Avoid conducting an ineffective or non-impactful virtual meeting that cost your business time and resources. Knowing how to craft a virtual meeting agenda will help you keep your meetings short, informative, and to the point so that your team can remain efficiently on-task and maximally productive.
webcastingandvirtualevents.com gathered the following information on creating virtual meeting agendas to keep your meetings organized, reflecting the level of efficiency expected from your team.
What is the Purpose of a Virtual Meeting Agenda?
A virtual meeting agenda helps you and your team prepare for an online meeting and guide yourselves through the topics you need to discuss. The time spent on planning an agenda will save time for all meeting participants by establishing a clear set of objectives, topics, and time frames.
Creating the Perfect Virtual Meeting Agenda
With so many businesses having migrated their operations to remote working, the necessity for virtual meetings has grown exponentially, while the need for these meetings to be streamlined and efficient has become crucial to productivity. Your virtual meeting agenda should include the following:
Team and Meeting Logistics – Include standard meeting details like
- The meeting date
- The expected timeframe
- The meeting access link
- Expected team attendees
- The physical location for team members attending in-person
Your attendees should have quick and advanced access to these details. While they can refer to their calendar invite, having a second or third reference (email and text) can help.
Note: In the digital workplace, it is crucial to know where your team members and/or meeting participants are geographically located to avoid time-zone conflicts.
Tip: Keep your virtual meetings within a respectable 15 to 30-minute timeframe. Remote working is already filled with a multitude of challenges. Your virtual meeting should not create another challenge or difficulty.
Virtual Meeting Objective – “What’s the point?” You will want to include the meeting’s key objective prominently in your agenda. Everyone in attendance needs to be aware of why the meeting is taking place so it can stay on track.
Tip: Including the meeting’s objective can signal the end of the meeting once the objective has been met.
Meeting Discussion Topics – Avoid stray conversations by clearly defining what topics will be addressed. Each topic should be listed with its allotted timeframe and the team member responsible for its presentation.
Virtual Meeting Structure – It is absolutely essential that you establish an order in which meeting topics will be addressed. Give everything a timeframe, including introductions, icebreakers, and Q&As. This will help you ensure precise meeting timing.
Extra Meeting Details – Be sure to include the following information (either in the description or in the footnotes) when you send out your virtual meeting agenda:
- What documents or data should be formulated or prepared and by whom
- List any relevant documents, files, and source material attendees should be familiar with
- Who is responsible for what during the meeting (presentation, minutes, timekeeping, etc.)
Tip: Your meeting agenda should convey all pertinent meeting information to its attendees, reducing or eliminating any potential confusion or misunderstandings.
Team Feedback – A powerful ending to a well-organized virtual meeting agenda is a link or email address for team members to offer praise, criticisms, and suggestions about meeting structure, length, and/or content.
Time and Efficiency
One of the most challenging aspects of a functional and efficient digital workplace is a high level of respect for time.
You will not be effective in a digital workplace if you are in meetings or distracted all the time, and for most successful businesses, meetings are highly valued events. If you choose not to use a virtual meeting agenda, you are being inconsiderate with your coworker’s and peers’ time. Agendas help you keep meetings on task, allow participants time to prepare, define and restrict discussion time, and document crucial decisions and actions, so you don’t have to repeat the meeting.
Note: Meetings are the most costly form of collaboration. By pulling an entire team into a meeting, they are effectively all removed from production. Creating and using a virtual meeting agenda keeps everyone focused and significantly reduces the time spent away from production.
Virtual Agendas
In this article, you discovered what a virtual meeting agenda is, why they are crucial to virtual meeting efficiency, and how to put one together for your next virtual meeting.
By crafting and distributing a virtual meeting agenda, you establish a parameter for the meeting’s beginning, content, and ending. Thus, increasing effective information deliverance from senior staff to team members.
Ignoring the need for virtual meeting agendas leaves your team’s meeting subject to running overtime and accomplishing less than possible.
Sources:
extension.unh.edu/resource/best-practices-hosting-virtual-meeting
nceas.ucsb.edu/virtual-meeting-best-practices
strategicconsulting.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/332/2020/03/Guide-to-Effective-Meetings-Telecommuting_040620.pdf
