8 Freehand templates to improve meetings

There are a myriad of memes complaining about workplace meetings that could have been an email. However, there are ways you can make your meetings worthwhile so no one will feel the need to gripe about them. Check out the meeting templates for Freehand below to help structure your meeting, save time, and align your team.

Meeting Agenda Template

There’s nothing worse than a meeting that goes off the rails and wastes everyone’s time. This Meeting Agenda template can help you quickly map out your plan for the meeting so everyone knows what to expect.

This Meeting Agenda template will help you:

• Align the goal(s) for your meeting.
• Prioritize problems to be discussed.
• Assign tasks and determine the next steps.
• Figure out what should be done in the future.

To use this template, you just need to follow these six steps.

• Determine a goal.
• Set your agenda.
• Figure out solutions to problems.
• Determine your next steps.
• Assign tasks to the meeting members.
• Develop a timeline to achieve long-term results.

Icebreaker Template

When you set up a meeting, it’s important to take a few minutes to get the team involved and encourage them to share. Starting the meeting with a bit of silliness will help everyone relax and make them more willing to participate in the meeting. A great way to do this is to set up an icebreaker.

This Icebreaker template will help you:

• Develop a space where people are comfortable sharing ideas.
• Give everyone the chance to share their ideas, even if they don’t usually do so.
• Get your team used to sharing ideas virtually.

This Icebreaker template comes with two games to choose from.

• Pictionary: Someone draws a picture of a designated word, and the team has to try to guess what it is.
• Team portraits: This game involves each person contributing toward creating funky faces by drawing various body parts in different boxes.

Get an inside view on how the team at InVision, a company which has been remote for its entire 11-year history, uses InVision Freehand to transform what it means to collaborate. Watch on-demand. 

Daily Standup Template

If you’re hosting a meeting to check in with your employees on their progress, this Daily Standup template can be a lot of help. Starting the day with a daily check-in meeting allows teams to clear up any confusion and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Using this template allows you to:

• You can quickly share progress on the project you are working on.
• You can answer any questions or address roadblocks.
• If you have multiple different teams working, it gives you the chance to inform other teams of progress and align your goals.

Here’s how to use this template:

• Share any progress that was recently made.
• Plan what work should get done today.
• Identify any issues you are facing and work together to address them.

1:1 Worksheet Template

Team meetings are undoubtedly important to keep things running, but it’s also essential to check in with people via 1:1 meetings from time to time, as well. This allows you to ensure that your employees aren’t facing any issues and are staying on task. 

However, knowing precisely what you should do in a 1:1 meeting can be challenging. This 1:1 Worksheet template will allow you to collaborate with individual employees, reflect on what they are doing, and align on what they should do next to reach their full potential.

Quick Retrospective Template

Even if a project goes great, it’s important to reflect on the experience to see what went well and what could be improved the next time. This should be a collaborative effort with the entire team who worked on the project and allows the team to recognize strengths and weaknesses so future projects are seamless.

The Quick Retrospective template will help with several things:

• Allow your team to reflect and document where you succeeded and where you could find opportunities to improve the next time.
• Determine actionable steps on how you can improve as a team for the next project.

Here’s how this template works.

• Everyone spends five minutes individually reflecting and writing down their thoughts on sticky notes
• Then, as a group, you reflect together on what everyone said.

Meeting Notes Template

When you’re involved in various meetings  it can be challenging to keep track of everything that is said. Rather than having everyone take notes, you can designate a note-taker whose sole taskis record important information and key points from the meeting, however, taking notes can be challenging.

Instead, you can use this Meeting Notes template to organize all the information that needs to be saved. Once all the notes have been taken, the note-taker can share them with everyone involved in the meeting allowing the majority of the team to be actively involved in the meeting without worrying about remembering the main points.

Effective Workshop Template

It can take time to meet with people individually or try to collect feedback from people asynchronously. Hosting a workshop brings everyone together simultaneously, and you can work together synchronously to solve the issue.

However, you can’t just say you’re going to have a workshop and not do any prep. The Effective Workshop template provides you with a framework to minimize the amount of prep work while still providing an engaging and productive workshop.

Value Sessions Template

You can use the Value Sessions template to lead interactive training sessions that emphasize inclusivity. This will give HR teams more chances to dive deep into activities and collaborate.

Here are the steps you need to take to use this template:

•  Assign participants.
• Share a quote to spark conversation.
• Get the team engaged with the facilitator by discussing the quote. At this time, the facilitator should emphasize that values determine behavior.
• Next, you will complete an exercise where everyone determines their personal values.
• Then, you will condense your list of values into your most important ones.
• Determine five to seven core principles for the team/company.
• Find the connections between your personal principles and the team/company principles.

Meetings are an important part of everyday business, but it’s vital you go into them with a plan to make the most of the meeting. Using these InVision templates can help you host meetings that will increase productivity, generate new ideas, and align your team on upcoming projects. Try out some of our templates today and see how they can improve your meetings.