How to write meeting notes in hybrid

But all too often, they can become talking shops and the meeting notes don't bring clarity rather they are directionally correct, but not perfect. Meeting effectiveness is reduced because the actions and the decisions are just not clear. This is no good for anyone in any type of meeting, but if you are working in a hybrid way or fully remote, you need to be so much more intentional in the way in which you both run your meetings and capture the meeting minutes.

I'm going to share with you five steps that will help you bring clarity to the actions and decisions you are making in your meeting. And there's a big win for you if you are a manager of teams or projects, or just leading meetings because you will also be seen as one of those people who run great meetings and, move work along well. 

The second step is you need to allocate the role of writing the minutes to someone who's in the meeting. Do not try and chair a meeting and lead it and write the minutes at the same time. It's just too much to do.

You need to give that responsibility to someone and delegate that role. That person needs to be aware of their responsibilities before they come into the meeting so that they can prepare and get ahead and be ready to capture what's going on in the meeting and not be setting themselves up.

It also needs somebody who is confident enough to say, 'have we made the decision there?' or 'Can I just confirm the action?' And not to be a passive person in the background. You can have great teamwork between somebody leading the meeting and somebody writing the minutes because you can support each other and just check in that whatever has been agreed as written down correctly.

So what are you actually using to write the minutes? Now the key here, step three, is to have an agreed way in which you capture the minutes and you don't want to keep reinventing the wheel with everybody starting again. So you need a template format that you follow. Now all meetings are different and you may want to tailor it, tailor this, but I think there are two main ways of doing it.

You could use a meeting app that already does this for you provides the templates is shared to everybody and allows you to structure your meeting, plan it, to capture the actions and the decisions as you go. My favourite app for this is fellow.app. It's a great tool.

If you're not buying into an app, then you need to create templates for the kinds of meetings you have, that you then store in a shared folder with a very clear file name and everybody commits to using them.

 I'm going to share one with you here, which is for a formal meeting, to explain what should be on your templates. You can download this template if it helps you to get started. 

At the starting point, we capture what the meeting title is and it's the date.  Then to document the attendees, that's everybody who is in the meeting, whether it be virtual or face-to-face. 

This is the reason for the meeting. Focus on decisions first. Capture the decisions that have been made and any notes for clarity. This helps if these minutes are being shared, it means that there may be a bit of explanation so people know. But this needs to be crystal clear, decisions often get missed in meetings or they become a bit hidden.

In step four, once the minutes are written your need to store them for transparency and action. You want to be sharing a link to a shared folder location where everybody knows where they are, much better than sending individual files all around by email; bring everybody back to where you're collaborating, your digital collaboration space.