How to create a great team meeting agenda (with templates)

We’re just going to say it: Most founders and managers have no clue how to run effective team meetings.

So, you wind up with countless issues, from not knowing what to talk about in these meetings (i.e. using the time poorly) to disengaged employees who zone out during these meetings.

That’s a shame because when done well, team meetings are an excellent way to foster a collaborative, helpful, and transparent company culture.

In this post, we’re sharing how to structure a team meeting, along with sharing a handful of team meeting agenda templates you can use.

Why are team meeting agendas important?

Team meetings, along with your 1-on-1s with your direct reports, can help you build a collaborative and transparent company culture. Because of this, these are the only two meeting types that are almost always better held live.

The best team meetings aren’t run ad-hoc. Instead, they create a team meeting agenda in advance, which ensures the most important topics rise to the topic, empower the team to voice their voice, and ensure that meetings don’t consistently run long.

How to structure and run your team meetings to be more productive

Before we dive into a handful of team meeting agenda templates, here are some general tips for how to structure and run these meetings:

• Use a Remote-first approach: If you have a hybrid or fully remote team, these meetings should be run with remote-first principles. Simple things like having everyone log into the meeting from their own computer instead of having everyone in the office be in the meeting room while remote employees join from their computers creates a more inclusive environment.
• Find a time that works for everyone: Time zones matter. Make sure that your team meetings take place during working hours for your entire team.
  
  Pro Tip: SavvyCal can help with finding a time to schedule these meetings. 😉
  
• Assign a notetaker for each meeting: Switch up who the notetaker is every meeting. Please DO NOT always designate the most junior team member or a woman to this role each time.
• Stick to the allotted meeting start and end times: This is just a simple gesture that shows you respect your entire team’s time.
• Don’t try to solve every single problem on a call: If an item is going to take up too much of the team’s call, take it offline. You can either schedule a follow-up call with just the key stakeholders to go over this topic or better yet, try to discuss it via asynchronous communication.
• Create a collaborative team meeting agenda: While you should only have one person leading the meeting, the entire team should be able to weigh in on what’s covered. This can be as simple as starting a shared Google Doc where team members can add their agenda items a couple of days before the meeting, or you can use collaborative agenda software like Fellow.app or Hypercontext.
• Follow proper Zoom etiquette: Simple gestures like arriving on time, keeping yourself on mute when you are not talking, refraining from interrupting others, and reducing background noise can go a long way.

6 team meeting agenda templates you can use

From a company all-hands meeting to weekly department meetings, here are some team meeting agenda templates you can use.

1. A company all-hands meeting agenda template

Depending on the size of your company, you may have an all-hands meeting weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. Regardless, here is a template you can use.

Opening

• Icebreaker
• Welcome message from founder or CEO

General business updates

• Include data, key metrics, last month’s numbers, and overall progress towards goals.

Project updates by all team leads

• Each team lead should have time (~5-10 minutes) to provide updates and essential information such as progress, schedule, insights, or data, so the company understands the overall status and goals.

Employee or team shoutouts and wins

• Focus on recognizing achievements and wins of employees or teams.
• This can also be a great time to welcome new employees and celebrate those who have employment anniversaries (such as one-year, two-years, etc., with your company).

Q&A

• Anyone can ask the CEO or team leads questions, voice concerns, or raise issues. You can have people send questions in advance or submit them during the meeting.

Closing and reminders

• Wrap up the meeting with reminders or initiatives, a way anyone can leave feedback after the meeting, and end with a thank you from the CEO.

2. An executive team meeting agenda template

As your company scales, you are going to hire a leadership / executive team. Your c-suite or executive team should hold regular meetings. Here is an example of a template you can use.

Opening

• Provide any important wins, status updates, or schedule changes since the last meeting.

KPI update

• Highlight any progress or significant changes in key metrics since the last meeting for context for the action items and ongoing tracking by the executive team.

Follow-up to open items from the prior meeting

• Provide brief updates or further discussion on items not resolved from the previous meeting.

Top objectives and challenges

• Having a list of the meeting’s priorities will help ensure that everyone knows the primary focus of the meeting before it starts and ensure that there is ample time to discuss the information without getting sidetracked on other issues.

