Common Corporate Meetings Minutes Mistakes

Most Common Corporate meetings minutes mistakes

A brief introduction to minutes of meeting

Minutes of meeting are, basically, a chronicle of the meeting’s key focuses and a record of what went on in a meeting. They typically describe the events of the meeting and may include a list of attendees, a statement of the issues discussed by the participants, and related responses or decisions for the issues. According to some scholars, “minutes” possibly derives from the Latin phrase minuta scriptura (literally “small writing”) meaning “rough notes”.

In the old analogue days, minutes were usually created during the meeting by a typist or court reporter, who often used shorthand notation and then prepared the minutes and issued them to the participants afterwards. Today, the meeting can be audio recorded, video recorded, or a group’s appointed or informally assigned secretary may take notes, with minutes prepared later. Many government agencies use minutes recording software to record and prepare all minutes in real-time.

It is important to note that minutes are the official written record of the meetings of an organization or group, but they are not detailed transcripts of those proceedings. According to the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure called Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR), the minutes should contain mainly a record of what was done at the meeting, not what was exactly said by the members.

The format of the minutes can vary depending on the standards established by an organization, although there are general guidelines. Robert’s Rules of Order contains a sample set of minutes.

Generally, minutes begin with the name of the body holding the meeting (e.g., a board) and may also include the place, date, list of people present, and the time that the chair called the meeting to order.

The minutes of certain groups, such as a corporate board of directors, must be kept on file and are important legal documents. Minutes from board meetings are kept separately from minutes of general membership meetings within the same organization. Also, minutes of executive sessions may be kept separately.

Why should you take minutes of meeting?

For what reason would you need to record meeting minutes? How to take minutes at a corporate meeting? You would want to take minutes at a corporate meeting for historic reference, to give an update to the people who were missing, and to give a precise description of information disclosed that can later on be used as a confirmation or proof.

Today, the coronavirus outbreak is making organizations switch to remote work. The process of recording corporate meeting minutes helps organizations to remain adaptable and strong. It is useful in conditions of quarantine and assists in facing quickly changing conditions.

Imagine the following situation: You’re having an important meeting with a lawyer, and you might need to keep a detailed record of each point you’ve discussed for additional reference.

If you have troublesome issues in your agreement, that might crucially affect your business or personal matters. That is the reason it is very important to keep track of everything.

In a professional workplace, effective meeting minutes are quite important. Why? Because our ability to recall subtleties is normally constrained. Oversights may prompt missteps and wrong business choices. That is the reason taking corporate meeting minutes requires a good capacity to focus and an astounding ear for detail. This duty is usually delegated to a trusted secretary or a personal assistant. However, it’s really easy to make mistakes while taking meeting minutes.

In this article, we will talk about the most well-known slip-ups that happen when taking minutes of meeting and the arrangements that may assist you with avoiding them.

Corporate meeting minutes mistakes to avoid

To guarantee transparency and straightforwardness, the US legislation requires that corporate board meetings follow a certain procedure. Corporate boards of directors need to take meeting minutes and afterwards distribute them among laborers.

Taking corporate meeting minutes additionally helps members to prove that they are acting with the best interests. Likewise, it assists with understanding the business on a basic level, and for tax, liability, and fiduciary purposes. Without the right methodology, however, meetings will in general become too long and exhausting. At the point when most participants begin to regard meetings as an exercise in futility, you know you’re on the wrong track.

The most widely recognized errors are as follows:

1. Not setting up the agenda for the meeting

An agenda sets up the structure of a specific meeting. It is a diagram of themes you will talk about with the rundown of speakers and the time that you will distribute for every theme. A board meeting agenda may resemble the following:

1. Q1 financial report (Chief financial officer, 15 minutes)

2. Implementation of a new data security system (CTO, 15 minutes)

3. Getting ready for an upcoming product launch press conference (Press secretary, 20 minutes)

A clearly defined agenda provides guidance to the meeting participants by defining cutoff points and limits. Regardless of whether it’s a customary week by week meeting, it encourages members to stick to the point and keep their brains (and speech) from meandering.

