Why It's Crucial to Have a Meeting Agenda

The success of a meeting hinges on the agendas set for it. Agendas provide structure, purpose, and direction for you and your team. These practical tips will guide you through organizing and carrying out your next remote meeting more efficiently.

Agendas help manage your time

As more teams make the move away from traditional to remote workplaces, communication remains a crucial factor in teamwork, so one of the first things to consider in team meetings is setting a short agenda for catching up with one another and saying hellos. Another idea is to hold separate meetings to check-in with your colleagues within working hours, so you save time when you enter into other team meetings.

Though there are other options for scheduling and tracking meetings, I find Google Workspace easily accessible and a practical tool to maintain your agendas for each meeting. It has a calendar you can set for your team or yourself, along with a description field where you can place the meeting agenda, and it can offer a unique link for a virtual call you can send to your attendees, which will also go into their calendars.

It's important to keep in mind that setting agendas also serves as a good way to keep track of what you and your team have and have not discussed. It's equally helpful to designate a notetaker at the meeting for you and your teammates to review for the next meeting. Meeting notes can be shared with the rest of the company as well if necessary, so dedicating a channel on a communication platform like Slack or Teams can be an effective way to foster teamwork within a company.

Agendas help you prepare for meetings

Include meeting guidelines in your meeting notes, such as who will facilitate the meeting, whether or not participants should mute their microphones when others are speaking, and whether or not they should use the "raise hand" feature for when questions would be taken. Add expectations to your agenda and timings to help your team plan their part of the meeting, such as typing up reports by teammates to give everyone extra time to prepare and contribute where needed.

Agendas should be sent out in advance to give everyone enough time to review the items and prepare at least 24 hours before a meeting. Ideally, offering more than 24 hours to a week is better, especially if a colleague would be presenting something. As for how long a meeting would last, Google Calendar allows you to set the time and will reflect in the invites sent to your coworkers; then, you can divide the time spent on each topic on the agenda.

For presentations, a good tool to use is VideoCom Presenter. You can import your presentations from Google Slides or PowerPoint and add an extra flair to each slide, such as having your camera as part of the slide. It even offers easy annotations and a virtual laser pointer, so you can guide where you want your colleagues to look. You can also use VideoCom Presenter as a recording tool and save recordings of your meetings on the VideoCom Cloud! Having your videos stored in the VideoCom Cloud also offers extra communication functions, such as adding file attachments, call-to-action messages, and a comment box within the videos.

Agendas are one of the most potent tools in remote collaboration and can prevent teams from needing another meeting because nothing was decided in the last one. For more tips on having a more efficient workflow, visit our blog.