Don’t Attend a Meeting Unless There is an Agenda
By: Debi Peverill
Tags: Governance, Productivity, Meetings, Agenda, Goals

An agenda is a wonderful thing if it is properly prepared and circulated well in advance of the meeting.

Properly used, an agenda will make any meeting more productive and possibly shorter. The shorter meeting part should occur because you are only going to talk about the items on the agenda. If someone brings up other items, the information that the item is not on the agenda should be all that is needed to keep the topic from being discussed. When our goal is to have effective meetings, the tactic of sticking to the agenda will help a great deal.

Standard agenda items are also a help in drafting an effective agenda. The agenda can be organized by committee so that each committee gets a chance to explain their activities and progress to the full board. The agenda could be arranged by the goals that are tied into the strategic plan for the organization. The important part about all of this is that the agenda should be arranged in a consistent format, so that meeting attendees do not waste time figuring out what is on the agenda.

If at all possible the agenda should have the predicted time that an agenda item will be discussed. If a meeting starts at 10 am then the calling the meeting or order, approving the agenda and the review of the prior meetings minutes should not take more than 10 minutes. Therefore at 10:10 the group is on to the next item on the agenda.

Putting the elapsed time on an agenda allows the participants to see how much discussion is expected for each item. Another benefit is that if you have someone joining the meeting at a particular time, then they have an idea when they should knock on the door to announce their arrival or when they would be expected to be joining a zoom call.

One of the benefits of putting a time on each agenda item is that you get an idea of how long the meeting should be. If when you are drafting the agenda the elapsed time starts to creep over two hours, then it might be time to decide that the agenda is too full and some decisions need to be made. Perhaps it is possible to move some items to another meeting or maybe an item should be referred to a committee to do some work on it before the full board hears about it. Another choice is to have more frequent but shorter meetings.

For example, if you want to keep the meting under two hours, then meeting every two weeks might become necessary rather than meeting once a month. Some groups are content with full day meetings, but they have them every three months. Your group will make this decision. If members have to travel to attend meetings (remember that?) then less frequent but longer meetings would be the strategy. If there is no travel involved, then frequent shorter meetings would be the strategy.

In 2020 with Zoom meetings becoming more popular, shorter meetings have become the norm, both because we are not travelling and because it is harder to get engagement when we are not in the same physical space.

To raise the bar on effective meetings — milestones from the strategic plan should be in place in each meeting’s agenda. All the participants should know where this meeting fits on the path to achieving the organization’s goals.

If you refuse to go to a meeting without an agenda, you will be taking a step towards improving the meeting experience for the entire group.