How to Not Fumble Ingenious Ideas and Brilliant Decisions Reached at a Meeting

What is minutes of the meeting?

A strategy meeting by top execs can drain lots of money. And it is such a bummer when all that effort goes down the drain. So it’s important that the meeting brings the result it was organized for. Minutes of meeting is what can help with this. So, what is minutes of meeting, exactly?

Minutes of meeting (MoM), minutes, or protocols, are the written record of a hearing or meeting. They recount the events of the meeting, its agenda, attendees, and decisions. Their main purpose is to document all important outtakes and resolutions reached for any stakeholders to review afterwards. NOT to be confused with transcripts of the proceeding – the minutes have to record not what was said, but what was done.

There is no rigorous form for MoM, it’s completely at the host’s disposal. Some enjoy it concise, like a list of discussed topics, while others can go as far as composing separate documents for each protocol.

Why do you need minutes of the meeting?

Meeting notes are crucial for following up with the event’s participants. In the heat of a strategy meeting, discussing matters of life and death (of a business, at least), it’s difficult to keep every bit of important information in mind. Especially if this includes long-term solutions, while a person is most concerned with current ongoing problems. Double especially if implementing those solutions isn’t directly the person’s responsibility.

It’s not uncommon for action items that were defined at a meeting to go unresolved or unassigned to a concrete executive or department. To avoid such situations, and to keep all stakeholders on the same page, meeting minutes should be properly written and distributed.

If that wasn’t enough, getting the results of the meeting across to all concerned employees can be plain out expensive. Someone is going to need a reminder, a couple of workers will need to clarify something, others will want a guideline of sorts… A person responsible for this will quickly realize how many man-hours could be spared by optimizing the whole process, like sharing a single link to notes with everyone. This is where meeting minutes come in.

How to write minutes of the meeting?

To fulfill the aforementioned goals, minutes of the meeting should list the most important information. A sample of minutes taken at a meeting would include:

• Date & time of the meeting
• List of attendees (also wouldn’t hurt to add their contact info if it wasn’t an internal meeting)
• Agenda (topics)
• Discussions and conclusions
• Action items and delegated tasks (extra important!)
• (Optional) – next steps, follow-up events, etc.

A small hint – things are easier to manage when they are organized and kept clear. That’s why we don’t recommend using too many specialized tools for different tasks, instead of utilizing those with vast feature pools.

One of such convenient, all-in-one services is a professional planning tool KeepSolid Goals. While it was designed for building strategic plans of all sorts of scopes, it’s super-convenient to use the app to record meeting minutes. You may outline the necessary points in the relevant Objective and document the minutes there. Every team member that you invite will then be able to review the contents. Let no task slip away from your attention ever again!