Boarding minute-taking is a complex task. It takes dedicated listening and organizational skills to perfect the art of meeting minutes. In order to write minutes that accurately capture the events of the meeting, you must give your complete attention and be able to summarize the whole discussion into bullet points.
But you don’t need to wait for years and several meetings before mastering the art of meeting minutes. With these five digital life hacks, you can manage meetings and minutes like you’ve been doing this for decades.
1. Record the meeting
Record your meetings with your phone or a screen recorder so that you won’t miss any details in the minutes.
Recording the meeting allows you to focus wholly on the meeting since you’ve got a reliable reference when you need to recount certain events.
If you’re planning to record the meeting, let the board members or the director know for transparency purposes. Some people don’t like being recorded without their permission. Also, some companies do not allow it, so ask first to verify.
2. Use a transcription tool
If you want to speed things up when preparing your minutes’ report, use a transcription tool to transcribe your recording. These transcription tools use Artificial Intelligence technology to turn your audio or video recording into text.
Since an AI is doing the transcription for you, it may not be one hundred percent accurate, especially when there are indistinct parts of the audio or noises overpowering the speaker(s). The dictionary and grammar bank aren’t up to par yet, so expect some spelling and grammar errors too.
So as a tip, you should still review the transcription of the tool, then revise as you see fit.
3. Integrate your video conference tool with your communication and productivity tools
Make it easier and more convenient to hold meetings with your video conference tool of choice by integrating them with your communication and productivity tools!
For instance, you can integrate Zoom into Slack, so you can instantly launch meetings even while on the app. To integrate Slack into Zoom, go to the Zoom Marketplace, and find and install the Slack app. Once done, you can send Zoom invites on Slack using the /zoom command.
There’s also a way to integrate Google Calendars and Zoom. Head to your Google Calendar account, go to Settings, then “Get add-ons,” and select Zoom. After granting permission for Zoom, you can now create a meeting event in the calendar with Zoom.
4. Use a template
Every minute may differ in agendas, but it won’t hurt to have a standard outline of the minutes to speed things up, report-wise.
If this is your first time writing the meeting minutes, you can refer to previous minutes and use them as your template for your minutes.
You can also look up some boarding minute-taking templates online and edit them to match the agendas of the current meeting.
5. Use a board management software
The ultimate life hack to managing meetings and minutes effectively? Use board management software. It has the following features to help you organize everything for your organization efficiently in one place:
- Take notes and create meeting minutes on the portal
- Automate scheduling meetings (you can also integrate your video conferencing tool with a board portal)
- Vote directly within the board portal and record voting results in real-time
- Unlimited storage for all governance documents and meeting minutes
Board minute-taking is complicated and requires dedicated listening, organizational, and detail-oriented skills. Since it is the point of reference for board members in making fundamental decisions, the minutes should always be accurate and concise.
But as long as you practice these five digital lifehacks for managing meetings and minutes, you’ll have no trouble completing these minutes in the fastest time possible!
