How to create meaningful meeting notes
A quick note for those who accept that no one is going to watch the recording anyway.
You weren’t able to attend a meeting – and now you want to figure out what happened. If there aren’t any meeting notes, you’ll simply ask a colleague to let you know if there’s anything you need to be aware of.
For most meetings the answer are usually something like this:
We discussed the new pricing structure, especially how we are going to have it work for existing customers. We’ve decided to create specific legacy plans for them, so Maria is going to look into how to set this up with our payment provider.
John did a presentation on the new CMS we’ll be transitioning to next quarter. The slides are available in the knowledge base. But, to be honest, it looked quite intuitive to me, so actually you can just go with what you know.
And then there are some meetings where no one really remembers, or where the social interactions were the point of the meeting. In those cases you’ll get a shrug or a funny anecdote.
If you can trust your colleagues to summarize the most important takeaways in two sentences – your meeting notes don’t have to be much longer either. The bare minimum is the decisions that were taken and the next steps.
Basic template for your meeting notes
This is my personal meeting note template. While in the meeting, I focus on the decisions and the next steps. Everything else is added after the meeting.
Topic
Date and attendees
Agenda (copied from invite)
Milestones achieved, decisions taken
Next steps (and who’s responsible)
Links to related documentation
Optional (and personal): what did I learn?
And that’s it!
Pro tip: At the end of the meeting, summarize your takeaways and ask attendants if anything crucial is missing. Write it down, add the meta data (the what and who) and related documentation and publish it / send it to everyone.
Seriously, no one should be tasked with transcribing an entire meeting. The person would not be able to participate, and few people would want to sift through these notes anyway.
Isn’t it important to know who said what and why and how?
The details about who said what, when and how can be really interesting in customer research. Here, the nuances can be crucial. However, this is not the focus of your standard work meeting. You are here to make a decision, to remove obstacles, to get a consensus, to organize next steps. Unless the meeting is specifically about opinions or someone requests to be on the record, there’s no need to know who exactly made which comment and what exact moment.
Exception: Give credit where credit is due. If someone has a great idea, make sure to highlight who shared this nugget of wisdom. This helps to celebrate those who share new approaches, and not just those who end up talking the most. So, even if the rest of the meeting involved everyone to refine the details, give credit to the initial idea person.
Status update meeting notes
Usually, status updates should be written down somewhere. If you need to discuss specific topics around these status updates, refer to the written material and stick to writing down decisions and/or next steps.
If a meeting is purely done to share status updates in person, ask everyone to submit their own summary after the meeting. Hopefully this helps you to transition to regular written updates so you can skip the meeting altogether (or use it to discuss questions arising from those status updates).