Ways to Capture Valuable Notes on Meetings

The only way you can be sure your teams get value from meetings is to capture that value in writing.

Your teams’ meeting results belong to your business. Employees get paid to work through problems, make decisions, come up with new ideas, and commit to action. Teams meet to get those results, and yet very few businesses require employees to capture and publish these results where others can put them to use.

Last November, researchers combed over 400 meeting-science studies to find the top 10 rules for business meetings. Failing to follow the tenth rule, “Plan for creativity and capture these outcomes,” is, by far, the most wasteful mistake my team sees business leaders make. 

When you leave it up to every individual to rely on their memories, you will inevitably spend time combatting these preventable problems:

• Waiting for someone to complete a task, only to discover too late that they never realized they were supposed to do it.
• Repeating discussions your team seems to forget you’ve already had about decisions you’ve already made.
• Combing your email to figure out what the real story is before you head into a client meeting.
• Managing bad assumptions, politics, and all kinds of wasteful baloney as your leadership team second-guesses what they’re each doing in their black-box silos.
• Scrambling to figure out what’s going on with a project or customer or supplier when the person who normally meets with them leaves.

Do any of these problems sound familiar? You can prevent a lot of that drama by having everyone capture and publish meeting notes. Here’s how.

1. Assign someone to type notes for every meeting. 

You may have read that it’s better to take notes on paper, which is true for college students attending lectures. Research shows paper note taking helps individuals remember complex topics better, but it does nothing to help a whole group remember anything.   

Read more: https://www.inc.com/jelise-keith/how-to-capture-valuable-notes-from-every-meeting.html