Mastering the art of driving effective meetings and seamless collaboration among stakeholders.
Meeting minutes is widely used in organizations as an accessory to meetings. Capturing minutes of the meeting efficiently is crucial for successful collaboration among stakeholders and can work wonders to drive a project. In this article, we will go over the basics of meeting minutes. Here's a quick overview of the topics we will cover:
Why are meeting minutes important?
Who should write meeting minutes?
When and how are meeting minutes shared?
Meeting minutes, also known as minutes of meeting (MoM) or meeting notes are written records of a meeting. Meeting minutes summarize the meeting to the reader by outlining an overview of the discussion and highlighting key decisions, action items and next steps. Meeting minutes can be a powerful mechanism to keep stakeholders aligned and drive accountability within team.
Meeting minutes is a versatile channel of communication and can be leveraged to serve different purposes as highlighted below:
A study conducted by Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield, highlighted the importance of meeting notes with 63% of the participants claiming to take down personal notes in the meeting
Minutes are an important record of what we said we'd do and when we said we'd do it. I go back to them when people aren't happy that a particular situation has occurred because someone hasn't done something they said they'd do
Now that we know the importance of meeting minutes, let’s talk about how to capture meeting minutes so that they are useful and serve the intended purpose. In general, meeting minutes should capture six elements of the meeting -
1. Meeting Date
2. Attendees
3. Agenda
4. Notes
5. Key Decisions
6. Action Items
Let's go over each of these in more detail.
It is important to note that the six elements outlined above serve as general guide on how to write meeting minutes. The relevance of some of these sections might vary based upon the need. For meetings like Project Kick-Offs, Project Reviews etc., capturing attendee list, key decisions and action items promote better project management. Whereas, for Team Meetings, 1:1s, Sprint Planning Meetings etc., capturing attendees list might not be as relevant as documenting key decisions and action items.
We have talked about the importance of meeting minutes and have outlined the layout of meeting notes, but we are yet to answer a key question... Who is responsible for capturing and sharing meeting minutes?
Well, any meeting attendee (SURPRISE!)
All meeting attendees are eligible to capture and share meeting notes. Usually, to ensure efficiency in note taking and avoid confusion, it is considered best practice to assign an individual to be note-taker for the meeting and share meeting minutes. If there is no assigned note taker, this responsibility is defaulted to the meeting owner.
For recurring meetings, it is a good practice to rotate the responsibility of note taking to ensure that attendees remain connected to the content and promote team spirit. Another collaborative approach is for attendees to capture personal notes throughout the meeting and share with the note-taker to build exhaustive meeting minutes.
Meeting notes should be shared at the earliest, after the meeting. This ensures that the content remains relevant, and the meeting attendees can review the notes for any inconsistencies. Sharing notes early also eliminates ambiguity if the stakeholders have already started working on the action items.
A common way to share meeting notes is via company email, but over time, emails get buried in the inbox and are challenging to refer back. To drive more collaboration, teams are also using other applications like JIRA, Asana or Slack to track individual tasks outlined in meetings. However, these applications fail to capture the context behind these tasks or provide meeting summary. Moreover, these tools might not be accessible to all stakeholders across the organization.
Since meeting minutes are a mechanism to Capture, Share, and Reference meeting outcomes, a lightweight tool like Loopin checks all boxes.