How to Set a Meeting Agenda – To Improve Meetings and Not Waste Time

How to Set a Meeting Agenda to get the best out of the meeting and not waste attendees time takes a little bit of thought. The average person attends 10 meetings or more per week and spends 31 hours in unproductive meetings per month. I have 7 actions that you can take to create meeting agendas that work, keep everyone engaged and produce useful output. These cover meeting agenda best practices and I have tried and tested these in 25 years of working in work class companies through to SMEs. The first step in how to plan a meeting agenda is to think what you want to get out of the meeting or the meeting’s purpose. If you are not clear on this, creating the meeting agenda and then having effective meetings is that much harder.  To help you with how to plan a meeting, we have included some examples of what time to allocated to different types of meetings and give you some thoughts on meeting agendas.  The meeting agenda format will depend on what you want to cover. We suggest that you keep it to a small number of agenda items and give sufficient time to each rather than cramming as much as possible into the meeting agenda.  Make use of pre-reads – information sent out before the meeting starts – to share information which frees up time during the meeting for discussion, problem solving and decision making. This will ensure efficient meetings and keep the attendees engaged.  It is useful for a person to take minutes during the meeting, saving everyone getting distracted writing their own note and then you can share with the wider team meeting agenda and minutes afterwards to promote an open working culture.  Providing a meeting agenda format with specific agenda items allows each attendee to start mentally preparing before the meeting. This helps in running efficient meetings where everyone is able to participate from the start.  How to set a meeting agenda is a great skill to develop and will make your job as a manager of the team that much easier.