Effective Minute Taking: Advanced
This workshop is a more detailed and advanced workshop, constructed on the learning from the "Effective Minute Taking" basic course. Its purpose is to help participants be confident and competent in more complex and lengthy meetings, teleconferences and meetings with a political profile or media coverage. Special attention is paid to what to include and what to leave out when drafting meeting notes into minutes.
Duration: 1 Day
Outline
- Part I: Introduction and Review
- Roles and goals of this workshop; admin details
- Review of basics: Robert's Rules of Order
- Types of minutes
- Types of meetings
- Creating a functional agenda
- Roles of meeting participants
- Part II: Preparing to Take Notes in Complex Meetings
- Using good "proxemics" in setting up the meeting room
- Where the minute-taker needs to sit, and why
- Preparing for a meeting where you don't know all the participants
- Review of agenda-building techniques
- Preparing for and writing through teleconferences, video conferences and "virtual" meetings
- Preparing for the high-level meeting with regional representatives
- How and when and to whom we distribute Kits of material to attendees
- Meetings with political implications
- Meetings with media coverage
- Electronic recordings (taping, digital recordings)
- Implications of Privacy of Information legislation on published minutes
- Preparations that good minute-takers make for their own comfort and peace of mind
- Examples of what to include in your minute-taking template
- Building a glossary of people, terms and acronyms specific to our meetings
- Lists of common note-taking abbreviations
- Why it is important for the minute-taker to have access to the organization's by-laws (charter)
- Part III: Tips on Taking Notes in Complex Meetings
- Practise your listening skills!
- Know the players
- What words and situations to focus on and listen for
- Comparing different models of actual notes taken in the same meeting
- What people expect to read in the minutes of high-level meetings
- What to do if your laptop crashes, and other disasters
- Reasons for having a back-up (taping, another recorder)
- Predicting and preventing common note-taking problems in complex meetings
- Part IV: Creating Draft Minutes
- Pruning wordy notes into accurate, concise, complete, readable minutes
- What the good minute taker leaves in
- What to omit
- Using the five guidelines of "Plain English" for professionalism
- How to paraphrase repeated matter and ideas
- Confidentiality of notes and draft minutes: who gets to see them?
- Part IV: Editing and Proofreading Draft Minutes
- The difference between editing and proofreading
- What the self-editor looks for in the content of minutes
- Ensuring the style of your minutes matches the approach of the meeting
- How to incorporate others attendees notes into the draft minutes
- Six common errors the proofreader looks for
- When to have someone else proof your minutes
- Part V: Process for Finalizing the Minutes
- Distribution of the draft (when, why and to whom)
- Obtaining approval for your draft minutes
- Handling corrections from meeting members
- Handling corrections from stakeholders who did not attend
- Approvals of corrections
- Approval of the minutes
- Options for distributing the finalized minutes
- When and why would a hard copy be made of finalized minutes?
- When can minutes be used as legal documentation?
- Storing and archiving minutes for fast retrieval
- Part VI: Course Review, Closure and Evaluation