26 Common Meeting Types And How to Run Them

More than half of us sit in meetings for at least four hours per week. And many teams hold the wrong meeting for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. That’s a lot of wasted time. 

However, schedule the right type of meeting for the right reasons in the right way, and meetings become worth the time invested.

As the dictionary eloquently states:

This resource of meeting types only includes formal, scheduled meetings for people working in the same organization.

We hold these meetings to collaborate: share information, make decisions, nurture relationships, solve problems, and come up with ideas.

But too often, meetings are boring and don’t serve their purpose. They have the wrong attendees or  too many of them. There’s no clear purpose or agenda. And, as Harvard Business Review observed in 1976, “in most meetings someone takes a long time to say very little.”

You can resolve many of these issues by understanding the different types of meetings and their purpose, and choosing the one that best serves your purpose.

We’ve put together an overview of the 26 most important work meetings and the goals they can serve, so you can have more effective meetings.

You can use the table of contents below to jump to the five main categories. Each one includes several types of meetings along with its purpose and facilitation tips:

Product and project management meetings help teams plan, execute, check, and deliver their work.

Overview of product and project management meetings:

Brainstorming meetings tap into the creativity and expertise of a group to come up with ideas or solve a problem. By involving folks with different backgrounds, skills, and perspectives, these meetings help you find solutions you can’t come up with by yourself.

Examples of topics a brainstorming session can cover:

💡 Tips for brainstorming meetings:

📚️ Further reading (and listening)

Project planning meetings bring together all of the different stakeholders involved in a project. A project manager usually drives and leads these sessions to gather information, decide on a project’s scope, and determine what’s needed to deliver on the project’s objectives. You then work together with everyone to agree on a timeline for the deliverables.

Depending on the size of the project, planning meetings can span several sessions across weeks or even months, involving many people and teams.

Examples of projects a planning meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for Project planning meetings:

📚️ Further reading

The kickoff meeting marks the start of a project. Its purpose is to bring the entire team together, highlight milestones and other agreements from the planning process, and ensure everyone is clear on their responsibilities and objectives.

💡 Tips for Kickoff meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Managers hold check-in meetings to monitor a team’s or individual’s progress against earlier-agreed objectives – say, during project planning. Sometimes such events are for information gathering. But their underlying function is usually to enforce accountability so people stay on track.

Check-in meetings are often planned at recurring intervals, such as weekly or monthly, with the same attendees. You can also use these gatherings to clarify next steps or address challenges if they involve the entire group.

Examples of topics a check-in meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for check-in meetings:

📚️ Further reading

The daily huddle is a short meeting that teams or companies hold every day to sync up on their work. These gatherings usually don’t last more than 15 minutes and often happen in person or over a call.

In most organizations, the huddle is a daily pulse check on goals from larger, less frequent meeting types.

Examples of topics a Daily Huddle meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for Daily Huddle meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Holacracy is a method for running organizations through decentralized management. Weekly tactical meetings are an essential component of the system.

These events have a rigid structure and combine elements from other meeting types, like checking in on metrics and task statuses, while allowing participants to solve problems and make decisions.

A typical tactical meeting agenda looks like this:

💡 Tips for tactical meetings:

📚️ Further reading

You hold an incident postmortem meeting after you’ve resolved a problematic situation. Doing so allows everyone involved to extract learnings from the incident and define ways to prevent them from happening in the future.

Examples of incidents a postmortem meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for incident postmortem meetings:

📚️ Further reading

In a lessons-learned meeting, a team comes together to review a project, milestone, or Sprint to discover what did and didn’t go well. They can apply these learnings to future projects and share them across the organization.

Teams take lessons learned into account in future projects, and they can also be shared across the organization. Lessons learned meetings typically happen at the end of a project or on a fixed cadence. You can also hold a review meeting in the middle of a large project whenever you complete a milestone.

Examples of topics a lessons learned meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for lessons learned meetings:

📚️ Further reading

We consider any event that’s part of an Agile framework, methodology, or theory an agile meeting. Anyone can benefit from these meetings – not just agile teams.

Overview of Agile meetings:

During Sprint Planning, Scrum teams decide which are the most valuable Product Backlog items to deliver in the next Sprint.

