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A Format For Minutes of Meetings
By gooseandgander | February 13, 2009
In the company I work for, organization is paramount. We have forms for everything and everything, and they are usually efficiently designed so as to contain a maximum amount of information with a minimum amount of fuss. Our invoices, payment records, tax records, and personnel records are all flawlessly organized. That is why I was so surprised when I actually looked at our meeting notes. Apparently we had never come up with a standard format for minutes of meetings. Everything was in complete disarray.
The secretary who took the meeting notes had training in transcription, and it seems like she took that training too much to heart. A format for minutes of meetings should be brief, straight forward, and to the point. It should contain the essential details of what transpired during the meeting. The report should be briefly summarize, any and all announcements made should be recorded, the general nature of discussions should be simply described and, of course, resolutions adopted should be written down as well. You don’t have to describe everything that everyone said, and you certainly don’t need to do transcriptions!
The format for minutes of meeting that the secretary had been using, however, was almost as thorough as a court transcription. I had to admire the thoroughness of the secretary, and she did seem to be a very competent and intelligent officer, but nonetheless she had no idea how to write down meeting details. It would be a nightmare to have to record all the minutes again, but it seemed like this was what we would have to do. We had to individually go through all of her notes, summarize them, put them down in the proper format for minutes of meetings, and refile them. It took hours upon hours, and was not much fun.
Now that we have more distinct, properly formatted notes, it is much easier to review the records. Until we went through them all, there was just too much information. A lot of people think that thoroughness is the only goal, but it is not. In this modern business world, being able to safely include the relevant information is even more important. If you are writing down too much stuff, the important facts will get lost in the shuffle. If your format for minutes of meetings is straightforward and to the point, however, any important decision can be easily index and looked up at a moments notice.
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