Weekly Team Meeting Agenda Template

With 97% of employers and workers expressing the belief that the lack of team alignment affects the success of a task or project, the importance of weekly team meetings has never been more apparent. The reason team meetings are so valuable is that they keep teams connected, aligned, and engaged.

They are also a great productivity hack when done correctly because timely communication has been proven to improve productivity in the workplace. A study by McKinsey corroborates this. According to the study, employees who feel more included in workplace communication are nearly five times more likely to report increased productivity!

You might be wondering how you can you make you supercharge your weekly team meetings to achieve all these. It’s simple. The first step is getting your agenda right, and we will show you how.

Why do we need a team meeting agenda? 

Agendas are indispensable for holding effective meetings, and this is even truer for team meetings. One of the reasons for this is how expansive the scope of team meetings could be. Approaching them without an agenda could result in meetings going totally off the rails or simply wasting work hours.

With agendas, you can avoid this error by structuring your meetings to focus on priority talking points and keeping the conversation on what matters.

Beyond these, agendas also

• Help meeting participants prepare adequately for a meeting by giving them an at-a-glance view of what to discuss and their role in the meeting.

• Serve as a guide on how to approach each topic, and set the timeframe for the discussion.

• Provide clarity on the objectives of the meetings. 

• Keep the meeting on track.

You can directly use Airgram’s weekly team meeting agenda template for your next meeting directly or customize it to your taste!

How to create an effective staff meeting agenda?

Creating an agenda from scratch might seem daunting at first. However, shifting your mindset and approaching it as creating a to-do list makes it infinitely less complicated.

Agendas are essentially a list of things you hope to do or discuss during a meeting. The only difference is that making a high-quality one requires a significant amount of planning and collaboration. 

You need to create a mental picture of how you want the meeting to play out and what you want to prioritize. After this, you can craft your plan in line with your vision. The plan often includes details of how much time to allot to each item and how to approach the overall meeting while being flexible enough to accommodate contingencies.

If you are ready to proceed with your draft, here are some tips to guide you.

1. Set clear objectives 

Setting clear objectives is the first line of action when creating your meeting agenda. 

A common pitfall for most managers when setting team meeting objectives is writing a long list of what they want to achieve. While ambition is good, the problem with this approach is that it overwhelms your focus and could make it difficult to achieve the most important goals on the list. So, the simpler and fewer your objectives are, the better.

There is another lesson in prioritization you need to learn here. If you have a lot of goals, write them all out and select the three most important and urgent ones to focus on.

Summarily, the key here is to keep your objectives simple, clear, and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).

2. Add specific topics

Even though weekly team meeting agendas have a standard set of topics, what you would include in yours will depend on your objectives.

Start by writing down your talking points in line with your objectives. Then, organize them in your preferred order of priority and add a timeframe for the conversation.

Specificity is important to manage the limited time you have for the meeting efficiently. Make sure the topics are relevant to the meeting objectives and/or are crucial to your team’s success.

We will look at some standard weekly team meeting talking points in the next section if you are still unsure about topics to include in the agenda.

3. Include necessary resources or documents

A good agenda should include all the information that participants need. This could include performance charts, web links, documents, and papers that they have to study ahead of the meeting or that would be discussed during the meeting.

Including the necessary resources would ensure that participants come to the meeting prepared and with clear expectations.

4. Get input from team members

Do not see creating an agenda as a personal project and put pressure on yourself to develop the agenda unilaterally. 

Since other members of your team are participating in the meeting, it is important to get their perspectives and input. Beyond making them feel included and valued, this could encourage them to raise issues that they had been hesitant to discuss and open up more.

And this is not difficult. You can simply share your draft with them and ask them for their thoughts and input on the topics of discussion and objectives.

5. Leave room for questions

Your agenda should include a segment for questions by team members and other stakeholders at the meeting. So, it is not enough to simply map out agenda items and talk to your team members, you need to create room for them to ask questions and seek clarifications on issues discussed.

6. Get feedback and iterate

At the end of the meeting, ask your team members for feedback on the meeting and agenda so that you can figure out what you are doing wrong or right and how to improve.

You can ask for this in a feedback form, especially if your team is large, or ask direct questions to members. 

The feedback you receive can serve as a guide for what you need to alter to make your agenda better. 

Weekly team meeting agenda topics

The agenda topics for weekly team meetings could include issues for discussion, information to be shared, or action items that need to be assigned.

As stated earlier, meeting agenda topics are not fixed. However, the following are standard weekly team meeting topics you should know: 

• Company news and announcements

• Key metrics

• Project and task updates

• Challenges and roadblocks (current and potential)

• Feedback 

• Shoutouts

Company news and announcements

These are general updates on the state of the company or team’s affairs, including topics such as recent accomplishments, organizational restructuring, and promotion.

The announcements are usually made by the moderator at the beginning or end of the meeting. However, as a rule of thumb, if they are relevant to the discussion, it is important to state them early in the meeting.

Key metrics

The key metrics to be discussed here are an evaluation of the progress against essential goals, for example, an increase in sales. They could be team-wide or individual.

Analyzing the key metrics will not only align all teammates on the set goals but also celebrate the wins we have made and therefore boost confidence.

Some questions you can consider to kick off the conversation on key metrics are:

• What have we learned from the success?

• How close are we to achieving our goals for the quarter?

Project and task updates

This topic is a common feature of weekly team meetings. Here, team members update on projects and tasks they are working on or overseeing to bring everyone up to speed on how far they have gone.

The main difference between project/task updates and key metrics is that while the latter measures progress against set objectives, project/task updates only focus on what has been done in the period under review.

This topic also often presents the opportunity to define action items. Usually, after providing an update, the team member would share their plan for the next steps.

You can transition to project and task updates during meetings by asking your team members questions like

• Are there any updates on the XYZ project?

• What are the new developments on the ABC task that was assigned to you?

Challenges and roadblocks 

It is expected that team members will experience challenges and roadblocks while carrying out their responsibilities, and weekly team meetings are an ideal place to table them and figure out a solution or way forward.

The challenges and roadblocks could be either current or potential. You can ask the following questions to ignite the conversation:

• What are the biggest blockers that hinder us from achieving our goals?

• What adjustments do we need to make?

• What challenges are you facing with this project?

• Do you think we are on the path to achieving our goals or is there a potential threat to concluding on schedule?

Questions and feedback 

Questions and feedback are essential parts of all team meetings. 

A Q&A session allows you to clarify points made earlier and gauge the understanding of the issues discussed. You can clear up miscommunications, confusion, and ambiguities.

Feedback, on the other hand, is an opportunity to discuss what needs improvement and what should be kept up. This topic is especially useful in finding out what your team members think of their work and the meeting.

You can get your team talking by asking:

• Do you enjoy working in the team?

• What are your thoughts on today’s meeting? Would you say it was productive?

In practice, getting feedback on the agenda or meeting might be difficult because people are unwilling to express contrary opinions for fear of being targeted. Your best bet at getting them, to be honest, might be anonymous surveys. Share the survey after the meeting and assure them of complete anonymity to get their honest opinion. 

Shoutouts

You should never end a weekly team meeting without acknowledging team members, especially those whose performance has been outstanding.

Lack of appreciation in the workplace is a major cause of employee attrition. A study by O.C. Tanner Learning Group showed that 79% of people who quit their jobs cite lack of appreciation as their reason.

What’s more? Acknowledging employees’ work and achievements have proven to increase profits by 29%.

Your shoutout should spell out what the team member has done, the impact of their action, and that you and everyone on the team appreciate it. Give them some time to soak in the praise and encourage other team members to celebrate them.