Sprint Planning ensures teams have enough direction and structure to know what to work on next. The event eliminates the need for long-term plans that are often inflexible, unrealistic, or become obsolete due to changing customer and business priorities.

“Parabol has made a massive difference. Our retrospective and sprint planning meetings are more consistent, productive, and enjoyable. It keeps our meetings flowing, no matter who is leading them.”

The Sprint Planning meeting happens at the start of the Sprint. It can last one to two hours for a two-week Sprint.

💡 Tips for Sprint Planning events:

📚️ Further reading

Backlog Refinement is a process by which teams add detail to items in their Product Backlog so it includes all the information required for work to begin.

Some agile practitioners don’t consider backlog refinement a meeting because the Scrum Guide refers to it as “an ongoing process.” Other teams make backlog refinement a recurring, formal meeting to ensure that it happens often and not at the last minute before Sprint Planning.

📚️ Further reading

Planning Poker is a meeting during which teams estimate how large or small various tasks and projects are using a set of poker cards.

Teams review a selection of user stories or tasks from the product backlog. Then each participant individually estimates how much effort that task will involve. Teams do this by playing cards with different values from a customized deck.

💡 Tips for Planning Poker meetings:

📚️ Further reading

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event held every working day of the Sprint at the same time and place.

The goal of the meeting is to create clarity on the day’s work, adjust plans, and engage in some quick problem solving. The focus of the Daily Scrum should be on looking ahead at how to tackle the day rather than giving status updates on what the team completed the day before.

💡 Tips for Daily Scrum meetings:

📚️ Further reading

The Sprint Review showcases the Scrum team’s work from their Sprint. Sprint Reviews take place at the end of the Sprint before the Sprint Retrospective.

During a Sprint Review, the team collects feedback on their work from stakeholders. During this meeting, the team determines if they met the Sprint Goal and discuss how to improve the product in future Sprints.

💡 Tips for Sprint Review meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Agile teams use Sprint Retrospectives to review their work together and identify opportunities for process improvements. Teams hold a Sprint Retrospective at the end of every Sprint.

Anything is up for review and discussion during the Sprint Retrospective, including working relationships, interactions, processes, and tools.

Team members first suggest topics for discussion, usually by writing their thoughts down on cards. They then group these into themes and vote on which ones they want to discuss.

💡 Tips for retrospective meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Meetings for operations and middle management keep the company running. In these events, you create strategies, sync up between teams, and look at higher-level performance and business metrics.

Overview of meetings for operations and middle management:

Strategy planning means you’re devising a plan to reach a specific objective. You can do this at the company level – the overall business strategy – and within a team, say, the marketing strategy for Q4.

Typically, strategy planning happens in a dedicated meeting. Its length and frequency depend on the challenge to be tackled.

For example, overall company strategy planning happens on an annual rhythm, often with executives going off site or offline, sometimes for multiple days.

Coming up with a Q4 marketing strategy can generally be done in a handful of one to two-hour meetings over a period of one or two weeks at most.

Examples of topics a strategy planning session can cover:

💡 Tips for strategy planning meetings:

📚️ Further reading

A management meeting brings together the highest level managers of a company or, at larger organizations, a department. Its format can differ, but usually, these meetings involve reviewing metrics and project progress, solving problems, and making decisions.

Management meetings are typically held weekly on the same day and time and follow a fixed agenda.

Examples of topics a management meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for management meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Most teams hold team meetings and have many reasons for doing so.

First, regularly bringing the group together ensures everyone feels they belong to a team. Once together, some teams review essential projects and metrics they’re collaborating on. Other groups might share learnings, say when you’re on the same team but work for different customers.

Team meetings often happen weekly, but other rhythms and ad hoc gatherings are possible, too.

Examples of topics team meetings can cover:

💡 Tips for team meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Most organizations hold sales meetings weekly. Each sales team member shares how prospects are progressing through the sales pipeline during this gathering. At Parabol, we call this meeting “Deals, Deals, Deals!”

This meeting is an opportunity for team members to discuss best practices with each other. In most cases, its primary purpose is for the sales leader to stay on top of everyone’s sales performance and test how realistic each member’s forecast is.

