Meeting Charter

Do you know how it feels: you get invited to a meeting, join on time, are anxious about the topic…and soon realize you should have spent your time otherwise.

This Meeting Charter will make meetings more productive, and results focused. Capturing the agreed tasks in a section similar to an Action Item List makes following-up on tasks easy, transparent and effective.

Which problem it helps to solve:

The starting point of any good meeting is building a consensus on the meeting’s purpose and desired outcome. Once it is clear why people should invest their time and meet to discuss, align or decide something, the next step is being clear about who should attend.

Once the why and who are clarified, the agenda is being set to achieve the purpose. Documenting the agreed actions in the established form ‘who, what, until when’ builds accountability and ownership.

You will be surprised about the effect when using this meeting charter: not only will you – as the facilitator of the meeting – deliver more results in shorter time. Those colleagues who join your meetings will highly appreciate your thoughtfulness and clear structure. You achieve your purpose with only the minimum number of people who invest their time.

How it works:

This Meeting Charter template offers four sections:

1. What the meeting is about:
   Here, the purpose and individual objectives are being clarified. In case decisions are to be made, a drop down allows you to label this accordingly.
   
   
2. When, where and who needs to attend:
   This section is your money saver! You enter the names and their roles – and only those should attend the meeting. You can also label if the meeting is face-to-face or remote (or even both).
   
   
3. Agenda:
   We decided to automate this section as much as possible to avoid time consuming calculations of ‘start / end time’, calculate the durations manually etc.
   Every agenda item has one owner and a desired outcome.
   
   
4. Meeting Minutes:
   In most meetings either decisions are being taken or tasks recorded. An integrated Action Item List makes it easy to capture the agreed outcome of the single meeting.
   In case an Action Item List is needed for continuous follow-ups, we offer a separate template (Action Item List).

What else to know:

As always: don’t start by overdoing it. During the recent years of our professional lives, we have seen too many cases when individuals go from ‘zero to 100’ immediately. In case your status quo is ‘our meetings are a mess and only blabla’, we recommend you use the template but start small. Indicate to your teams your intention is to take it step by step.

Our template will help you to visualize to your teams what the end state will look like. Anyhow, we encourage you to take the journey of change slowly.

Reading recommendation fromt the Managing People Series: Harvard Business Review "Yes, You Can Make Meetings More Productive" (June 2014)