You need to organize a meeting. The company requires you to provide an agenda to prevent the meeting from going all over the place. Or have people attending who don’t need to be there (see Sitting in multiple meetings each day and never say anything?).
Writing an agenda does not need to be complicated. The agenda also help you get clarity about what you need to discuss. The outline is giving you a tool to realistically estimate the time required — giving you a chance to time box your meeting appropriately.
And with a clear meeting scope, you can better decide who you need to invite. So you don’t start the meeting and find out that one key person is missing, which means you have to reschedule for another day.
There are multiple formats an agenda can take. But I think keeping it simple is the way to go. The most important is that you have thought about what you want to achieve in your meeting. So I think the crucial part is to define a goal for the meeting. I would recommend something short and precise—a sentence summarizing the intended results/goal of the meeting.
As the second item, I would include a list of needed sources—the idea being that the attendees can read up on the meeting topic. And be prepared for the meeting. Having your attendees be informed helps shorten the meeting tremendously. You can still give a short overview at the beginning of the meeting. But, it is best if everybody comes prepared and the agenda is helping with achieving that goal.
And to complete the agenda, you can add little details like the date of the meeting and location. But nowadays, this information is redundant mainly as it is already part of the calendar entry.
I think it is helpful for everybody to see who you invited and why, so I would add the list of attendees to the agenda. Add a short statement next to each person why she should join. When you can’t come up with a reason, it could mean that you don’t need to invite this person at all. It shows appreciation of your fellow team members' time when you only invite the necessary people. It also prevents situations where you have attendees who don’t have to say anything at all in your meeting.
To help you organize the next meeting, I’ve created a small agenda template to help you make a clear invitation: Meeting Agenda Template.
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