45 Minute Team Meeting Template: This 45-minute meeting agenda suits almost any team.
Whether you’re a new manager running your first team meeting or a seasoned veteran looking to spice up your existing meetings, here’s a team meeting agenda you can use to help spark meaningful conversations.
In this article, we’ll walk through:
Download the 45-minute team meeting agenda template.
Team meetings are an essential tool for internal alignment. It’s a time for team building, decision making, and ensuring the team is moving in the same direction.
Meeting with your team on a weekly, or bi-weekly basis, with no interruptions allows the team to collaboratively:
With the majority of people spending over 10 hours in meetings per week, it’s easy to want to cut down on that meeting time by eliminating internal team meetings.
But, based on our research, fewer meeting doesn’t lead to faster growth. At the end of the day, it’s about making those meetings more effective — so let’s dive in!
Think of the agenda for your weekly team meeting as the map. It guides the conversation to ensure it’s productive and meaningful.
There are a few key things to consider when making your meeting agenda. Firstly, it should include:
But remember: you’re not solely responsible for making the agenda. Get your team to contribute as well. By making a collaborative agenda, they’ll be able to add anything they think should be discussed ahead of time. This will help your meetings be more of a discussion and less of a monologue.
Lastly, there’s no need to recreate the wheel each week. Establish recurring items you want to discuss regularly as the foundation of your agenda. Then, add a section for ad-hoc items that may come up during the week and need to be discussed.
Let’s look at a good starting foundation for every team meeting agenda. 👇
Starting every team meeting agenda with metrics reinforces how everyone’s individual or team KPIs ladder up to what your overall company objective is.
First, reiterate the objective. It will keep your team focused on the big picture. Then, go through the numbers.
Don’t run through a laundry list of metrics, instead use this as an opportunity to tie your team’s individual KPIs to the overall company objectives.
Some questions to consider include:
This is where the bulk of team meeting time is spent: what is everyone working on for the next sprint (or week, or until your next meeting).
To avoid this one agenda item sucking the life out of your meetings, ask employees to share this update in advance of your meeting right within your shared meeting agenda. That way, you spend more time in your meetings making decisions and less time sharing context.
After getting updates on everyone’s projects, segue into if there are roadblocks – and where they are.
As a manager, this is your time to shine! Remove the roadblocks as best as possible during the meeting, and get a sense of some of the larger issues your team is struggling with.
It could be as simple as “I’m away next week and worried about completing X” or “We need another developer if we’re going to hit X goal.” No matter what, this is a huge opportunity to increase the productivity of your team for the next sprint.
Encourage teammates to shout each other out for great work. Not only is this a great way to end your team meetings on a positive note, but it helps build your team dynamic and culture.
Take note of these acknowledgments and make sure to call out individuals for superior teamwork in your individual one-on-one meetings as well.
There are a lot of team meeting questions you can include in your agenda if you’re looking to switch things up. Here are a few more tried-and-true winners we recommend:
If you’re looking for more team meeting ideas, check out these 24 team meeting topics for inspiration.
✨ Skip ahead to download Hypercontext’s 45-minute team meeting template.
Looking for a more specific team meeting agenda template? We’ve got you covered with department-specific templates:
👉 Sales team meeting
👉 Marketing team meeting
👉 Leadership team meeting
👉 Sprint planning meeting for engineers
The average employee spends 31 hours in unproductive meetings every month. Given that team meetings are the most common meeting in everyone’s calendar, they’re a likely culprit.
So, how can leaders run effective team meetings?
Below we share some team meeting tips that hold true across every department.
Jump to a tip:
The question is simple: what are you hoping to get out of this meeting?
If this isn’t set yet, collaboratively set the meeting goal with your team. When you collectively decide on what the best use of everyone’s time is, it will make it that much easier to stay hyper-focused during meetings.
Some common team meeting goals include:
Only 3% of people working in tech plan to return to 100% in-office work, according to research we did for The State of High Performing Teams. So whether you’re a distributed, fully remote, or hybrid team, you need to approach every meeting with a remote-first mindset.
This creates a more inclusive environment for everyone on the team. It levels out the playing field and makes it easier for everyone’s voice to be heard, which in turn will improve overall team collaboration and productivity.
With the right mindset and remote tools, running meetings with a remote-first approach is much more accessible than is once was and can make a big difference for your remote team members.
While this seems like an obvious one, it’s certainly not the first thing you think about. If your team is comprised entirely of morning people, you should schedule your recurring meeting in the morning when people are most productive and engaged.
But, if they’re not and you book your recurring team meetings every Monday at 8 am…chances are you won’t get much participation and that wouldn’t be a great use of everyone’s time.
Another thing to think about when it comes to scheduling is the maker vs. manager schedule. While the individual contributors might seemingly have more time in their calendars, it’s important to consider how meetings might disrupt their focus time.
The best way to find out the most optimal time? Ask your team point-blank when they would prefer to have the team meeting. The same should be said for your one-on-one meetings too.
Conducting inclusive meetings isn’t only a nice to have. It’s an essential part of making your meetings more effective. After all, if your team members don’t feel comfortable contributing to the meeting, what’s the point?
Not everyone is comfortable participating in team meetings by speaking up and that’s okay.
In fact, some people want the time and space to think things through and write them down. That’s why it’s so important for teams to invest in collaborative agenda software to give everyone equal opportunity to participate in team meetings, whether they want to write out their thoughts or share them verbally.
Just because you’re the owner of a meeting, doesn’t mean you need to dictate everything.
When you spread the responsibility around, not only does it get your team more involved, but it’s also a great way to boost participation during these team syncs.
By having a shared and collaborative agenda that’s available to all team members before each meeting, everyone has the opportunity to contribute to it. When everyone has access to the agenda before the meeting, they’ll:
It’ll avoid wasted time and help you stay on track in your weekly meetings.
While this sounds like an ineffective use of people’s time, ice breakers offer many long-term benefits to your team, including:
Plus, the short-term benefits are that you can ease everyone into the conversation. Think of it as a warm-up before a big game. Try asking one of these icebreaker questions at the start of your next team meeting:
Professional athletes shoot around before the game starts. Musicians run up and down scales before the show starts. Why shouldn’t you warm up your conversational skills before the meeting starts?
Keeping the team accountable for what was agreed on during the meeting is key to ensuring the things you want to get done, will get done.
Having next steps documented, along with your meeting minutes, is also a great way for everyone on the team to keep track of how far along others are with completing their tasks. However, don’t mistake this as a micromanaging tool. When you continue to build a culture of accountability on your team, it also helps build trust amongst team members.
Ultimately, your team meeting should be a time for your whole team to come together to align, problem solve, plan and celebrate. Try putting these tips into action with Hypercontext’s 45-minute team meeting agenda template.
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