How to Create Effective Meeting Agendas for Productive Meetings [+4 Examples]

Want to run productive meetings? It may be tempting to think that all it takes is a few best practices.

Show up with the right attitude. Get everyone engaged. Keep an eye on the clock to ensure the meeting wraps up on time.

While those skills are certainly valuable once you're in the room, truly effective meetings are born long before the meeting date, even before invites are sent out.

It all starts with having a productive meeting agenda.

Great meetings happen because the meeting is necessary to accomplish an important goal. The purpose of the meeting must be well-defined before a leader can decide who needs to be in a meeting and how it will run. Meeting agendas accomplish exactly that, and much more, serving as a team preparation tool before the meeting, and a guide during it.

An effective meeting agenda clearly states meeting goals and discussion topics. It is written in a way that helps team members get on the same page, before, during, and after the meeting, providing all necessary information to set the team up for success.

Table of Contents

Tips & How-tos

1. What is an agenda?
2. How-to create your agenda + 5 tips
3. Using the agenda to take notes
4. Handling action items

Meeting agenda examples

1. Manager 1:1
2. Weekly Team Meeting
3. All Hands Meeting
4. Exec Weekly Meeting
5. Explore 80+ other templates

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Definition: What is an agenda?

Created before a meeting begins, an agenda is a list of meeting activities and discussions that will be covered in your meeting. They are laid out in order, often as a list or set of bullet points.

An effective meeting agenda might be a very basic list of topics, but it can also be a more complex document. Exactly how much detail to include depends on the type of meeting you are having, and how organized you want to be.

A quick one-topic huddle may require no agenda at all, whereas an All-Hands meeting should be carefully planned to maximize the team's time together.

Agendas are notably different from meeting notes, which typically begin with the agenda, but are filled in with more information about what took place during the meeting—such as decisions and next steps.

For example, an agenda may include a question that needs to be answered, such as, "Discussion: Should we post-pone our team-wide retreat until 2022?"

Then, in your notes for the meeting, after the discussion you might jot down, "Decision to delay until 2022 due to the risks of having the entire team traveling during peak COVID-19."

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How to create your meeting agenda

Your first step in putting together a good meeting agenda is decide what kind of document to use. This sets up how easy it will be for meeting attendees to create, share, and reference your agenda.

Options for formatting your agenda include:

• Word doc
• Google Doc
• PDF
• Email
• Put the agenda in the calendar invite
• Use a document-in-folder notes app like Evernote or OneNote
• Use a calendar-based meeting notes software like Fellow

You will want to consider whether anyone else will need to contribute to the agenda or be able to comment on it. If so, emailing the agenda is going to add friction there, so going for a more shared approach is going to be useful.

For example, you may want to design a beautiful agenda PDF to print before a meeting. Using such a format will make it difficult or impossible for others to make suggestions to the agenda, or fill in their part with more detail if they are presenting at your meeting. That's why a shared document is often preferable.

But, regardless of what platform you choose for your agenda.

Below is an example of a team meeting agenda. After starting with an agenda template, the difference between a good meeting agenda and a great meeting agenda is in the details.

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Read on to see best practices on how to make the best meeting agenda possible. 👇

Tip: Create your meeting agenda in ADVANCE

Early agenda creation has multiple benefits — from narrowing down meeting goals, which helps identify who needs to be in the room — to estimating a realistic meeting length for the discussion topics included. Outlining a meeting before sending out invites increases the likelihood that attendees will arrive prepared, since they’ll know what’s on the agenda.

Here are a few other key things to keep in mind for creating an effective meeting agenda:

Make the agenda in advance so you can share it. 

In most circumstances, it’s not productive to spring meeting goals and discussion topics on your attendees the day of the meeting.

That might work for weekly meetings with low-stakes decision making objectives. But, a wiser approach is to get into the habit of sharing well thought-out meeting agendas with room for attendees to suggest changes. Agendas are more powerful when shared, and when attendees can contribute to them.

Whether a key piece of information needs to be included to inform the meeting — or more time needs to be allocated to a topic which a team member feels is more complex than it appears — enabling attendee engagement early on forms a strong foundation and grants attendees ownership.

What’s more, building an agenda in advance gives the meeting leader plenty of time to organize thoughts and goals, and make sure that nothing important is missing from the agenda on meeting day.

Not sure where to start? Check out some of these sample meeting agenda templates for inspiration. 

Decide on a formal or informal agenda.

Those weekly low-stakes internal meetings probably require a different agenda style than, say, a meeting with a new potential partner. An informal meeting agenda may be short and simple, something like this:

An agenda like this is productive and efficient because it assumes quite a few things...

That everyone understands what to expect from “housekeeping.”

That Joe has been given enough notice that he will be making a 10-minute presentation.

And that attendees have been involved enough with the marketing campaign to identify strengths and weaknesses and brainstorm adjustments.

There may also already be internal discussion/brainstorming practices in place which ensure all voices are heard.

An informal agenda such as this is fine as long as attendees are familiar with the processes utilized at each stage of the meeting. Still, sharing it in advance so that Joe can communicate that he may need more time, or another team member can suggest more brainstorming allocation, is beneficial in ensuring the meeting will be productive.

A partnership meeting, of course, is a meeting that will likely require a more formal, detailed agenda. Sharing a well-written meeting agenda at the time of invitation gives everyone internally and externally the same opportunity to prepare and give feedback as needed.

