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Brief note on attitudeReading this piece carefully will take a few minutes. A brief review may lead you to conclude that it’s “overkill”, and that you prefer to “keep things simple” – meaning that maybe you’ll read it later. As a meeting leader, you owe it to your participants to plan productive meetings. This piece will help you do that. Maybe make a game of it. Try to find anything that you think is unnecessary. Try to find things you would do differently. Whatever you do, keep in mind that this piece was written by someone who has led thousands of meetings. The advice herein is imbued with inescapable principles, that if embraced will likely result in your meeting participants to regard the meetings you lead to be worth their time, but if ignored will lead your meeting participants to question their involvement. |
Meeting Name
Use the following format for naming a wiki page, Google docs name, Word document name, etc.: YYYY-MM-DD [Org Unit Name] Meeting. Let’s break this down
YYYY-MM-DD: Date in a format that is recognizable across cultures, and supports sorting by date (as opposed to M/D/YY, which doesn’t).[Org Unit Name]: Replace the brackets and the text with the name of the organizational unit. For example, “Board”.Meeting: The literal string “Meeting”. This allows the same name to be used for both agendas and minutes, which is helpful in that often agendas are edited to produce minutes.Example:
2020-06-17 Board MeetingOptionally, for physical files (e.g., Microsoft Word, PDF), replace space characters with underscore characters. Example:
2020-06-17_Board_Meeting.pdfDoing so will improve readability in cases where web servers escape (replace) spaces with%20in filenames of files they serve as downloaded files (e.g.,2020-06-17%20Board%20Meeting.pdf).
Meeting Participation
Member List: A numbered list of the group’s voting members. The list is numbered to easily note how many members the group has, which is required to determine whether a quorum has been achieved. This list should be present in the agenda, which is distributed prior to the meeting. Optionally, list the person’s role in the group (e.g., Chair, Treasurer).
Members Present: A numbered list of the group’s voting members who are present during the meeting. The list is numbered to easily note how many members are present, which is required to determine whether a quorum has been achieved.
Other Present: Simply noting who else was present during the meeting. Optionally, list the person’s applicable role and/or reason for being present.
Meeting Logistics
Time: If the participants are in different times zones, list applicable times with city-indicated time zones. If participants are in the same time zone, just state the local time.
Duration: State the duration in hours or minutes.
Logistics: State the physical location, dial-up information, or online meeting information as applicable. Alternatively, reference meeting details in a calendar invitation.
Resources: Links to resources that apply to all meetings of the overall organization and/or the organization that is meeting.
Meeting Topic Groups
Grouping meeting topics helps meeting planners to focus their attention on main topics.
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Topic Numbering
It is often useful to referenced reference opening and main topics by number. Topics They are numbered sequentially starting at “1” from opening topics through main topics. Closing topics are not numbered sequentially starting at “51”. The reason for the gap in the numbering sequence is so that closing topics don’t need to be renumber when adding main topics, which would be the case if topics were number sequentially through closing topics. Furthermore, it that if they were numbered, then they would have to be renumbered when adding and deleting main topics. It is rarely useful to reference closing topic topics by number.
Opening Topics
Topic | Topic Leader | Desired Outcome | Notes |
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Minutes taker | Chair | The desired outcome is that a minutes taker is selected. |
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Quorum | Chair | The desired outcome is that the chair has reminded the meeting participants what the quorum requirements are and has determined whether a quorum has been achieved. |
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Agenda | Chair | The desired outcome is that the meeting participants agree to the agenda, adjusting first it as required. |
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Prior unapproved meeting minutes | Chair | The desired outcome is that the working group has approved all unapproved meeting minutes. |
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Outstanding tasks | Chair | The desired outcome is that the meeting participants understand the status of all tasks outstanding as of the end of the previous meeting. |
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