Productive Meetings Every Single Time
Are your meetings taking longer than you planned? Do you find it difficult to keep everyone aligned with your topic? Do you feel your team meetings can be more productive and focused? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you will benefit from using our team meeting agenda board template.
You can use this meeting agenda template for brainstorming new product ideas, reviewing your team’s progress on your project goals, or sharing project updates. Anything that requires you to discuss with your team would benefit from a structured meeting agenda. Here’s how you can start having productive meetings every single time.
How to Use the Team Meeting Agenda Template
The Kanban Zone team meeting agenda template is divided into two major sections.
The first section covers the basic information about the meeting:
- What’s the topic or goal of the meeting?
- Where and when will the meeting take place?
- Who will be in the meeting?
Answering these three questions is important as it sets the tone for the meeting. The meeting venue, time, and attendees are usual information shared before a meeting. But the reason for the meeting isn’t always a priority for some. How many times have you been pulled into a meeting without knowing why? I bet you’ve experienced that at least once. When the topic or goal of the meeting is clear, it allows attendees to prepare their ideas before the meeting. It can also be a way for the team to verify whether they have all the right people in the meeting.
Remember, you should only attend a meeting when you feel that you can actively contribute or learn something from it. That’s what will make it productive for you and your team. And the first step to knowing that will be to clarify what the meeting is for.
The second section of this template is used actively during the meeting. It contains the following columns:
- Outline and Schedule
- Topics
- Agreements
- Action Items
The main purpose of the second section is to keep the meeting focused and structured. The facilitator of the meeting needs to explicitly set ground rules for the meeting and outline the topics. Having timing goals for each topic will help teams stay focused during the meeting so that they can address all items in the topic list.
The last two columns help teams get focused outcomes from their meeting. The Agreements column will hold any pertinent agreements and decisions that were made during the meeting. The Action Items column helps to keep track of task assignments made during the meeting and hold people accountable.
The structure and focus that the team meeting agenda board template brings to teams are invaluable elements to productivity. You can reuse your board multiple times. Just create new cards for your new meeting and follow the format of the team meeting agenda template and you’re all set.
Benefits of Using the Team Meeting Agenda Template
Here are five compelling reasons why you should use the team meeting agenda template:
- Align on desired outcomes and goals – When the meeting purpose is set and communicated to everyone, attendees know what to expect from the meeting and how they should prepare for it.
- Improve clarity and accountability – The team meeting agenda requires teams to explicitly identify agreements and action items. This heightens accountability and ownership among all team members.
- Facilitate prioritization of key action items – You can use the team meeting agenda template to clarify priorities for action items.
- Keep your team engaged during meetings – With explicit time boundaries and a preset topic list, your teams will be more engaged and focused during the meeting.
- Run your meetings more efficiently – The team meeting agenda template removes the guesswork on how to run your meeting more efficiently.
Create Your Own Team Meeting Agenda Board
The Kanban Zone team meeting agenda board is flexible. You can use the preset templates, add to them, or change them up. It’s totally up to you. All you have to do is to go back to the purpose of your meeting and what would be beneficial for your team. Using our template will help you get the most out of your meetings and have your teams feeling more productive in them.