They act as a source of information for members who were unable to attend. They allow participants to go back and revisit the key ideas and discussion points that led to a decision. Without a clear record, it is easy to forget why a certain decision was made. In the worst case, you may end up having to repeat the meeting and have the same discussions all over again. In the past, minutes would be shared with the participants as an email attachment.
Some companies still disseminate meeting notes the same way. However, this approach has many downsides. The meeting notes are hard to organize and can easily get lost in your inbox.
Getting input from participants and revising the record requires multiple email loops. There is no easy way to follow up on assigned tasks.
Today, most companies have better tools at their disposal. Internal wiki tools, such as Nuclino allow companies to organize and collaborate on their minutes much more efficiently:. Often neglected, a meeting agenda is one of the best ways to ensure you stay focused and prevent unproductive meetings. It sets the pace of the meeting and acts as a time management tool. It will also serve you as an outline when you write the minutes. Include a list of participants, both present and absent, and share the minutes with them after the meeting.
If you are using a tool like Nuclino , you can simply -mention the attendees, sending them an in-app notification and sharing the document with them.
Using your meeting agenda as an outline, separate your notes into clear categories, for example, discussion items, decisions made, and tasks and next steps. Create a meeting minutes template and follow it consistently.
Make sure that your minutes are complete and accurate by asking other participants to go over them. Despite the team, they are not a minute-by-minute record but include the key details that the team will want to know.
It's important in meeting minutes to capture information such as:. Minutes are the record of who was there and what happened. They are an important source of information for people who were unable to attend or looking back to reflect on what happened.
They're also an incredibly effective tool to notify or remind people of tasks assigned to them or timelines to keep everyone on track. Sign up for a free Notejoy account so you can start taking notes with your entire team. Have decisions been shared with everyone who needs to know? If you missed the meeting, how can you catch up on the details? As one freelance project consultant told the folks at monday.
This checklist summarizes all the steps we detail below. It should help colleagues and collaborators understand how to take minutes in the event of your absence. The best way to prepare to take meeting notes is to find out exactly what will be the most useful and the most worthwhile items to record.
Do this by reaching out to the meeting owner for a list of priority items. Push this contact person, if you can, to reveal the most crucial piece of information to capture through your note-taking.
I take minutes for a weekly top team meeting, and my exec just wants the basics, nothing fancy. But for our annual retreat, I follow a more formal format, which takes significantly longer to write. If you want to get advice like this and so much more, you can actually join our tight-knit EA community by signing up for the Assist.
Shout out to all the experts in our Facebook group for providing these invaluable tidbits! Request the Assist , our freemium weekly newsletter, to get even more tips like these, on everything from calendar management to decoding your job responsibilities. The rules above apply to both in-person and virtual meetings. However, there are a few bonus tips for anyone taking down virtual meeting minutes:.
Your goal in this step is to chisel your notes away until the main, preferably actionable, points remain. You might be surprised how even the seemingly small context you have in your head a few hours after a meeting will help.
Just try waiting a week to polish your minutes to grasp the importance of revising as soon as possible. Wait too long, and you might have to question even small sentences, wondering what you were talking about. Plus, as one member of our EA community wisely said:. Establish your preferred revision process by building on the steps below and even turning them into a checklist.
In fact, you need to send them out to stakeholders if you want them to become the official written records they should be. According to this post , nothing is official until the stakeholders approve them. However, sending out the meeting minutes is far more than just sending any old email.
The distribution of meeting minutes is really the next big call to action after the meeting. The clarity you use to share the meeting minutes and also delegate follow-ups and actions items can seriously influence the success of a project. Your mission, in sending out meeting minutes, is to:. Pro-Tip: Follow ups from meeting are almost like little mini projects. Keep everyone on track using Toggl Plan. Anything, from a simple folder in Google Drive to a dedicated location on your company network, can house the minutes.
When conducting a simple meeting, this template is a good place to start. There is no special formatting needed like tables or any illustrations. Another thing to note is that all items to fill out are written in linear form making it easy to jot down or customize the minutes of the meeting sample according to your needs.
You can also take advantage of taking down minutes with the help of a table using Excel. This version allows you to easily keep track of details especially if the meeting involves a bunch of information and different categories.
Take a look at the meeting minutes template examples created using Excel. Five sections are included in this version of the template. The first section comes with the basic information like the date of the meeting, time, who prepared the minutes, etc. Underneath sections are meeting objectives, attendees, admin, and old business. Here is another meeting minutes template version created using Excel.
Before proceeding to the agenda items, the note taker will need to determine first the project title, meeting date, location, and other basic details. You can also use this approach wherein the main categories are arranged in a row and under while items are organized in a column form. Google Docs is another tool you can use to create comprehensive meeting minutes. It operates like MS Word and offers some basic functionalities as Word.
With it, you can customize the font, color, text alignment and so much more. You may refer to the simple meeting minutes template for Google Docs below. Although the tool offers simple functionalities, you can still create detailed meeting minutes in just a few simple steps. Using this version of Google Docs version meeting minutes you may include all the necessary information and show the category of details using a table-based layout. If you are accustomed to writing notes using bullet form, this meeting minutes example should be useful.
This version uses both numbering and bullet approaches in listing down information.
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