Everything you need to know about minute-taking

What is a minute-taker?

The minute-taker is the individual that records everything that is said in a meeting. By summarising key points, the individual helps keep an accurate record of what’s being discussed so it can be referred to in future meetings and business operations. Using a highly-skilled minute-taker helps influence important decisions and actions, and saves you time. 

There are three main steps to minute-taking: listening, taking notes, and recording. Good minute-takers have excellent listening skills in order to capture all the important points during a meeting. They also take concise and accurate notes, ensuring that the key points are captured without including any unnecessary information. Finally, they use an accurate recording method to ensure that the minutes are easily accessible and accurate. 

How to take meeting minutes?

We highly recommend taking notes of what you hear by writing down short phrases, rather than complete sentences. There may be points mentioned in a meeting that are not relevant to your minute-taking duties, so try not to write everything down. When recording the minutes, it’s helpful to be experienced in condensing topics into points that summarise what’s being discussed.  This means that you are more likely to capture everything that was mentioned in your meeting.

Minute-takers provide a valuable service, ensuring your business is operating efficiently and effectively. With their excellent listening skills and ability to record information accurately, minute-takers help keep your business on track with effective minutes.

What’s the difference between minute-taking and transcription services?

A transcript is a verbatim transcription of the speech and discussion. This may be used for meetings, conferences, seminars, video, board meetings, and so on. Minutes are a brief chronology of events that summarizes issues, proposals, action points, and decisions that have been made. For important meetings, we’d recommend keeping utilising both transcription and minutes as both have their unique benefits. Where you need an exact account of what has been said, referring to a transcript can be helpful for accurately relaying information at a future date. Minutes are useful for summarising topics to be discussed in future meetings or events. 

5 tips for accurate minutes and note-taking.

1. Listen attentively: This is the most important part of being a minute-taker. You need to be able to accurately capture what is being said without missing any details.
2. Take concise notes: Try to stick to key points and avoid including any unnecessary information.
3. Use an accurate recording method: This will help ensure that the minutes are easily accessible and accurate. Experiment with a range of technology from note-pads to laptops.
4. Leave out personal opinions: As a minute-taker, your job is to simply record what is being said, not offer your own opinion.
5. Formatting: Try to keep your notes neat and tidy, this will make them easier to read and follow.

How Global Lingo can help your business meetings.

Minute-taking is an important task, ensuring that your business is running smoothly and effectively. You can use our helpful insights, or get in touch with one of our industry expert project managers, who can dedicate professional multilingual minute-takers for your business. If you’re working in medicine; law; not-for-profit; or any of our other specialist industries, we guarantee that we can provide the perfect minute-taker for your business.

If you’re looking for a minute taker, or need professional minute-taking services for your next meeting, get in touch with us today. We have a team of experienced and qualified minute-takers that are more than happy to help.