Meeting minutes are underrated, but potentially pivotal documents. When done properly, that is. You won't believe how many points you can score when you share neat and comprehensive notes with your team and client.
Whether your meeting is face-to-face or on Teams, it is easy for participants to misunderstand, misinterpret, or simply get distracted by the excessive number of attendees, documents, topics and details. It is also impossible to stay focused 100% of the time, especially when the conversation drags on endlessly, and you let your mind drift off to more pleasant thoughts and memories.
When you are leading a meeting, you will hardly take any notes. Instead, you will be bringing a junior team member along for that very purpose. S/he, however, may also get distracted or, because of lack of experience, may not fully grasp all of the concepts being discussed, and the information documented in the minutes may turn out to be incomplete or, much worse, wrong.
You didn't hear this from us, but the trick to drafting thorough and reliable minutes is recording the meeting using your phone. Please be very discreet about it, and delete the recording once you are done writing up the minutes (mainly for privacy reasons, but then again, why in God's name would you want to keep it anyway?). This will give you the opportunity to replay the meeting as many times as you need to fully understand everything that was said, and write down all of the key points discussed, the decisions taken, and the issues that are still outstanding.
Here's our template for writing up meeting minutes, for your reference and use:
To populate the template, we suggest you do the following:
Break the meeting down into discussion topics.
Use bullet points, and be concise.
Add important quotes, along with the speaker's name.
Record upcoming deadlines and expected deliverables in the 'Next steps' section.
Lastly, share your minutes with the client (post internal review), so that everyone is on the same page.
We hope you found this article useful. For questions or clarifications, feel free to reach out. Thanks for reading, and good luck!