Use action-oriented language in your agenda.

The best agenda topics are also more than just a procedural list. They explain the goal of that part of the meeting as an action. For example, "Brainstorm adjustments for the next campaign" is much stronger than simply saying, "Brainstorm."

Identify meeting goals, and state them clearly.

Why have a meeting at all?

Before diving into creating an effective meeting agenda, be sure to have a clear idea of what the meeting is trying to achieve. Making a clear goal statement (or a few) not only helps invitees anticipate what they’ll need to do to arrive prepared, but also help with guiding the creation of the agenda.

There is an easy way to help attendees arrive prepared. In the agenda, include any questions which need to be answered during the meeting.

Questions inspire thinking better than ambiguous statements that don’t describe the issue at hand. Instead of “Discuss marketing campaign,” for example, try “What went well with this campaign? What did not? Why?”

At this phase of agenda creation ask yourself, “How will we know when our goal has been achieved?” Visualize what a successful meeting outcome will look like. Be sure to make that desired outcome clear on the agenda.

Be sure to arrange presentations, discussion topics, etc. and their related goals in a way that makes sense. Brainstorming new marketing campaign ideas may yield quite a few unusable suggestions if the previous campaign’s results haven’t yet been shared.

One more word of advice on meeting goals: if they seem to be focused only on information sharing, seriously consider whether a meeting is necessary. If the information can be shared in a less resource-demanding format, that may be a better option.

Meetings require many people to find a shared time to come together during work hours, which can negatively affect productivity if the meeting purpose doesn’t justify the effort. Better meeting ideas are ones which require collaboration, such as customer meetings, post-mortems, onboarding, or one-on-ones. 

Enable preparation before meeting day.

Nothing’s worse than attendees showing up to a meeting unprepared to discuss the topics at hand. While clearly stating a goal can help reduce the chances of this happening, another option is to include expectations in the agenda when invitations are sent.

If, for example, attendees need to be familiar with certain documents before they can reasonably participate in a discussion topic, state as much and attach the documents to the agenda and meeting invite.

Even the informal agenda above noted the time allotted for each agenda item and who would be involved at each stage; that’s because this information is important for preparation.

When all attendees understand the expected pace and participation of the meeting, it reinforces the need to arrive prepared and helps keep the meeting on topic once in session.

With a well-constructed agenda shared in advance with all meeting invitees, everyone will be on the same page on the day of the meeting. The agenda’s job, however, is far from over: it will prove helpful in pacing, focusing, and recording the meeting’s progress.

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Use the agenda to take notes during the meeting.

As mentioned earlier, the second thing great meeting leaders do is create meeting notes by filling in the agenda. One way to do this is by having a note taker.

Maximize productivity with a note taker.

There are many ways to take meeting notes, but one of the most productive practices is designating one note taker who will share the notes with all attendees (and anyone else who needs to know what happened) after the meeting is over.

This may happen via a shared document, or even a whiteboard that gets photographed and shared at the end of the meeting. With meeting note platforms like Fellow, however, things are much easier than that, especially with a prepared agenda to guide the notes.

Follow the agenda and fill in notes along the way.

If agenda items have been properly arranged, it should be relatively easy to move down the agenda as the meeting progresses.

Allocated times and participants noted at each phase should also help keep the meeting on task, ensuring that each agenda item receives attention and (hopefully) resolution.

Another benefit of well-written agendas is the ability to use them to make the most of notetaking. Writing notes directly into meeting items has multiple benefits. It puts the meeting notes in context both for the note taker and anyone who will be reviewing the notes later, especially people who were not in attendance at the meeting.

Filling meeting notes in on the agenda also clears up which meeting goals have been met and which still require action. Assigning team members to action items and noting due dates in the meeting notes keeps critical information in one, easy-to-navigate place: the agenda everyone has access to.

With some modern productivity tools, access to the new, note-filled version of the agenda can be available immediately when the meeting ends, so that everyone is clear on next steps.

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Action Items: Note them too, and assign them.

Most of the work that goes into creating effective agendas and running great meetings is in the preparation, with some happening during the meeting. Before the meeting ends, however, there are a couple things you can do to make sure that the meeting has met its goals and that future ones do as well:

Answer questions.

Before adjourning, ask if anyone has any questions. Be prepared for anything from one individual’s lack of clarity on a small issue, to the whole group remaining confused about whether the goal of the meeting has realistically been achieved.

If time was allocated in the agenda for answering questions, there shouldn’t be pressure to rush through making sure everyone understands which desired outcomes were, and were not, met. 

Review the meeting.

Especially when working on building a better meeting culture, it’s not a bad idea at the end of a meeting to simply ask attendees:

How did this meeting go?

What when well? What didn’t?

What can be done better next time?

The feedback received from these questions can inform and shape better meetings in the future.

With collaborative preparation, a team ready to stay on-task, and thoughtful reflection, wasted time in meetings can become a thing of the past. With the help of strong meeting agendas, productivity goes up and disengagement drops.

Ready to create effective agendas and lead better meetings? Browse some meeting agenda templates and get started now!

Learn More: Want Your Meetings to Matter? Follow Up After

Effective meeting agenda examples

Below are more examples of good meeting agendas. Each is available to download as a Word doc, copy as a Google doc, or add to your free Fellow account. (Fellow is meeting management software.)

All of the above meeting agenda templates come from our library of 80+ templates for all sorts of types of meetings. Browse the full meeting agenda template library.

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