Examples of topics sales review meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for sales review meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Like the tactical meeting type we reviewed under product and project management meetings, governance meetings are a specific meeting type from Holacracy.

In traditional meetings, people often get assigned new responsibilities masquerading as projects and tasks. Say your boss tells you to “keep an eye on our website’s Google Analytics from now on.”

While that sounds innocent enough, it can be a significant, ongoing responsibility you now have that was never part of your original job description.

Holacracy deals with such role-scope changes in separate governance meetings. These gatherings aim to amend roles that individuals hold and those of what Holacracy calls “circles”–roughly translatable as a team or department in traditional organizations.

These meetings help clarify responsibilities and give people a way to accept or reject the “scope creep” of their roles.

Topics a governance meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for governance meetings:

📚️ Further reading

HR and people management meetings help people grow, recover, or bond–if they’re done right and for the right reasons.

Overview of HR and people management meetings:

Onboarding meetings are the workplace equivalent of first dates. New hires feel nervous and excited about joining a new company and meeting many of their coworkers for the first time.

Onboarding meetings should help calm those nerves. These gatherings give people a great first impression of the organization and familiarize new employees with how to do their work and operate within the company.

Examples of topics an onboarding session can cover:

💡 Tips for onboarding meetings:

📚️ Further reading

One-on-one meetings between boss and employee can be awful. The manager might lecture instead of listen, the subordinate might complain about coworkers, or the boss makes promises they don’t keep.

You can resolve most of these issues by letting the employee own the meeting’s agenda. Make it their meeting, and ensure they do most of the talking. Also, try to keep out operational topics, or tackle them if the employee thinks they’re pressing and there’s some time left at the end.

Examples of topics a one-on-one session can cover:

💡 Tips for one-on-one meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Formal performance reviews usually involve a written evaluation of an employee that you then discuss in a meeting. They’re hallmarks of hierarchical, traditionally managed organizations and are still surprisingly common.

Nobody likes these meetings. They imply managers should give feedback on a quarterly or annual frequency. Yet regular, immediate feedback is much more effective and motivating.

Another problem is that performance reviews suffer from recency bias, meaning events close to the meeting will get much more weight than those that happened long ago.

Examples of topics a performance review can cover:

💡 Tips for performance review meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Team building meetings strengthen bonds between team members. They can be as small as a team lunch and as big as multi-day events or retreats.

Usually, the goal for these meetings is not just for people who work together daily to get to know each other better but to create bonds with folks from across the organization.

Examples of team building meetings:

💡 Tips for team building meetings:

📚️ Further reading

Executives communicate with the entire company or collaborate with their bosses – the Board and shareholders – in leadership and executive-level meetings.

Overview of Leadership and executive-level meetings:

A company’s shareholders elect the members of the Board of Directors (“the Board”) who oversee the organization’s performance and, specifically, the CEO. The Board is essentially the CEO’s boss, though, ideally, its members act more like trusted advisors.

Board meetings usually happen quarterly and provide a chance for the CEO to discuss the company’s progress, plans, and challenges. Such talks should be about high-level, strategic topics, say whether to launch a new product, not a minor feature update.

Examples of topics a board meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for board meetings:

📚️ Further reading

When your company reaches a few dozen people, a town hall meeting helps everyone stay in touch with the leadership and vice versa. The session can motivate people and highlight the company’s vision, values, and goals.

Examples of topics a town hall meeting can cover:

💡 Tips for town hall meetings:

📚️ Further reading

All companies that are owned by more than one person have to bring their shareholders together at least once per year. These gatherings can be intimate or huge, depending on the organization’s size.

During shareholder meetings, the company leadership gives an update on how the business is doing and where it’s headed. Shareholders can ask questions and, sometimes, vote on specific topics, like selecting board members or approving an acquisition of the company. (What shareholders can vote on depends on the rights of the shares they hold.)

Examples of topics a shareholder meeting can cover:

📚️ Further reading

We leave you with this checklist. Run through these questions when preparing for any meeting–you’ll ensure the gathering will be as effective and enjoyable as possible.

Head over to our resource of 29 tips for running effective meetings if you want even more ideas for making the most of your meetings.