How to Write Effective Meeting Minutes [+ Free Meeting Minutes Template]

Meetings are crucial events for businesses where important decisions are made, ideas are expressed, and brainstorming occurs. It's essential to document participants' contributions, record decisions on topics, note the meeting's flow, and preserve these details for future reference and decision-making. For this reason, taking notes on important topics discussed in your meetings is vital. Meeting minutes serve as the record of key decisions, participants' ideas, and other significant details. If you want to increase the efficiency of your meetings and better articulate your thoughts, we've got you covered!

In this article, we will discover meeting minutes and how you can take effective meeting minutes.

Ready? Let’s begin!

TL; DR

• Meeting minutes are official records of a meeting for its participants and company.
• Meeting minutes are usually taken by secretaries, but other participants can also take them.
• Meeting minutes provide advantages such as accountability and outlining the meeting structure for the company and participants.
• A basic meeting minutes should include name, date, time, participants, important topics, documents, and objectives.
• To take meeting minutes effectively, you can create an outline, create an attendees checklist, and use previous meeting notes.
• In effective meeting minutes, you should avoid writing everything, check important notes after recording the meeting, and proofread the entire document to make it error-free.
• If you are looking for an AI assistant to support you with all company tasks, including meeting minutes, ZenoChat is the way to go.

What are Meeting Minutes?

Meeting minutes are the official records of a meeting for its participants. Meeting minutes include notes on who attended the meeting, what they discussed, which action items came out as a result, and what ideas about topics were taken. Contrary to its name, meeting minutes do not necessarily record every minute; it is sufficient to document only relevant and important information.

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Who is Responsible for Taking Minutes for a Meeting?

Secretaries usually take notes at company meetings and are responsible for taking meeting minutes. If there is no specific role for this task in your company, those meeting participants who are used to taking meeting minutes will take on this task. You can also use templates generated by AI assistants to take meeting minutes and cover the entire meeting. For example, you can use the following meeting minutes template for meetings for a new project.

Advantages of Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes are incredibly handy tools that offer your team and meeting members a wide range of advantages. Let’s exemplify some of the advantages of meeting minutes.

They Make Meetings Actionable

Meeting minutes help you avoid endless discussions and list actionable decisions made in meetings, such as plans of action, assign contact people, and task and sub-task lists.

They Outline the Meeting Structure

Organized meeting minutes create an outline and meeting agenda that you can use for all your meetings and that participants will become familiar with over time.

Keep Everyone Updated

You can keep everyone updated by sending copies of meeting minutes to all participants via internal communication tools or email.

Highlight Important Topics

If you forget a few important topics after meetings, or if participants forget, meeting minutes can help you avoid this situation. With meeting minutes, you can note important topics and review them at the end of the meeting.

Accountability 

Meeting minutes are the perfect solution for turning topics discussed and decisions made during the meeting into lists. This way, you can highlight who is assigned to which task and the responsibilities of the participants.

What Should a Meeting Minutes Include?

The content of meeting minutes varies depending on your company’s needs and meeting habits. While each company has different meeting layouts and needs, there are certain information you should include in each meeting minute, such as:

• Meeting basics such as name, place, date, and time
• List of Meeting Participants
• Meeting Objectives
• Approval of Agenda
• Discussion Points
• Action Items
• Next Meeting
• Documents
• Notes/Comments

How to Take Meeting Minutes Effectively?

If you want to make your meeting minutes perfect, you need to start preparing before the meeting. If taking meeting minutes is new to you and you are inexperienced in taking notes, we have prepared a guide for you!

Create an Outline

As with any enterprise document, creating an outline for meeting minutes that includes agenda items is essential. We recommend focusing on key goals and listing your meeting agenda while developing your meeting minutes outline. If you need assistance in creating your outline, you can utilize conversational AI assistants like ZenoChat.

Check off Attendees

Keeping a list of meeting minutes attendees and checking their names off the list when they join is an effective way to take attendance. This way, you can keep track of who is attending your meeting, and you can send the meeting minutes document to those who will not be able to attend to keep them informed.

Previous Meeting Notes

In some meetings, it may be necessary to reference and use items from previous meetings. For example, you may need revised action items from previous meeting minutes, previous meeting ideas that support the current topic, a summary of previous meeting notes, and topics that will extend into the current meetings.

Avoid Writing Everything 

When taking meeting notes, you should only write important and relevant information. This way, you can prevent your meeting minutes from turning into a mess and create more organized and easy-to-understand meeting minutes.

Record Meetings

You may consider recording meetings to enhance your meeting minutes and check if there is any information you missed during the meeting. You can record meetings with a recording device or your mobile phone and store these files in your company's knowledge base.

Revise Your Notes and Proofread Them

By rereading your notes after the meeting, you can correct spelling errors and make sure that all information is written clearly. In this way, you can store the written records of all your meetings and guarantee that they are perfect and error-free.

ZenoChat – Your Personal AI Assistant for Meeting Minutes

If you are looking for an AI co-pilot to support you in all your company tasks, including taking meeting minutes, then ZenoChat by TextCortex is designed for you. ZenoChat is designed to support you in every company task with its multiple LLMs, powerful RAG, web search, trained data, knowledge bases, and customizable personas.

ZenoChat can help you take meeting minutes by:

• Generating personalized meeting minutes templates,
• Fixing the grammar & spelling of your meeting minutes in less than a minute,
• Storing your meeting minutes with knowledge bases,
• Analyzing your meeting minutes with knowledge bases and generating outputs using them.

By uploading or connecting your meeting minutes to ZenoChat’s knowledge bases, you can have ZenoChat analyze all your notes and generate answers to your questions. With its powerful Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), ZenoChat can recall information from your notes without error. Moreover, you can boost your employees’ performance by using ZenoChat’s knowledge bases and other features. See the results from one of our case studies:

• TextCortex was implemented for Kemény Boehme Consultants as a solution to tackle these challenges and today employees report increased efficiency and productivity (saving 3 work days per month per employee on average).
• AICX, an ecosystem partner of TextCortex, was integral to the onboarding and helped achieve a 70% activation rate of the team within the first weeks.
• Employee confidence in using and working with AI increased by 60%.‍
• The implementation results in a 28x return on investment (ROI).

Wanna explore more? 

Sign up today to integrate ZenoChat into your workflow and boost your productivity!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are meeting minutes?

Meeting minutes are the official record of what decisions were made, who was appointed, which action items resulted, what ideas about the topic were discussed, and all other related events that happened during the meeting. With TextCortex, you can have an AI assistant take meeting minutes for you according to the template you want.

How do I write minutes of a meeting?

If you are writing a meeting minutes, we recommend that you include the following sections:

• Meeting basics such as name, place, date, and time
• List of Meeting Participants
• Meeting Objectives
• Approval of Agenda
• Discussion Points
• Action Items
• Next Meeting
• Documents
• Notes/Comments

The meeting minutes that you will generate through TextCortex will include these headings and other important headings that your organization needs. This way, instead of wasting time drafting the meeting minutes structure, you can get straight to action.

What is the rule for meeting minutes?

The meeting minutes are a factual and official record of business. Avoid including opinions, judgments, statements like “a well-done report,” or criticism sentences about members, topics, and ideas, whether good or bad. If you want your meeting minutes report to be well-structured and professional, you can turn your notes into a professional tone of voice with TextCortex.

What are company meeting minutes?

Meeting minutes are notes taken during a company or organization's conference or meeting. They document discussions, decisions, results, ideas, notes, and action items. Companies need meeting minutes to organize their meetings and evaluate the results of previous meetings.