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

  ON-TRACK Corporate Training has a diverse and flexible schedule that can be customized to your needs. We offer group courses (both public and corporate), one-on-one training, virtual (on-line) classroom (Zoom etc.) and on-site training options. We also have easily accessible on-line training videos on OnTrackTV.