Remote Meeting Template

In a world where remote work is gradually becoming the new normal, regular remote team meetings are the secret to maintaining a highly productive team.

While these meetings are instrumental to team cohesion, goal alignment, and project coordination for a distributed workforce, they quickly drain time and productivity when ill-managed. That's where a remote team meeting agenda comes to play.

How do you create a remote team meeting agenda?

Every meeting must have an agenda set beforehand, especially if you manage a widely distributed team. 

There's no rocket science in creating an agenda for your hybrid and remote meetings. Creating one simply means giving direction for your meeting before it starts. That way, you can eliminate all distractions and inessentials that plague most virtual meetings. 

A remote team meeting agenda should highlight the following：

• Meeting's date, time, duration, and location

• Discussion topics

• Meeting goals

• Attendees list

• Supporting documents, if any

These are what form the basics of an effective meeting agenda. Now let’s look at how to create one closely.

Determine meeting objectives

You won't start a journey without a destination in mind. Only start a remote meeting with a straight set of objectives. You will understand this better if you've ever attended a meeting where you spend the first 20 minutes figuring out what to discuss.

Your meeting objectives will guide you to what the meeting discussion will be. Are you meeting to discuss the last project feedback from the client? Are you discussing last quarter's financial report? Or is it a recurring weekly team meeting? 

Define a set of topics

After determining the objectives of your remote team meeting, the next thing is to highlight a set of topics to give your discussion a streamlined scope. While objectives are your final destination, topics are the roadmap to get you there.

Similarly, defining a set of topics gives everyone in attendance the needed headstart on what to contribute to the meeting in advance. And since you have a destination in sight, you’ll quickly identify when the meeting objectives have been achieved and when to call it a close.

Once the remote meeting agenda is drafted, share it with other attendees, which not only informs them what will be discussed but also let them prepare in advance.

Running a productive remote team meeting in 5 tips

Now that you’ve learned what a remote team meeting agenda means, its importance and how to create one, here are some tips for running effective remote team meetings;

Consider if you need a meeting

When it comes to remote meetings, the best mentality to adopt is “less is more”. 

All too often, meeting-happy managers call for remote meetings for the most trivial of issues, which often could have been an email or phone call. 

There's a thin line between an effective meeting and when your meeting becomes a sheer time-wasting event. Before organizing a remote meeting, ask yourself if the meeting is necessary. 

Think of other ways to get over the issue and only resort to meeting as your last option. If you are just looking for information. Consider sending an email or chatting up concerned team members. You can take it further by recording a short video message with the details of the information you need.
A good manager must know how to create a system of operation that naturally eliminates meetings. Be that manager.

Find the most convenient time

Anytime might work for you as a manager. But for your team, anytime is not it. So the first thing to look at when trying to have a remote team meeting is timing. 

The struggle to find a meeting time that works for all team members is real, especially for widely distributed teams across different locations and time zones. Here are some tips to help.

• Check the employee calendar to grasp their working hours so you will only schedule meetings when they are supposed to be working. 

• Set a clear duration for your meeting. Attendees want to see the exact length of the productive time they'll be investing in the call. 

Once you identify a time that works for everyone, It's advisable to stick to it to prevent future scheduling issues. 

Focus only on key attendees

To hold a meeting that benefits all your attendees, you need to be highly selective about who you invite.

Often, managers are trapped in the "invite everyone just in case" mindset instead of focusing on having the most concerned member on call. It's difficult to lead a meeting to fruition when you have many attendees. So don't go for something other than an all-hands meeting when you can limit the attendees to your meeting.

If you are not selective about who you invite, It's easy for your meeting to quickly become a marketplace where too many overarching ideas and noises slow things down. 

Take meeting minutes and assign clear action

An effective meeting note captures all major points discussed during the meeting, including any decisions made and any important information shared.

Remember to record any action items delegated to certain people when you take your notes. Make a list of these actions, briefly describing each one and the person responsible.

Review your notes after the meeting and make any required revisions to make sure they are accurate and comprehensive. After the meeting, share the meeting note with attendees for referencing and record purposes. Luckily, you don't have to do any of the above manually today. With meeting management and an assistant tool like Aigram, you are well covered.

Leave time for questions

Instead of waiting until the end of the meeting to attend to all questions, it's better to entertain questions throughout the meeting. This can help maintain the conversation flow and avoid a backlog of questions at the end.

Consider splitting up the meeting into smaller segments if you have a lot of content to cover and are running short on time. Leave time after each segment for questions.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't give room for questions before closing the meeting. Set aside a specific amount of time, 10-15 minutes, in the end, to answer questions.

How to use this remote team meeting agenda template

Instead of creating your own meeting agenda from scratch, this meeting agenda template from Airgram can save you moments of head-scratching. Moreover, you can customize the agenda to meet your own needs. 

Let's see how you can use this Airgram template.

Apply: Open the template to familiarize yourself with its structure and contents.

Customize: Customize the template to match the specific requirements of your team. You can do this by

• Adding or removing sections

• Changing the headings and subheadings to correspond with the subjects you want to cover

• Editing the details of each agenda item, such as the time duration

Share: After customizing the agenda template to your goals, share the agenda with your team members via Email or your workspace communication channels like slack and Asana.