Effective Minute-Taking Level 1
Whether we are asked for the first time to take minutes at a meeting or are a seasoned Minute-taker with experience in many meetings, there are relevant skills to learn and improve. Participants will learn and practice these skills in an enjoyable environment.
Duration: 1 Day
Course Objectives
After this session, participants will be able to:
- Prepare to take meeting minutes
- Explain the roles of the people in a meeting
- Distinguish between different types of business meetings
- Use one of the three categories of meeting minutes
- Take effective agenda-based notes
- Make summary choices and condense the notes into draft form
- Proofread and edit our minutes
- Distribute and integrate corrections to the minutes before finalizing
- Handle common minute-taking problems
Outline
Part 1 : General Information about Meetings and Taking Minutes
- Definition of terms
- Reasons for taking minutes, and advantages to the Minute-taker
- Types of meetings and categories of minute-taking
- Roles of the Minute-taker, Chair and meeting members
- Robert's Rules of Order
- Five-stage process of writing meeting minutes
Part 2 : The Meeting Agenda
- How the agenda is prepared and by whom
- Components of a professional working agenda
- Sample templates of a meeting agenda
- Do short meetings require an agenda?
Part 3 : Preparing for the Meeting
- Our secret weapon: knowing the topics, terms, acronyms and documents
- Setting up our note-taking template: coordinate headings with agenda items
- How our prep for virtual meetings and teleconferences differs from live ones
Part 4 : Techniques for Note Taking
- Listening skills: Where to practice listening: what to do if we miss a key point
- Compared advantages of handwriting versus typing our notes in the meeting
- Developing our own set of abbreviations
- Coordinate headings in our minutes with agenda items
- How to record motions, decisions by vote or consensus, and action items
- The issue of making a recording of the meeting for our later reference
Part 5 : Drafting Minutes from our Notes
- Focus on clear minutes, understandable on first reading
- Summary choices: condensing wordy sentences and paragraphs down to essentials
- Using Plain Language
- Point form, bullets, graphics and tables
- Importance of drafting minutes right after the meeting: the Forgetting Curve
- Suggested formatting for Motions, decisions and Action Items
- Attaching documents, reports and other relevant data to the draft
- Using our organization's style norms: font, bolding, underlining, templates
- Proofreading and editing our draft minutes
- Distributing our minutes for correction before finalizing; do's and don'ts
Part 6 : Common Meeting Problems for the Minute-taker