Team meetings are one of the best opportunities to create alignment and visibility across an organization. How they are run can also be massively influential on company culture, enabling culture to be a key driver of success.

We surveyed professionals across many top organizations—including Shopify, Trello, Drift, Miro, Calendly, and Etsy—to figure out how high-performing teams run their meetings. We then took what we learned and turned it into these example team meeting agendas and templates.

Use the free agenda templates on this page to write notes for your meetings as well. That way, you'll have a resource to review later to see what was covered in the meeting. Make sure to highlight decisions, actions, and next steps in your meeting notes.

To get the most value from these sample team meeting agendas, here are seven tips — habits to help your team grow and become more productive and aligned.

Tips for Better Team Meetings

Keep It Real

Creating a culture of transparency is difficult. However, when your leaders are honest and share insights without constraints, it allows the rest of the team to build on that knowledge and grow, which in turn improves team productivity and collaboration in your business. If your team is able to create a culture where everyone's opinion is valued, you'll find more cohesion and inspire everyone to strive for growth.

Be Upfront About Who, How, and Why

If organizations with smooth and effective team meetings are more likely to be efficient and productive in other areas too, the opposite is also true. When run poorly, these business meetings can be a big waste of time, and one that sets a dangerous tone for the organization overall. That’s why it is critical to have clear communication about the meeting's purpose, agenda, goals, and what outcomes are expected.

Always Have a Meeting Agenda. Always Share It

Having a great staff meeting begins before the meeting starts. A well-organized meeting has a solid meeting agenda.

Because team meetings are usually recurring (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc...) you should invest in creating a team meeting agenda template that lists out common agenda items. With a template, you never have to start from scratch when preparing for your next meeting.

An agenda doesn't need to be overly detailed. Even a handful of bullet points — containing key metrics, project updates, and discussion topics — can go a long way to helping attendees get more value from your team session. Your agenda style may vary across projects, teams, and types of meetings, but simply having one provides so much-needed direction to all attendees.

Every meeting can have at least a one-sentence "agenda" that cover's that meeting's purpose and goal.

(Don't worry, we have a lot of sample agenda templates for you to copy or download as Google Docs, Word Docs (.docx) or use for your meetings in Hugo.)

Document Action Items and Assign Them

A good team meeting template also leaves room to document action items within the meeting notes or meeting minutes. If you want tasks from your meeting to get accomplished, make sure you note those action items.

Many teams also find it helpful to document priorities, roadblocks, feedback, and ideas that come up in the meeting. By being able to review these details later, you're able to get a wide-angle view of the team's progress.

Upskill Your Team

While it's not efficient to spend the majority of team meeting time mentoring and coaching every week, the occasional deep dive into data, learnings, or strategy can be of major benefit to long-term company success. Team meetings aren't just for giving status updates on a project, they're to help the team learn and grow together. Keep an eye out for opportunities to upskill everyone.

End Meetings Early (When You Can)

Let your team know you value their time. Endless meetings not only take up time, they suck the energy out of team members, disrupting employee productivity for hours afterward. For productive meetings, try to schedule meetings in small clusters on specific days of the week to minimize disruption, and then end them early when you can.

At Hugo, we use a Ten Percent Rule, giving employees only 4 hours of total meeting time per week. This self-imposed scarcity of meeting time ensures that every second is used wisely.

Customizing Your Team Meeting Agenda Template

Every team is different, and every team meeting is different.

When you take a look at the team meeting templates on this page, compare them to how you are meeting today. When customizing your team meeting agenda, here are some additional questions to ask yourself:

• What are the differences between the agenda template and your current process?
• Are there parts of your current meetings that you should consider omitting so that you can focus on more productive parts of your team meeting?
• Does your team prefer a formal agenda format, or something productive but not too rigid?
• Is this a weekly meeting, bi-weekly, monthly, or ad-hoc team meeting?
• Do you need to cover updates, or can you mostly jump to discussions on roadblocks, ideas, challenges, and solutions in your meeting?
• Who will take notes? Who will review the notes? What information could they be looking for?
  

Get your team meeting template

On this page, we’ve compiled agenda templates for the most common types of team meetings. From quick stand-ups, to weekly planning meetings, brainstorming, and post-mortems, there are a lot of reasons for teams to meet together.

Below you can find a selection of sample agendas for all these common types of team meetings pulled for our free library of 80+ meeting agenda templates. (Or, scroll back up and download the whole bundle of team meeting templates.)

Each agenda template is available to copy as a Google Doc, download as a Word doc, or use with your free Hugo account.

And if you don't find the team meeting agenda template you're looking for here, in our executive meetings category, you'll find templates for other kinds of team meetings: board meetings, leadership meetings, and strategic planning sessions.

Other Resources for Team Meetings:

• How to Choose the Right Meeting Cadence for Your Team
• How to Run Team Meetings That Actually Matter
• 3 Reasons Why Meeting Notes Should be a Team Sport
• Tried and true methods to improve communication in your team
• What is a Board Meeting? [Tips, FAQs, & Minutes Templates]
• Vital Meetings: Shorter, Fewer, Better [eBook]

‍