Meeting Template

1. Check-in round

At first, everyone gets ready for the meeting. Before the meeting begins, participants prepare by ensuring all updates are entered on their assignments from the previous week and reviewing their assignments for the week. Then, the facilitator asks each person to share how they are feeling or one brief fact/experiences/opinion they haven’t shared before.

2. Checklist review

For weekly meetings, each member summarizes their accomplishments from the previous week.  Recurring actions (for example, social media posts 3x/week) are also reviewed. The facilitator checks against project task lists from Monday.com and/or jira and asks the people responsible for the recurring action to provide a status update, which gives everyone visibility into those actions.

The member responsible for a recurring action can only respond by saying “check” or “no check” to each item for the preceding period. 

3. Performance review

During this step, the team reviews their overall performance. Each person assigned a specific metric shares their latest data and briefly explains it. Participants are allowed to ask clarifying questions.

4. Project update

Project owners share a summary of any changes since the last meeting. It is encouraged to only share relevant changes for others to know. If further discussion is required, it will be addressed in the next step, “Triage Issues.”

5. Build agenda

During this step, participants collaboratively construct the meeting agenda on the spot based on their operational issues. The secretary records the agenda items, and any participant can add additional items later. This approach allows colleagues to directly influence the discussion without pre-dictating the agenda, preventing off-topic discussions that may consume valuable time. 

6. Triage issues

Once the agenda is complete, the core part of the meeting begins, focusing on addressing relevant issues and determining clear next steps. The facilitator guides the discussion by going through the agenda points, ensuring that each item receives sufficient attention within the allocated time. 

The goal is not to analyze issues extensively but to quickly triage them and determine actionable steps to move forward. Success is defined by enabling individuals to progress with their projects after the meeting, prioritizing action over perfection. 

To facilitate this, teams are encouraged to follow four sub-steps: 

a. The facilitator asks the agenda item owner about their needs. 

b. The agenda item owner requests any operational requirements (actions, information, opinions, ideas, advice) from other team members to advance their work or shares relevant information or updates for the team. 

c. The secretary records the outcomes and to-do’s, serving as the formal output of the meeting. 

d. The facilitator confirms if the agenda item owner has obtained what they needed. If yes, the team moves on to the next agenda item. If not, the sub-steps are repeated from the beginning.