8 Meeting Minutes Writing Tips That Help Make Every Meeting a Success
The minutes of a meeting is a very important tool for professionals who convene groups for a specific purpose. These minutes inform people about what transpired in a previous meeting and what will be discussed in the next meeting. If the group has many members, the minutes may allow members to stay focused on the group tasks. Eventually, the minutes of successive meetings will serve as a timeline for group activities. It allows everyone to track goals achieved and plan for future accomplishments.
Knowing that you should read through these meeting minutes writing tips. Bear them in mind as you attend meetings because you never know when you’ll have to put them into practice.
Keep it Fresh
You shouldn’t put off writing meeting minutes for too long because you might forget key points in the meeting. This may be the most important of the meeting minutes writing tips you will ever encounter. The worst “crime” as a recorder is to forget some important parts of the meeting.
Remind Others of Group Activities Accomplished
This means just printing out or sending out a list of the group activities the previous meeting delineated. Make sure to mention who accomplished such activities.
List Down Current Meeting Goals
This is important to group members who might have been absent at the previous meeting. The current meeting may assign new tasks to these group members so they need to catch up through your minutes.
Make a List of Current Participants
Some may feel this is the least important of the meeting minutes writing tips. But this is vital to keep the group on track in its group activities. Sometimes, the person who is left out of the loop could be the most important person in the group. So, this list just helps everyone remember who they are as far as the group action is concerned.
Attach Images to Your Minutes
Not everyone recognizes the value of images in the minutes. However, some people remember images better than words. So, for the sake of more clarity, you may want to put images such as photos in your minutes.
Use the Power of A Standard Format
Since there are a lot of things to remember, it will be useful to rely on a definite format for every meeting minutes. You might want to put this in table form so that you just need to fill in the blanks. This will benefit the group if another person is assigned to take down minutes eventually.
Refer to Previous Meeting Minutes, When Necessary
You can refer to previous meeting minutes and just copy-paste decisions made there into the current meeting minutes. This will reinforce the recall of group activities so that the group can decide on more effective action to take.
Rely on Deadlines for Your Minutes
Some people in the group may need your minutes right after the meeting, so it pays to be taking notes. That way, you can simply save and print so that everyone stays on schedule.
Conclusion
The key to remembering meeting minutes writing tips is to put them into practice as you go along. You can just type up a short outline of such tips and keep them somewhere handy, like on your desktop. That way, even if you haven’t mastered all the meeting minutes writing tips, you have a cheat sheet.
Sometimes though, your group may ask for the organization’s or office’s secretary to take down the minutes for them. If your group lacks a secretary, you may refer to 3E Accounting services as your Indonesia Corporate Secretarial Service Provider. We will provide you with such personnel when needed, at your convenience.