18 Effective Free Meeting Agenda Examples and Templates

Meetings are one of the most common forms of communication at work because of how productive and versatile they can be! The key to making effective use of this time with your colleagues is to ensure it’s planned well. Factors like setting a purpose for your meeting, deciding on talking points, and inviting appropriate attendees are all keys to success. But having one collaborative place to plan and document those factors is also important—and that’s where a meeting agenda comes into play. 

• What is a meeting agenda?
• Why does every meeting need a meeting agenda?
• Who owns the agenda?
• What should be included in the meeting agenda?
• 10 tips for creating an effective meeting agenda
• Why your agenda needs iteration and experimentation
• 18 free meeting agenda examples and templates
• The best tool for meeting agendas: Fellow

What is a meeting agenda?

A meeting agenda is a document that organizes the talking points for an upcoming call. You can create a meeting agenda with pen and paper or, for easier sharing and collaboration with colleagues, you can make a virtual one, too. Meeting agendas are typically created by the organizer of the meeting and then shared with participants at least one business day in advance. Since everyone on the call has access to the document, it becomes a central place to track the meeting’s purpose, plans, and outcomes. It can even be useful and added to during the call as well! 

Why does every meeting need a meeting agenda? 

Meetings are so important for effective collaboration, decision making, and brainstorming. But without some form of structure, participants in these calls may not know how to jump into a discussion or in what order they should approach topics. This leaves a lot of room for ambiguity and risks the meeting going off topic or over time. Instead, meeting agendas provide a clear structure for what to talk about, who is responsible for each point, and how much time is allocated to discuss each topic. 

On the topic of the importance of meeting agendas, Roger Schwarz from the Harvard Business Review says,

“An effective agenda sets clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting. It helps team members prepare, allocates time wisely, quickly gets everyone on the same topic, and identifies when the discussion is complete. If problems still occur during the meeting, a well-designed agenda increases the team’s ability to effectively and quickly address them.”

Who owns the agenda?

Alright, now that you know why having a meeting agenda is so crucial, you might be wondering: who’s in charge of creating one?

The owner of the meeting agenda is the meeting organizer. It’s up to this person (or a team of people) to create the template, but remember that it’s everyone’s responsibility to add talking points and various action items that need to be discussed. 

If only the manager takes the time to add talking points, it will only be the manager talking. Not only is this not productive or a good use of everyone’s time, but chances are also good there will be some yawns from meeting attendees. 

What should be included in the meeting agenda? 

If you’re the meeting organizer and it’s up to you to create the agenda, here are some must-haves that you’ll need to include to make the meeting agenda as comprehensive as possible:

1. Title of the meeting: Clearly state the purpose or main topic
2. Date, time, and duration: Specify when the meeting will start and end
3. Main objective: Briefly describe the main goal of the meeting
4. Talking points: Break down the meeting into specific topics or segments
5. Supporting documents: List any reports, data, or other materials attendees should bring or review beforehand
6. Decisions: A segment to determine what decisions were made or not made
7. Action items: Assign and document what actions need to be taken post-meeting
8. Follow up: If it is a recurring meeting, confirm if it is necessary to meet again or confirm the next meeting date and time
9. Feedback: Provide a way for attendees to give feedback on the meeting for continuous improvement

How in-depth you go into each of these components will vary depending on the type of meeting you’re holding, but the agenda should cover these elements throughout. Remember, the agenda should be distributed in advance to give attendees enough time to prepare.

10 tips for creating an effective meeting agenda

• State the meeting purpose and objectives
• Incorporate AI for agenda optimization
• Prompt attendees to add talking points
• Attach relevant material
• Assign facilitators for each topic
• Allocate time for each section
• Prioritize talking points strategically
• Add a section for action items
• Leave a section for questions
• Automatically share the agenda with meeting attendees

1State the meeting purpose and objectives

Every agenda for a meeting should outline a clear purpose—this is known as your meeting purpose statement. It’s for helping the rest of your invited group of participants understand what the call’s goal is! Including this meeting purpose statement in your meeting invitation is also important as it allows attendees to quickly identify if the meeting is relevant to them or not. If you’re using a meeting management tool like Fellow, you can embed the purpose statement directly into every invite so you don’t forget! 

Fellow helps ensure every meeting has a clear purpose. With the Meeting Guidelines feature set, when a meeting is being created, meeting organizers are prompted to add a meeting purpose to the description of the meeting, to help boost meeting engagement.

2Incorporate AI for agenda optimization

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have come a long way in automating work! When incorporated into meeting planning, AI tools can help optimize your agenda by recommending new topics, sorting the order of talking points, and transcribing the notes at the end of your call. When you leverage AI to take care of some of these challenging or mundane administrative tasks, you’ll grant yourself more time to focus on other growth drivers for your team! 

3Prompt attendees to add talking points

It can be difficult to find innovative ways to get your participants more involved in meetings. But you don’t actually have to go that far out of the box to find successful virtual engagement strategies in your team calls. One simple prompt is to request that team members add their own talking points to the meeting agenda. You can add talking points as questions that they need to answer, such as, “What are some blockers that you need help overcoming this week?” This will spark collaboration and ensure that the meeting topics are highly relevant to your team’s needs. 

