Meeting minutes contain information about how to write meeting minutes. Experience and knowledge are needed to properly record meeting minutes. Moreover, it calls for awareness, professionalism, integrity, the capacity to rapidly comprehend meeting activities, understanding of corporate procedures, and managerial abilities. Keeping meeting minutes involves much more than just shorthand proficiency. Hence, taking meeting minutes is not a secretary’s role, despite what the majority of people would prefer to think so that they may avoid the duty. Nevertheless, if you want your conference minutes to be accurately recorded, I must make something very obvious to you.
A secretary might be quick at taking down dictations and the words said by different meeting participants, but he or she won’t be able to decipher what was said. The best people to interpret what each meeting participant says are managers and junior managers. Hence, managers should take the minutes rather than secretaries or personal assistants if they are to be meaningfully recorded. Not to minimize the value of secretaries and personal assistants. Personal assistants and secretaries are qualified for other careers and in other ways. Moreover, secretaries and PAs are so crucial to office management that managers will not be able to function without them. Even highly intelligent managers occasionally fail miserably at answering the phone. Similarly, secretaries are terrible at taking minutes during meetings.
It Needs Creativity and Lip Reading Skills
It can be challenging to how to write meeting minutes. At meetings, many people frequently begin speaking at the same time, especially when there is a heated discussion going on. When everyone is speaking at once, it is difficult to understand what they are saying. Words become hazy and unclear. As a result, the manager who records conference minutes needs to have keen hearing in order to tell one person’s comments from another’s. Although it’s not always possible to hear every word said at a meeting, the manager must also be very astute in interpreting what people are saying by observing their lip movements. So, in addition to being alert, the meeting minutes recorder must be an expert lip reader
Optimal Meeting Minutes Should Be Captured Verbatim
Written minutes from meetings should be kept. Business gatherings may often be contentious events. Some managers might refute what they said during the meeting. So that no meeting participant can subsequently refute anything, you must document corporate meeting minutes verbatim. Moreover, you must clearly note the name of each speaker next to their statements so that you and the other managers may afterwards identify who spoke when.
The importance of integrity and professionalism cannot be overstated.
The individual taking minutes during meetings must be completely truthful. Numerous times, recorders of minutes have caused a commotion by recording events that did not take place at the meeting. The need for ethics and professionalism in a minute’s writer is due to this. Otherwise, you’ll discover that your minutes resemble a fairy tale and a cock and bull story. The recorder should capture the guests’ statements as well as the relevant information and pressing topics. The purposes of meeting minutes are too accurately and impartially record the events of the meeting. Care should be taken when selecting the minute’s recorder. A biased individual will only fabricate meeting minutes by using lies in order to endanger corporate records.
Many people believe that audio or video recordings of meeting minutes should be made. This is not a bad idea, but I advise you to hand-write down meeting minutes in addition to recording them on video and audio. There are several reasons why you need to manually document meeting minutes even if you are audio recording and/or video recording them.
The entire meeting can be seen afterwards on a video tape. While the video recording will show the entire meeting exactly as it happened, you will have a difficult time recalling the words said by each participant after watching the entire video, just as you would have a difficult time recalling the words said by each actor after watching an entire movie on video. To hear what Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts said again, you would need to fast-forward and rewind to the appropriate point in the video and click Play. Seeing a conference’s video recording has the same effect. To hear the words of one speaker or all of the speakers, you will need to continuously fast-forward and rewind the video.