Free Simple Meeting Agenda Template for Effective Meetings

The problem with meetings 

Most organizations lose productivity to bad meetings; a reason for that is – while many of us have to organize and hold meetings, very few of us have formal training in how to do so. Meeting facilitation is not treated as a skill, and it should be. Consider this – how often do you see ‘meeting planning and facilitation skills’ as a requirement in a job posting? How often has an interview panel asked you to “tell us about a time you organized an effective meeting”? I’ve interviewed for a lot of jobs, and used a lot of templates in interviewing my own staff – and despite many of these jobs being responsible for chairing meetings, the question doesn’t come up.

Meetings get roasted constantly for being a waste of people’s time, and that upsets me to no end. It upsets me because GOOD Meetings are an extremely powerful tool for harnessing the knowledge and experience of your team to make good, collaborative decisions. On top of that, good meetings are a cornerstone of a change management or culture-building strategy. Good meetings can propel your team to become more than the sum of their parts – an inclusive, engaged, collaborative, and efficient actor within the organization. However, bad meetings can do the exact opposite – they waste time, drain energy, and build malaise within the organization.

Good meetings propel a team to become more than the sum of their parts – an inclusive, engaged, collaborative, and efficient team. Bad meetings do the exact opposite – they waste time, drain energy, and build malaise within the organization.

Do the former – plan good #meetings. pic.twitter.com/RLMKVqYLgR

— Chris (@ChrisjBergen) December 13, 2022

How do we fix it? 

Good meetings start with the Chairperson. In fact, a meeting should be a product of an objective, not a desire to hold a meeting. That means – if you don’t have something that needs to be accomplished with the help of your team, then you don’t have a meeting. Simple as that. If you have one scheduled, cancel it. However, if you have a project or objective that will benefit from pulling together a select group of contributors, then pull that meeting together! Collaboration is powerful – so if you think you have a case for it, go for it!

Start with a great meeting agenda! 

So – assuming you have a good reason to pull your team together – what’s next? An agenda! Every good meeting has an action-oriented, time-based, simple agenda. In addition, that agenda is sent out at least 24 hours in advance so that the participants have time to prep and get their minds ready to make meaningful contributions.

Here, I have included my Meeting Agenda Template for you to use in your own workplace. It’s simple, easy to work with, and can be used in Microsoft Word. The free Meeting Agenda Template includes every piece of info you need to build out an effective meeting strategy, without fluff, complicated formatting, or special software needed – you can just plug in your info and go.

Please feel free to download the Word Document, make edits, and circulate as you please. And if you like this template, check out my Meeting Minutes template for effective note-taking. You can also the rest of my template catalogue, and make suggestions for future templates via the contact page. And finally, go check out my article on how to run an effective team meeting!

Good luck in your next meeting!