As business professionals, we have countless meetings throughout the week. It can get hard to keep track of all the new initiatives and changes to your projects. Enter meeting minutes.
Meeting minutes give your team a recap of their conferences, seminars and meetings. Attendees can refer to meeting minutes to review actionable tasks and stay productive throughout the week.
Here’s what you should know about meeting minutes and how to successful create some for your company.
What are Meeting Minutes?
Meeting minutes are written records of what happened during your conferences and meetings. Generally, one person oversees recording the minute details of a meeting, making sure to include actionable items and tasks.
To write meeting minutes successfully, follow these steps:
- Plan for the meeting with a template and agenda
- Set up meeting recording
- Conduct the conference and take notes
- Highlight areas participants want to focus on
- Recap important information with attendees
- Polish your meeting-minute notes
- Send the meeting minutes to participants
1. Plan for the meeting with a template and agenda
Before the meeting, you want to be prepared with a template for your meeting minutes. As the person in charge of the meeting minutes, you’ll take notes throughout the conference. You also want to set up an agenda so participants can stay on tasks.
2. Set up meeting recording
Using a tool like StartMeeting, you can record your meetings and have an exact recollection of the meeting. If you’re wondering what was said during a time in the meeting, you can go back and review what participants discussed.
Another great thing an audio or video recording gives you is the ability to send the video to those that missed the meeting. With meeting recordings, you can include as many people into the conversation as you want.
3. Conduct the conference and take notes
At the start of your meeting, you can recap a previous meeting by bringing up an archived meeting minutes page and address any lingering tasks.
As the meeting progresses and you move down your agenda, take notes on what participants talk about and keep a detailed log of any actionable items or notable events.
4. Highlight areas participants want to focus on
When attendees spend more time on a topic than others, more than likely that’s something very important to your team. Make note of these areas in the conference so you can come back to these actionable items and make sure participants stay on task.
5. Recap Important Information with attendees
As your meeting wraps up, you’ll want to remind attendees of what exactly went down during the meeting. Give your team a recap from start to finish, making sure to bring attention to items you’ve previously highlighted and look forward with any actionable items presented during the meeting.
6. Polish your meeting minutes
Now that the meeting is over, go back and clean up your notes so someone that didn’t attend the meeting would be able to get a complete recap. After all, meeting minutes were created to help teams stay on task, whether they have to miss a meeting or not.
7. Send the meeting minutes to all participants
After polishing your notes, send the meeting minutes to your team. Participants can refer to this resource and review their actionable tasks throughout the upcoming weeks.
How to take advantage of meeting minutes?
Meeting minutes are meant to give participants a way to review their conversations in detail. To best take advantage of your meeting minutes, make sure to add formatting and highlight important tasks.
When building your template, make sure to include key components participants will need. Your meeting minutes template should include all the following elements:
- A list of participants
- An updated agenda and due dates
- Actionable tasks and their owners
- Important Ideas
- Future plans
- Related documentation, attachments and images
Your meeting minutes should be broken down into sections and labeled accordingly. Formatting helps your team easily go back through the notes and find key information without having to sift through the entire meeting again.
If you’re looking for a better way to stay productive during your meeting, meeting minutes can provide you with a guideline on how to keep your team on a path to success.
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