Sample meeting agenda
A sample meeting agenda to help you organise and plan your group work meeting.
Check-in (10–20 minutes)
Updates from last meeting
What team members have been doing and their progress. This can take quite a while if group members have something to discuss relating to what they’ve been doing. For example, they might:
- want input on an idea
- have an idea to share and get feedback on
- have something that might help another group member.
Action points from last meeting
Go over the action points from the last meeting and check that they’ve been completed.
If any action points haven’t been finished, see what you can do to make sure that they can be completed before the next meeting.
Discussion points (5–20 minutes each)
Discuss the project tasks that you are working on and get input and feedback from the whole group.
Discussion points should be sent to the group before the meeting, with a chance for everyone to contribute. An email thread is a good way to distribute and collect discussion points, or you can build your agenda in an online document through Google Docs or Word Online.
Using a car park
Use a ‘car park’ to write down ideas or discussion points that are off-topic, so that you can discuss them at another time.
Action steps for next meeting
Finish with a list of action steps for completion before the next meeting. Compile these during the meeting, after each discussion point.
Review these at the end of the meeting as a further reminder and make sure that everyone is clear on their responsibilities.
Send the minutes
After the meeting, the minute-taker should email a copy of the minutes to all the group members, so that everyone is clear about what they’re doing and to update any group members who did not attend.
Meeting agenda template
You may find it useful to use this template of a meeting agendadoc16KB as a starting point.
- Action points (10 minutes). Review from last meeting. Everyone has completed the research stage. Bob found extra resources for Sarah. Actions: Bob to send link to resources to Sarah.
- Research discussion (15 minutes). Decide what is relevant to our project. We’ll focus on theory X and Y, as well as current industry statistics.
- Research completion (15 minutes). How are we going to present the research? We’ll try to put it into a two page document, summarising the main points. Actions: Sarah to draft the summary and send it out a day before the next meeting.
- Stage 2 (30 minutes). How should we do it? Split the work: two people analyse each market while one finishes off Stage 1 summary. One- to two-page analysis draft by next meeting to get an idea of the next step. Actions: Mohamed and Em to analyse Indonesian market. Bob and Sapna to analyse New Zealand market.
- Wrap-up (5 minutes). Finalise action points, agree on next meeting time.
Within 1 hour and 15 minutes, this meeting managed to:
- review what the group had done so far
- discuss the current situation and decide on the next steps
- decide who is doing what
- set clear action points so that everyone knows what they’re doing by when.
In the next meeting, the group would allocate time to discussing the market analyses, giving feedback, and deciding whether more work was needed or if the group could move on to the next stage.
Notice that the group members were working to their strengths. Sarah might be good at summarising and have good written English, while the group members doing market analyses might know a bit about the market they will be analysing.
Speaking other languages is a particular bonus—it’s much easier to analyse the Indonesian market if you can understand local publications rather than relying on international information in English.