting agenda so that it covers foundational topics that are necessary for contextualizing other topics later in the meeting. Then, the next topics should be the ones that are high priority and need to be discussed first in case you run out of time.
Add a section for action items
Action items are essentially the to-do’s following each meeting. The agenda for a meeting should contain a spot for listing these action items as they are decided throughout the call. You’ll also want to make sure there is always a person assigned to complete the action item and a due date, as having these will improve accountability in getting it done!
Leave a section for questions
At the end of your meeting agenda, have a spot for any questions. Of course, questions can be asked and answered throughout the meeting if you prefer, but some meeting types—like a town hall—might have a presentation that can’t be interrupted. So, leaving 10-15 minutes at the end of each presentation is a great way to avoid interruptions in key sessions while also ensuring that employees’ concerns are heard.
Automatically share the agenda with meeting attendees
Making sure that your attendees actually receive the agenda for a meeting is important! Without it, they’ll be just as lost when the meeting time comes as if you didn’t build the agenda at all. Automating the distribution of the agenda is a way to save time and take another thing to remember off of your to-do list! Try to share the meeting agenda with your meeting attendees at least one business day in advance so that they can review the necessary materials, add talking points, and ask any pre-meeting questions they might have.
Why your agenda needs iteration and experimentation
Remember what we said about your meeting agenda being a living, breathing document?
We stand by this statement, but even so, you shouldn’t be afraid to throw it in the trash and start new.
No meeting agenda is perfect, and no matter the size of your company or the industry it’s in, things change. The agenda that worked in Q1 may no longer be a perfect fit come Q3.
Just like you need to consider “Do I actually need this meeting?” every so often, you need to reflect on your agendas the same way. Don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves, iterate, and improve on your agenda from time to time to reach maximum meeting productivity.
The best tool for meeting agendas: Fellow
Fellow is an AI meeting assistant that helps teams have their most effective meetings. When Fellow joins a meeting — whether in Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams — it automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes the call.
But even a bad meeting that’s recorded is still a bad meeting, which is why Fellow helps to make meetings more productive. Ahead of your meeting, invitees can contribute to a collaborative agenda. Choose from our library of 500+ meeting agenda templates, or create and customize your own with AI suggestions. Either way, everyone will arrive prepared.
After the call, Fellow sends out an AI recap that summarizes the meeting. Plus, follow-up is made easy with Ask Fellow — like ChatGPT for your meetings. Before your next meeting, Fellow will send a pre-meeting brief summarizing your last call.
You’ll be able to find all your meeting recaps as well as your agendas — which become your meeting notes — in your recording library. Set up permissions in this library to control who within your organization can view which calls.
Fellow is built from the ground up with security and privacy at the forefront. In addition to best-in-class security standards, call recording can be paused and resumed at any time. And, after, you can permanently redact and delete portions of the recording, transcript, and call.
Parting advice
Meeting agendas have a lot of benefits. They help organize you and your team, they provide a centralized place for accessing information, and they’ll continue to evolve as your team grows! Also, the best part about meeting agendas is that they’re customizable to different needs. Depending on the type of meeting that you’re running, you can opt for more formal or informal agendas that hit on different talking points. Feel free to test a few different options using our meeting agenda examples and templates and explore what works best for your team!
What is a meeting agenda?
A meeting agenda is a document that organizes the talking points for an upcoming call. You can create a meeting agenda with pen and paper or, for easier sharing and collaboration with colleagues, you can make a virtual one, too, using a tool like Fellow.
Meeting agendas are typically created by the organizer of the meeting and then shared with meeting participants at least one business day in advance. Since everyone on the call has access to the document, it becomes a central place to track the meeting’s purpose, plans, and outcomes. It can even be useful and added to during the call as well!
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