For successful corporate meeting minutes, absence of an agenda is a huge hindrance. Taking meeting minutes requires careful arrangement. Without a clear agenda, the individual liable for recording minutes doesn’t have the foggiest idea what to concentrate on. Solution: Always set up an agenda before the meeting. If for reasons unknown you have neglected to do as such, transcription software will enable you to catch the information that was disclosed. Organizing your meeting minutes, however, will take some time.

2. Not sticking up to timing and content while taking meeting minutes

When you have set up an agenda for the meeting, you should follow it. Adhering to timing and the topics on the agenda requires discipline. What’s more, it serves an important role: to keep meetings from transforming into useless and meaningless chit-chats.

What befalls the corporate meeting minutes if you neglect to keep the meeting inside its limits? They become too extensive and lacking structure, and, accordingly, can’t be utilized for reference or considered reliable. Regardless of whether a member responsible for meeting minutes has enormous capacities to focus, you can’t extend their capacity to concentrate perpetually.

Solution: In this circumstance, meeting ownership is the best cure. Appoint a person to supervise the connection. What’s more, ensure that everybody adheres to the pre-established rules and meeting agenda. Timing is the deciding factor of a meeting, so don’t leave it unattended.

3. Having no agreed meetings minutes format

Without a pre-established format, corporate meeting minutes may become unreadable or inaccessible. If you don’t agree on a file format, your partners who don’t have the software for reading these file types might not be able to access it.

Meeting minutes are intended to be available to you in a split second, at whatever point you need them for reference. In a critical situation, you would prefer not to waste valuable time on converting documents into readable formats.

It is likewise critical to settle on an archive for meeting minutes documents. Cloud repository can be accessed from numerous devices and it is regularly the most ideal decision for storing transcripts of corporate meeting minutes.

Solution: Gglot automatically converts recordings into .doc or .txt file formats. On top of that, it supports most of the popular audio and video formats: MP3, M4A, WAV.

Transcription software will also upload your meeting minutes files to the cloud. This will eliminate all accessibility issues.

4. Not paying attention to detail while recording meetings minutes

Nobody likes meeting minutes that are excessively detailed. All things considered, they are intended for fast reference and ought to give a short briefing of information exchanged.

Not focusing on subtleties, then again, may bring about some grave oversights. Furthermore, it might cause grave troubles when you’re in desperate need of well-backed verification or proof.

It’s the focus on the most significant themes and subtleties that makes meeting minutes such an useful tool. Most importantly, those connections ought to mirror the center issues and the decisions that the meeting participants concurred on.

The minutes must not miss anything fundamental: for instance, when the board votes on a decision, minutes need to have a note detailing who voted for what.

Solution: Decide on a corporate meeting minutes template. It will assist you with showing the gathering type, timing, members, things on the agenda, the rundown of key decisions, and the meeting’s synopsis. This template should assist you with avoiding large mistakes and to remain centered, focused and effective.

Most importantly: prepare in advance and make a board meeting recap

Taking meeting minutes requires your full focus. It is imperative to separate each topic individually and define what is important and what is insignificant. It is a difficult activity that requires relevant experience and practice. It is not so easy to catch all the decisions that the board made during the meeting and then record or write them down.

Recap of the meeting is extremely significant. You should make a small check-out with questions that are going to summarize everything that was said.

Luckily, present day transcription software provides you with toolsets for effectively taking corporate meeting minutes. Also, it assists with disposing of fastidious manual work. For instance, the Ggglot smart speaker identification feature automatically identifies each speaker. This is a very useful feature when taking meeting minutes. Gglot also automatically converts sound recordings into text. With tools like Gglot, you can spare time and focus on the more important stuff.

Remember these tips and make your corporate meeting minutes more compelling.