How to Take Meeting Minutes Efficiently? — Tips for Newcomers in the Workplace

Meeting minutes are a tool for reviewing the highlights of a meeting. Good meeting minutes can effectively promote the development of future work. But, do you know how to create good meeting minutes?

Before taking meeting minutes, you should know five components and four principles of high-quality meeting minutes.

-Five parts of high-quality meeting minutes:

1. Meeting topics: problems in work;

2. Information sharing: status of the problem and resources;

3. Proposal discussion: problem-solving tips and comments;

4. Forming a resolution: making a program decision;

5. Execution of labor: Confirm the division of labor and the person in charge of execution.

-Four principles of high-quality meeting minutes:

1. Matching principle. Meeting minutes are a part of meeting management, and meeting minutes should match the purpose and process of the meeting.

2. Purpose principle. You should be clear why you make these meeting minutes, whether they will be used for review, analysis of responsibilities, or confirm goals and plan division of labor.

3. The principle of responsibility. The person who takes the minutes should be responsible for the recording and the quality of the notes.

4. Consistency principle. The participants reached an agreement on the meeting goals, meeting procedures, the purpose and significance of the meeting minutes, and the responsibilities of the participants.

Here are two steps to help you make perfect meeting minutes.

Step 1: Make a draft.

Record all the content of a meeting and also mark the critical points. If you record all the content, you will better understand this meeting.

Then how to make a draft?

1. Full records;

2. Key record.

They should be done at the same time.

The full recording is to record the content of the meeting completely, from the first sentence to the last sentence.

But when you have a meeting, it is challenging to record thousands of words with just two hands. Therefore, you should prepare a tool as your perfect work partner. For example, using a voice recorder or tools that can convert the sound content into text and export the word document.

Tools can keep all the content, but it lacks key points. So you need to mark out the key points.

The key record is your hands-on record of important information on the topic. For example, you need to mark out the speakers, opinions, and solutions.

By keeping a good record of key points, you will know the ins and outs of the issues and what information is important.

However, when making keynotes, we will encounter problems: When you listen and write, it is difficult to distinguish the key points of the content. If we stop writing and think about which content is the key point, we will not be able to keep up with the rhythm of the meeting. To solve this problem, I recommend using templates for key logging.

A template is a piece of paper pre-set with vital information to be recorded.

With a clear goal, when you record the key points of the meeting, it is like filling in the blanks. As long as you fill in the key information, you can sort out the ins and outs of the topic.

Step 2: Formally write the minutes of the meeting

The meeting minutes are to refine the meeting content and send to colleagues.

It’s important to note that the readers of the meeting minutes are our colleagues. Therefore, we must write the meeting minutes from the readers’ perspective, and we must let them restore the original appearance of the meeting by relying only on words.

Finally, typeset the written meeting minutes, make sure that your colleagues can look at them comfortably and easy to grasp the key points, then the minutes are ready to be sent out.

Here are some tools that would help make good meeting minutes.

Recommendation: NEWYES Sync Pen 2

This product highly matches for business. The pen can be attached to NEWYES Notes application which can perfectly transfer all your notes to your mobile phone. And you could even fix and highlight the content on the application.

What’s more, it’s built-in powerful handwriting to text function. It can recognize your writings to be editable text within 1 second. You will save lots of time on re-typing!

Taking good meeting minutes is not that difficult. Just follow the above methods, and you can get it done quickly. I hope this article can be helpful for you.