The conventional wisdom says that thorough and rigorous minute-taking is a requirement for effective meeting practice. In some cases, where there are compliance or other legal reasons for doing so - yes. However, for the vast majority of meetings this is overkill and to have a dedicated minute-taker is an expensive luxury.

I was discussing this with an Executive Assistant who was regaling me with the number of hours that she would be spending taking minutes in meetings and then writing them up. A one and a half hour meeting takes about an hour to write up - in detail - since there’s no point in having a dedicated minute-taker just to write summary notes and action points. That’s 2.5 person hours to produce the record of the meeting.

We recently demonstrated the Action Meetings process to a group of senior managers. One of the features they particularly liked was the way we encourage minutes to be taken. It works like this - use a whiteboard and record the agenda, decisions and resolutions and action points on the whiteboard. If it’s self-copying then press the button with multiple copies and give every participant their copy of the minutes as they leave or take a photo with a digital camera and send to ScanR and then email the images to participants - time taken, 5 to 10 minutes max.

95% of the value of minutes is in the action point list. If you just record them, you’re working smart.

All the above ignores the question - does anybody actually read meeting minutes? Maybe they do - in the next meeting when more time gets wasted discussing whether the hitherto unread minutes are actually an accurate record.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Meetings, WOMBATS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.