Writing Meeting Minutes

Writing meeting minutes presents a great challenge to the author – concentrating during highly detailed conversations, capturing the right level of detail during the meeting and writing it up in a useful way for the attendees post meeting.

Meeting minutes are powerful as they can become official records for the organisation and personally, can be a testimony to the writer’s competence.This program presents many useful tips and templates to help write accurate, organised and purposeful minutes quickly and confidently.

Duration

• Half-day face-to-face or
• 1 x 3.5 hours live virtual training.

Audience

This meeting minutes writing course is suited for any team member who is required to take the minutes for meetings. It will focus on real examples and templates prepared within the organisation.

Outcomes

Learn how to:

• Differentiate between good and poor minutes
• Use meeting documents to the ensure the best outcomes
• Prepare for a meeting
• Take notes within the meeting using a variety of methods
• Work with the chairperson throughout the meeting
• Identify appropriate information from the meeting notes to insert into the minutes
• Compose concise and grammatically correct sentences with the reader in mind
• Use formatting techniques to enable quick comprehension
• Eliminate unnecessary words from the minutes
• Prepare meeting agendas.

Delivered in-house at your premises or in an online virtual classroom

We deliver our training programs either through:

• Face-to-face workshops at your offices.
• Impactful live online workshops.

Writing Minutes Group Training – Using Your Documents

Where relevant, we will use your organisation’s internal formats, templates and style guide relevant to writing meeting minutes.We will also use anonymised examples of participants’ writing in the workshop. With this material the facilitator:

• Assesses their writing ability
• Gains a thorough understanding of the written work they prepare
• Extracts examples for use as training material within the program.

Ask us how we apply this to your organisation.

Approach

We’ll discuss your needs and create a minute and agenda writing course that perfectly suits the audience and the meeting minutes and agendas they create. We’ll adjust this highly interactive workshop to the level of the participants.

Participants will use their own minutes and agendas to immediately apply their new writing skills. Ask us how we can tailor a writing training program to suit your needs:

• call 1300 655 098
• start a chat at the bottom of our page
• send us a message.

Tips From Our Meeting Minutes Writing Training Course

Before the meeting

• Send out:
  • an agenda
  • action point sheet from last meeting
  • any submitted reports.
• Populate a meetings template for yourself with the:
  • action items from the previous meeting
  • agenda discussion points
• Gather and check equipment
• Discuss the agenda with the chairperson and agree expectations and protocols
• Review the minutes from the previous 2-3 meetings

During The Meeting

• Prepare a seating map if you do not know the attendees
• Record only decisions, actions and time frames if the attendees are the only person reading them
• Record pros and cons for a decision if people other than the attendees will read them
• Record motions word for word
• Have the courage to speak up if anything about the action point is not clear or not stipulated
• Record the number of votes ‘for’ and ‘against’ for controversial decisions
• Develop your own shorthand using abbreviations
• Use colour highlights for discussing any actions, decisions or discussion points post meeting

After Meeting

• Create a draft within 24 hours:
  • Use short sentences
  • Do not include who said any statements unless specifically requested
  • Keep it factual and non-emotive
• Follow up with any unclear points with the buddy
• Check the accuracy of the draft minutes with the chairperson
• Distribute final version within 2-3 days of the meeting
• Check with chairperson if minutes need to be distributed to anyone other than attendees

Always remember – record ‘who’ is going to do ‘what’ ‘when’.Organise our meeting minute writing training program for a group of people in your organisation who write minutes.

The workshop will go into detail on these tips. Through discussion, practice and coaching you and your colleagues will gain the confidence you can write exceptional meeting minutes.