Best practices for meeting notes

By Lenka Davis

Is taking meeting notes necessary any more? Do meeting notes still have a purpose and value to a company? Is taking notes worth your time and effort?

Despite the feeling that nobody takes meeting notes any more, it’s actually a powerful project management tool. Project management helps organizations stay on track and organized. Taking notes is one tool that project managers use to keep track of key decisions, action items and discussions in company meetings. And, even though there are apps that allow you to record the audio and the video of your critical meetings, having written meeting notes, in addition to these welcome technologies, has advantages.

Benefits for taking meeting notes are:

History

Meeting notes offer a written record of the discussions and the decision making process that happened during the meeting. They are also there for people who could not make the meeting. Team members may need to search notes for various reasons. The most common reason that people search notes in the short term is to figure out what their action items are. The most common long term reasons could range from looking for what was discussed to when key decisions were made.

Tracking

Meeting notes' most useful purpose is to track action items for the team. At a minimum write down a list of action items or next steps and share them with everyone. This way if there was any confusion or someone’s attention was taken away during the meeting, they can find what they need on their own.

Accessible

Written content is accessible especially when it is digital and stored in a common digital location such Dropbox or in Atlassian’s Confluence team’s workspace. Searching text is fast and easy, and more visually scannable. If you add your notes to workspaces such as Confluence then the tool will automatically summarize action items for you on a separate page. If you have written content on paper then add symbols or annotate it so you can easily find information later.

Best practices for effective and useful meeting notes

Have an agenda or a purpose for the meeting. If anything is more clear to all of us over the last two years, people want productive meetings and to have them only when necessary.
Write notes for your stakeholders so they have clarity on what was discussed and a record of important conversations. If attendees are not able to make the meeting they can use notes to read what happened during the meeting.
Add Action Items, sometimes called Next Steps, at the top of the notes so that there is no need to scroll through the notes to find them. Make it easy for team members to see if they have any tasks assigned to them.
List any major decisions.
Offer attendees the option to give input on the notes to make sure everyone has the same understanding.
Keep them short and to the point. Only include notes on items that are useful to the team
Send or post notes within a couple of hours following the meeting when team members still have time to remember what was discussed, and so they have time to get their action items started
Share your screen while you take notes for more accuracy. If you are trying to get a team to agree on decisions or are having very technical discussions, adding visuals adds another level of understanding. Now you have visual people and auditory people both engaged.

Other items that might be helpful

Listing attendees and their role or title, and what group or company they represent. If teams are big or people are new this is super helpful to help with the context of the discussion.
If you have the agenda beforehand you can create sections to fill out or questions to answer in your notes document. This is especially helpful when taking typed notes on your computer.
Use marks to notate actions that often occur in your meetings. This is useful when writing notes since you might not have room to insert text or the ability to move text around. Use a mark such as a box or circle to put next to actions items, or a triangle next to items that are changed, etc.
Use templates. This is super helpful to organize your thoughts especially in apps such as Confluence.
Nothing will be more fresh in your mind than the 15 minutes after a 1 hour meeting, that’s when you want to review your notes and expand incomplete areas.
Try to write down phrases with a verb, this way you know the action to be taken

Notes are dependent on the type of conversation you are having, how content heavy it is, either with lots of new information or just a friendly conversation catching up with business partners. Consider your working style and create the best notes format that works for you.

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FunFact

What is the most widely used manual of meeting procedure used by a diverse range of organizations and of parliamentary procedure in the United States? Robert’s Rules of Order. You may have encountered this when attending any school, community or non profit organizations meetings. The manual was originally published in 1876 by a US army officer and engineer; it was created to help manage meetings. Even though these rules are more restrictive than most startups will ever need, it highlights the importance of having productive meetings for everyone.

Lenka Davis is a Managing Partner at Fly to Soar. She has worked in marketing, managing projects and building tools in the high-tech industry for Fortune 100 companies and also ran her own business. Follow Lenka and the Fly to Soar Team on Instagram @flytosoarcompany