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Organising your meetings

These guidelines and resources are designed to help you organise your meetings and keep a record of decisions and action points. They may help you establish a routine where, at the end of each meeting, you have a set of minutes ready to go for the next meeting… because, who likes to write up minutes after a meeting?!

The guidelines include

  • a suggested agenda structure for your meetings
  • notes on each point in the structure
  • a template that you can copy and adapt for your own use

Agenda structure

Title

Usually your Circle/Team name and the date

Make it easy for team members to find the links they will need most frequently:

  • Time, date and zoom/teleconference link for regular meeting
  • Link to Comms Hub page -- so it’s easy for everyone to find the team’s mandate, role descriptions etc
  • Review dates for role elections and policies
  • Link to team's agenda template, so it is easy to copy for each meeting -- some teams put it at the bottom of the minutes document.
  • Archived minutes -- if you keep the current minutes document under 50 pages it should still run quite quickly (longer documents are slow to load and scroll).

Some teams keep their quick links on a single linked page, using start.me or similar services. Here's the SOS team links for example.

A. Assign facilitator & minute-taker

It’s best to name the facilitator at the end of the previous meeting so the facilitator has ample time to prepare. Reviewing the context from the last meeting may inform how the new meeting runs. If this hasn’t been possible then before the new meeting starts, make sure that you have chosen a facilitator and a minute-taker.

It’s better if the minute-taker is on a PC/Mac for ease of access rather than a phone or tablet.

If you are the minute-taker, please type into your team's minutes document.

First, record who took which roles at the meeting:

Minutes: 
Facilitator: 
Present:
B. Check-ins

Everyone present checks in by saying how they are feeling, or what would make it easier for them to be present in this meeting today. This could also include any barriers/things that stop people from being fully present and therefore able to absorb everything including neurodiversity, sensory or physical impairment.

If not everyone knows each other, the facilitator may remind them to state their name and preferred pronouns.

Sometimes check-ins may include each participant mentioning one thing they’re grateful for.

Check-ins helps to enrich the culture, build trust, deepen relationships and prepare the ground for richer, respectful meetings.

C. Cultures Reminder

The facilitator of the meeting asks for someone to read out the Regenerative Cultures Reminder. Feel free to come up with different methods to promote regenerative cultures, e.g. a grounding exercise or a poem.

M. Preparing for the next meeting

it's helpful if the minute-taker can set up the template for the next meeting. This might include

  • collating the action points from the meeting into a list
  • copying the blank agenda template and writing in the next meeting date in the title area
  • copying the list of action points into section
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