Best Practices for Minute Taking in Board Meetings
The buck stops with the board.
Facing the highest stakes and making the most impactful decisions, executives depend upon accurate and organised minute taking to ensure accountability and strategic alignment.
Learn how to take minutes at a board meeting today with Inkserv’s handy guide. We highlight the tried-and-true tactics for producing meeting records that drive organisational efficiency, productivity and regulatory compliance.
Preparing for the Meeting
Understanding the Meeting Agenda
An effective minute-taker follows the agenda’s lead, anticipating topics to be discussed and preparing to capture all relevant opinions and conclusions.
That way, they enter the discussion with the context they need to organise information effectively.
Role of the Minute Taker
Minute-takers don’t transcribe speech — they extract, condense and organise the most important information discussed into a useful resource for future reference.
Quality minutes summarise and highlight decisions, actions, and key information so that teams, departments and stakeholders can communicate efficiently and coordinate their efforts effectively to achieve organisational objectives.
Tools & Templates
Leave the grunt work to the machines.
Using preformatted minutes structures allows the minute-taker to work efficiently, focusing on summarising, organising and clarifying meeting content.
What to Record (and What to Leave Out)
Key Components to Capture
Every meeting record should document the following essential information:
- Date, time and location of the meeting
- Names of attendees and absentees
- Approval of previous minutes
- Motions and resolutions
- A Summary of Key Discussion Points (e.g. proposals, objections, queries, report-backs, etc.)
- Actions Assigned (including the nature and purpose of the task, who will be responsible for its success, and deadlines for completion)
- Decisions Made, providing a clear description of the resolution and its rationale
Avoid Over-Detailing
Sifting for the essentials is a key minute-taking skill. The best minutes, by contrast, are focused distillations of only the elements that lead to important outcomes.
Using Clear and Concise Language
Objective and Neutral Tone
Meeting minutes are important organisational resources, and as such, should report the facts impartially, uncoloured by the personal sentiments of the minute-taker.
Concise Summarisation
Clarity and brevity are the soul of an efficient writing style. Use precise terms consistently. Keep sentences short, and structured simply for ease of reading. Record only the main discussion points, decisions, and actions.
During the Meeting: Effective Techniques
Active Listening
Learning how to take meeting minutes begins with presence of mind.
Pay careful attention to discussions, identifying crucial points, follow-up tasks and decisions. More casual approaches lead to errors, inaccuracies and omissions.
Abbreviations and Symbols
Writing shorthand accelerates note-taking, abbreviating key terms and common phrases, and drawing symbols to represent relationships between entities (such as an arrow pointing toward a decision).
These make for efficient minute-taking during the meeting, but require expansion and clarification afterward.
Confirming Decisions & Actions
To ensure accuracy, experienced minute-takers make a special effort to politely pause the discussion to double-check any decisions reached or actions assigned, before the chairperson moves on to the next agenda item.
Post-Meeting Practices
Review and Clarify Notes
Reading over your rough notes for a few minutes immediately after the meeting helps consolidate your understanding of the discussion, expanding on shorthand notes and ensuring information exchanged has been accurately recorded.
Formatting and Organising the Minutes
Well-structured meeting minutes contain tiered headings and subheadings, as well as bullet points and standard phrases such as “decisions reached”, “objections raised” and “tasks assigned”. These conventions keep minutes navigable during future reference.
Approval Process
Before final distribution, circulate the initial draft of the minutes to collect feedback from relevant parties. This improves quality, avoiding omissions and inaccuracies.
Storing and Distributing Minutes
Archiving Minutes Properly
Store approved minutes in a secure, accessible location where all relevant parties can review them independently.
If your organisation uses hard-copy minutes, consider keeping a digital duplicate as well to ensure ease of access, information confidentiality and reduced risk of loss or damage.
Timely Distribution
The sooner you distribute the minutes, the sooner the executives can implement the resolutions and actions emanating from meetings.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Summarising Complex Discussions
Some discussions entail high levels of nuance and technicality, with significant back and forth. When summarising, don’t replicate each statement.
Instead, use bullet points and labels such as “proposal”, “objection”, “decision”, “action”, and so on. In the case of a lengthy debate, number objections and responses under a shared heading.
Ensuring Accuracy
Precision is often lost in the flow of conversation and in the stream of shorthand note-making, so proficient minute-takers ask for clarification during and immediately after meetings.
Conclusion
Take your next board meeting minutes with success in mind.
Prepare in advance by reviewing the agenda and choosing a suitable template, then listen actively to the discussion, noting information in shorthand and confirming decisions and actions throughout.
After the meeting, review your notes, expanding and clarifying where necessary, before drafting the full minutes in an organised document optimised for ease of reading and accuracy.
Once approved by the other members, circulate the final record to all relevant parties, to ensure all decisions reached can be enacted as soon as possible.
For the best in professional minute-taking services, contact Inkserv today, and equip your executives with tools to steer your organisation to victory!