4Attach relevant material 

Any documents that will be discussed during the meeting should be linked directly to the meeting agenda. Not only does this help your attendees review content ahead of time to come prepared for the call, but it also allows you to quickly pull up the necessary documents mid-meeting to discuss them with the group. 

Pro Tip: Using Fellow, create an action item with multiple assignees at the top of the agenda prompting people to check off the task as they read the material before the meeting! 

5Assign facilitators for each topic

Facilitators are the people who are responsible for each section. They might be doing a presentation on that topic, moderating the conversation, or just ensuring that the discussion doesn’t go off the rails or over the allocated time limit. A helpful way to quickly coordinate and assign facilitators for each topic is through Fellow’s Sections automation. A feature like this makes it easy to visually identify whose section is coming up next and what topics will be presented by that person.

6Allocate time for each section

When people show up late or have technology issues, your meeting will be at risk of going over time. This can trigger the rest of everyone’s schedules to be delayed for the day, which isn’t an effective use of time. To avoid this, have at least five minutes at the start of the call for set-up and icebreakers. Then, allocate time for every other section and add this to your agenda. Knowing how much time is dedicated to each topic will help your facilitators plan their segments. In case you have guest speakers jumping into the meeting at a specific point, having a predetermined timetable will also help them know when to connect. 

7Prioritize talking points strategically

A recent study showed that social relationships in the workplace can actually become strained by too many meetings and meetings that aren’t organized effectively. As a solution, the study suggests organizing meeting talking points so that there is a small amount of time for social conversation before jumping into the business talk. This allows attendees to ease into the conversation and feel more heard at work. 

From there, try to organize the meeting agenda so that it covers foundational topics that are necessary for contextualizing other topics later in the meeting. Then, the next topics should be the ones that are high priority and need to be discussed first in case you run out of time. 

8Add a section for action items

Action items are essentially the to-do’s following each meeting. The agenda for a meeting should contain a spot for listing these action items as they are decided throughout the call. You’ll also want to make sure there is always a person assigned to complete the action item and a due date, as having these will improve accountability in getting it done! 

9Leave a section for questions

At the end of your meeting agenda, have a spot for any questions. Of course, questions can be asked and answered throughout the meeting if you prefer, but some meeting types—like a town hall—might have a presentation that can’t be interrupted. So, leaving 10-15 minutes at the end of each presentation is a great way to avoid interruptions in key sessions while also ensuring that employees’ concerns are heard. 

10Automatically share the agenda with meeting attendees

Making sure that your attendees actually receive the agenda for a meeting is important! Without it, they’ll be just as lost when the meeting time comes as if you didn’t build the agenda at all. Automating the distribution of the agenda is a way to save time and take another thing to remember off of your to-do list! Try to share the meeting agenda with your meeting attendees at least one business day in advance so that they can review the necessary materials, add talking points, and ask any pre-meeting questions they might have. 

Why your agenda needs iteration and experimentation 

Remember what we said about your meeting agenda being a living, breathing document?

We stand by this statement, but even so, you shouldn’t be afraid to throw it in the trash and start new.

No meeting agenda is perfect, and no matter the size of your company or the industry it’s in, things change. The agenda that worked in Q1 may no longer be a perfect fit come Q3. 

Just like you need to consider “Do I actually need this meeting?” every so often, you need to reflect on your agendas the same way. Don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves, iterate, and improve on your agenda from time to time to reach maximum meeting productivity. 

18 free meeting agenda examples and templates 

1Weekly team meetings

2Remote team meeting

3Company-wide townhall meetings

4Board meeting minutes

5Leadership team meetings

6Performance review meeting

7One-on-one meetings

8Peer meeting agenda

9Project kickoff meeting

10Sales team weekly kickoff

11Daily Leadership Huddle Template

12Weekly Executive Calendar Review Meeting Template

13Monthly Management Meeting Agenda Template

14Sales Team Meeting

15Weekly Scrum Meeting Template

16Engineering Manager One-on-One Meeting Template

17Performance Improvement Plan

18Employee Retention Meeting Template

The best tool for meeting agendas: Fellow

Fellow is an AI-assisted meeting management tool that helps teams collaborate online more effectively. Some of the latest AI features include the ability to automatically organize your facilitators’ sections, transcribe meeting notes, generate meeting summaries, and even recommend new talking points in an agenda builder (which is super helpful when you come up against a brick wall). 

Ahead of your meeting, you can access Fellow’s library of 500+ meeting agenda templates, review guidelines on how to make your call more effective, and automatically distribute the agenda to your team. 

During the call, the software integrates easily into your video conferencing platform of choice so you can see the agenda, documentation, meeting notes, and action items all from within one window! After the call, you can share an AI-generated summary or feedback survey back to your participants to optimize your next meeting. 

Parting advice

Meeting agendas have a lot of benefits. They help organize you and your team, they provide a centralized place for accessing information, and they’ll continue to evolve as your team grows! Also, the best part about meeting agendas is that they’re customizable to different needs. Depending on the type of meeting that you’re running, you can opt for more formal or informal agendas that hit on different talking points. Feel free to test a few different options using our meeting agenda examples and templates and explore what works best for your team!