Wrap up

• Key takeaways, assign action items, thank you, and next steps
• At the end of the meeting, provide a summary of the key takeaways, the next steps, assign any action items, and thank everyone for attending.

3. Department meeting agenda template

This is an example of an agenda template you can use for a weekly department meeting. In this specific template, we’re using marketing. However, this same template can be adapted for other departments like sales, customer support, or product.  

Marketing Team Meeting objectives

• List the primary objectives at the top of the Agenda to ensure these topics are discussed.

Wins

• Take a few minutes to celebrate progress or wins from specific marketing team members.  

Review key marketing metrics

• Highlight any progress or significant changes in key metrics since the last meeting for context for the action items and ongoing tracking by the marketing team.
• Discuss feedback from sales on lead volume and quality. Sales and marketing should be collaborative, and keeping an open loop is essential for this.

Team updates

• Focus on critical updates, such as schedule changes that impact other teams, discoveries that influence the overall marketing strategy or roadmap, or follow-up items from the previous meeting.

Goals and challenges

• Discuss and work through any new challenges or objectives that team members brought up.  

Wrap up

• At the end of the meeting, provide a summary of the key takeaways, the next steps, assign any action items to specific individuals, and thank everyone for attending.

4. General team meeting agenda template

Here is a general team meeting template, which is perfect for both cross-functional team meetings in smaller companies (for example - a sales and marketing team meeting) or individual teams inside a larger department in the organization (for example - the knowledgebase team within support).

You can use a template like this either for weekly, biweekly, or monthly team meetings.

For this example, we’re going to use a weekly sales and marketing team meeting agenda.

Weekly Sales and Marketing Team Meeting Agenda

Wins

• Take a few minutes for people to share a win or celebrate milestones and progress.

Review key metrics

• Highlight and share key sales and marketing KPIs since last week’s meeting.

Brief status updates

• Share sales and marketing updates, company news or new information that impacts both teams, and upcoming project deadlines and updates.

Discussion and problem-solving of primary agenda items

• This will be the majority of your meeting time where the specific meeting objectives are explored with a solution-focused approach.

Explore additional challenges or concerns

• Identify and explore challenges hindering progress or concerns. It is a good idea to list out all of these secondary agenda items. However, these are the items that may need to wait until the next meeting or you can schedule a follow-up meeting with key stakeholders.

Wrap up:

• Key takeaways
• Next steps
• Assign action steps to specific individuals if needed

5. General manager meeting agenda template

Many companies have weekly, biweekly, or monthly meetings for all team leads and managers.  This is typically separate and larger than a c-suite meeting and allows for more open and collaborative company culture.  

Monthly Manager Meeting Agenda

Brief company update

• Key company KPIs / metrics
• Company announcements
• New information
• Upcoming schedule/key dates

Team Lead / Manager roundtable

• Each manager should be given ~5 minutes or so to share recent wins, current priorities, and any blockers.
• This should be the bulk of your meeting.

Key challenges / problem-solving

• Use this time to allow attendees to bring up questions, concerns, or challenges not addressed at earlier points in the meeting.
• If you have a specific meeting objective that hasn’t been discussed, do so at this time.

Action items

• Key takeaways
• Next steps
• Assign specific action items to individual managers

6. Project retrospective meeting agenda template

While all of the meeting templates above happen on a regular basis (usually weekly, biweekly, or monthly), retrospective meetings happen at the end of a big company or team project.  For example, you might want to hold a retrospective with all team members (across multiple departments) after migrating to a new CRM.

Project Retrospective Agenda

Discuss what went well

• Celebrate wins
• Identify helpful processes or steps
• Unexpected actions that worked

Discuss areas of improvement and challenges

• Identify obstacles
• Unexpected problems faced
• Processes that didn’t work
• Discuss concerns and frustrations
• What you would do differently next time

Brainstorm changes to improve processes

• Explore possible changes that could be made to improve the process and overcome identified challenges.

Wrap up

• Key takeaways
• Next steps
• Assign action steps if needed

Ready to level up your team meetings?

Whether you are hosting a company all-hands meeting, department meetings, or manager meetings, these 6 team meeting agenda templates can help you stay organized and run smoother meetings.

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