Meeting minutes is an essential practice to keep the entire team, stakeholders, and meeting absentees in the loop. In the pursuit of keeping all team members informed and accountable, large corporations and startups need to deploy a decentralised and transparent communication model. Due to economic, political or pandemic issues, professionals are increasingly working remotely, interacting and engaging with other team members from multi-geographic locations. Being the year of the remote home working good meeting minute habits and practices become paramount in reducing communication barriers and friction. This article will outline five perfectly ideal minutes of meeting templates that can help the management of your team.
Why we need minutes of meeting
Different from the meeting agenda, meeting minutes contain three pieces of information: 1. Decisions made 2. Next steps and 3. The team who handles the tasks. It’s also a useful tool for everyone to reference post-meeting to track progress.
Steps creating good meeting minutes:
· Pre-planning before the meeting started
· Meeting recording, writing or transcribing
· Save the draft and send it to all the relevant people
Proper minutes of the meeting should include:
· Meeting date and time
· The name of people/team who’s responsible for each task
· Agenda items
· Strategic decisions
· Execution steps
· Next meeting plan
Related: Why should you book a private meeting room?
Top 5 meeting templates
Minutes of meetings by Microsoft Word Online
All users can create a massive volume of meeting minutes templates from the Microsoft Office website. Select Minutes from the Browse by Category section. For a professional touch, you can use the formal type of template that includes many colours and must-have titles like Approvals, Reports, Call to order and Adjournment sections. This template is most suitable for executive, committee or board meetings. View here.
Project minutes of meetings
Your company is running a few different projects, and you’re struggling with creating high-quality minutes after the meeting? Then we’re sure this template is the best one for you. You can find the project name at the top go along with the objective below. All the titles and headlines are presented and clearly so that people can easily keep track, leave signatures and add the next meeting plan at the bottom. You can download the ones from Microsoft and then upload them into other platforms such as Google Drive or Microsoft One Drive. See https://templates.office.com/en-us/triangles-meeting-minutes-tm22817755
Basic meeting minutes
In case you need a basic and straightforward meeting minute, there are a few basic templates for all kinds of meetings. You can find many headlines such as participants, topic discussions and announcements. This template format is very convenient and flexible to use. It could also be used in a business setting, school activities, clubs or any organisation meeting. Because of the basic style, the whole template is neatly displayed but still full of the necessary information. There’s also a space for the record person’s name in case you don’t have a secretary. See Google Doc Meeting Minute Template here.
Meeting minutes by Google Docs
If you’re proficient in using Google Docs, it’s convenient for you to create good minutes of meetings. Start by signing in to your Google account, select Start a new document. Choose the More arrow to expand the section and scroll down to the bottom. Then you’ll see a few meeting minutes samples to use from that.
A unique feature of these templates is the formal feel in the format. They presented almost all the important sections like participants, schedule, progress steps, notes and next meeting plans in many colours.
Board of Directors meeting minutes template
The BOD usually has legal and fiduciary duties, so it’s crucial to capture how the meeting happens and record the details about it. The BOD meeting minutes stand as a key that stores all the information about the strategies, plans, execution steps and decisions. The entrepreneur should know how to use the right template with a specific format to publish professional meeting minutes. Do the same in point 4 above in Google Docs, and the Board of Director meeting notes template will appear as an option.
Important Notes for meeting minutes
The minutes of the meeting is usually recorded through the meeting and modified or completed to send out to the attendees after the meeting ended.
In some BOD meetings or meetings that involve legal or government-related proceedings, you can let a person who does not join the meeting to record all the detail information. In case your company has no place for a secretary, you must be very detail-oriented and good at concentrating on the recording while listening through the meeting.
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