How to take meeting minutes: The Process

by iBABS | Nov 25, 2024

1. Review the agenda

The meeting agenda provides the structure for the meeting and is therefore a handy guide to which topics will be discussed and in which order. Understanding the agenda helps you anticipate what information will be shared and what needs to be recorded when the meeting takes place, as well as the order in which it will be broached.

2. Start with a minutes template

From the meeting agenda, you can fill in a template for your minutes. Rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper at the start of the meeting, creating this structure means you spend less time thinking about what is going to happen and when, and more time noting down the events of the meeting.

3. Take notes during the meeting

As the meeting continues, note down the important details such as the nature of the interactions between members on each motion, the decisions that were taken, the actions that need to be taken and the people assigned to them, as well as the nature of the voting and any other elements of the meeting that require recording.

4. Collect supplementary materials

The other resources from the meeting will help you create comprehensive minutes. This includes the reports given during the meeting, presentations and any other documents used by participants to illustrate their contributions. Collect these together and reference them whilst writing up the meeting notes.

5. Review your notes

Remember to look over your notes soon after the meeting to ensure that they make sense and match your recall of the activities that took place. The further away from the meeting you get, the more difficult it is to correct anything you might have missed or written down correctly because your memory will not be as clear. If you have any queries when looking back over your notes, reach out to another stakeholder who might be able to shed more light on what actually happened.

6. Create a final draft

Once again, creating your final draft as soon as possible helps you be more accurate and comprehensive in your minutes. Check the decisions and actions are noted down correctly and ensure you add them all to your draft.

Ensure you stick to the facts of the meeting and have enough detail in your final draft to provide a helpful representation of the meeting when viewed in the future. Outline the main arguments for and against a motion, for example.

When finalising the draft, check you have been consistent with the tense you use and the terms utilised in the document. Make sure the minutes are clear and easy to understand.

7. Distribute to get approval

Send the minutes to participants to get approval ahead of the next meeting. You can use email, post or share via the cloud using a board portal.

If someone queries anything in the minutes, check to work out if they are right or if they have misremembered. If the consensus is that they were correct, edit the document accordingly and then distribute it again for approval.

Getting approval before the next meeting means you save time during that meeting, rather than waiting until then to handle comments and edits.

8. Archive minutes

You should have a system for archiving your minutes that allows you to find them with little trouble in the future. One reason for writing minutes is to understand what happened if that information is required, so use an easily searchable document management system.

Save any audio or video files from the meeting, as they can be a handy resource for the future too.

In some jurisdictions, minutes from certain types of meetings must be archived and retrievable for a set period of time. In the UK, the Companies Act 2006 stipulates that board meeting minutes “must be kept for at least ten years from the date of the resolution, meeting or decision (as appropriate).”

9. Special considerations

There are certain circumstances in which your meeting minutes might differ from usual. For example:

If there has been an executive session, the minutes must be kept separately from those of the open meeting. They should have ‘unapproved’ printed on all pages to distinguish them from the regular minutes. They should also not feature detailed discussions of these confidential matters, but merely the important discussion points and the final actions and outcomes.
In Ireland, there is no obligation to record dissenting opinions in minutes (although it is good practice to do so), except in the case of banks and insurance companies, where the Corporate Governance Requirements for Credit Institutions states that “dissensions or negative votes shall be documented in terms acceptable to the dissenting person or negative voter.”