Meetings are a common part of the corporate world. Each organization and company has meetings regularly. Some of these meetings are very common and part of the day-to-day business, i.e. discussing sales figures with the sales department or implementing new marketing techniques. After discussing with the marketing department. On the other hand, some meetings are more important, i.e. annual progress meetings, board members’ meetings to change or implement new policies, or meetings between the shareholders for a merger or sale of company assets. You can easily document each meeting with the help of free meeting minutes templates.
No matter what the agenda of the meeting is, it’s important to document each part of the meeting effectively for record-keeping purposes. For this reason, meeting minutes are prepared. These are the brief notes taken before, during, and after the meeting. These are the key points that summarize the entire meeting in fewer than possible words.
Free Meeting Minutes Templates:
Here are several Free Meeting Minutes Templates to prepare your Meeting Minutes easily in a matter of minutes.
Uses and Importance of Meeting Minutes:
To Prepare Notes:
There can be hundreds of reasons for organizing a meeting. But one reason is the most important is that there is some issue or problem that needs to be discussed in the meeting. So the members can join their heads to find a solution to the problem. As the meeting secretary, it’s your job to attend the meeting and take notes for the session. Once the meeting is over, you will be asked to prepare the meeting minutes and distribute them among all the participants.
To Inform about all the Important Points:
It’s very common to miss some important details discussed in the meeting after a while. This is the problem that is tackled with the preparation of the meeting minutes. Each member of the board and other participants are given the meeting minutes. So they understand what was discussed in the meeting, what everyone agreed to, what actions are expected from each member, and how much time they have to deliver the decided results.
Evaluate the Effectiveness of Previous Meetings:
Another important benefit of preparing meeting minutes is to evaluate the effectiveness of the previous meetings. Usually, every meeting starts with a discussion on the progress of agendas discussed in the last meeting. If all the required actions were taken in time, board members can move on to the next issues. If there are still some tasks pending, effective measures can be taken to evaluate the reasons behind the delays and how to overcome these.
Meeting minutes are very important because they enable you to record the key issues raised during a meeting. With the help of it, one can easily solve or propose effective actions to solve the problem. One can do this manually or with the help of an electronic device. Nowadays, you can easily create meeting minutes with the help of pre-formatted templates. In these templates, you just have to record all the details in the specified fields and your document is ready in a matter of minutes. The main thing is to select the right template according to your needs. We have posted some free and editable meeting minutes templates that are created by our professionals. All of these templates are customizable as well.
How to Fill the Meeting Details:
Filling the details of a meeting in meeting minutes is difficult. You have to focus and understand each and everything clearly before filing the details of the meeting. It is necessary to have knowledge of the meeting, the agenda of the meeting, and the issues that will be discussed in the meeting. A clear understanding of the meeting and all the necessary points makes it possible to fill in all the details accurately.
Filling Before Meeting Details:
Although your only job is to take meeting minutes, that doesn’t mean you should go into the meeting blindfolded. You should be well aware of the agenda that will be discussed in the meeting or the important factors that might be discussed between board members. You should understand the purpose of the meeting and understand its basics so that during the meeting, you are not just writing but also understanding. This will greatly help you if your notes miss an important part of the meeting.
Including During the Meeting Details:
The common problem that occurs with meeting minutes is that the person responsible for taking these is not given enough time after the meeting to finalize all the paperwork and distribute complete minutes to each member of the meeting. What you as a professional secretary can do is differentiate notes from the actions discussed in the meeting. This will allow you to quickly add expected actions in front of each member’s name and then it’s easy for you to instantly transform all the details into a formal layout and share them with meeting participants right after the meeting.
Adding After the Meeting Details:
When the meeting is over, it’s time to complete the minutes and add other relevant details to the final draft. Here you need to look at the notes you took during the meeting. See what’s important to add to the meeting minutes sheet and prioritize all the details. At this stage, you should also be able to assign agreed tasks or actions for each participant and add a summary at the end of the final document that states what problems or agendas were discussed during the meeting and what duties were assigned to various members.