Proper documentation is need of the hour, which caters the needs of the stakeholders as well as management of the organization. Minutes are the correct recording of business proceedings in a meeting. The minutes are useful for noting down the decisions taken and clarifying the role for their execution. Recording of the minutes requires experience, expertise with alertness by minute taker to understand the meeting proceedings quickly. Recording minutes of a meeting can be a tricky business. Usually, number of meeting attendees starts talking at the same when the meeting becomes a heated debate. The person who is deputed for minutes recording must be very astute at lip reading in gauging, what a person is saying by watching the attendees’ lips movements.
In meeting minutes’ record of the time, date and place, the list of meeting attendees as well as absentees, previous meeting’s minutes and its left out points, agenda points has been made with decisions taken with the next schedule of the meeting. In this modern era, many companies are outsourcing minute taking to highly trained writers who attend meetings, take minutes and save in house staff’s time, stress, and resource. This is how efficient minute taking can be made;
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Minute taker must arrive early in the meeting with plenty of time to setup properly.
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Before and after the meeting you should devote time to review queries with the meeting’s chair and clarifying it on the spot.
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Notes may be written soon after the meeting as the meeting proceeding is still fresh in minute taker’s mind.
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Finalization of the meeting minutes must be made as early as possible, because it is not possible to remember every nick of detail of original meeting and a delay in circulating minutes usually means a delay in taking decisions.
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Allow three hours to create the finished minutes of the meeting for each hour of meeting as a general rule.
A minute taker must leave for him the enough time to prepare, take the minutes, and write up his notes, and set him up for great meeting minutes. There are many ways to record minutes like audio recording, video recording and hand recording. However, superiority is given to hand recording with experience, smartness, alertness of the minute taker.
