Capturing the action plan in your meeting minutes

- Every good meeting should end with an action plan. Otherwise, what's the point of the next meeting? So it's important that this action plan be reflected in the summary of your meeting minutes. In fact, some organizations require that meeting minutes include this sort of summary. Meeting minutes serves as a record of decisions that were made, what actions should be taken, and who must take them and when. Important meetings are held every day and the decisions made at these meetings can involve millions of dollars. And this is why the role of minute taker is so important. Meeting minutes drive action by providing a plan for you and your team. The minutes show how decisions were made, who made the decisions and when. By mapping out an action plan in the meeting minutes, you help ensure the work gets done. And the minutes can also provide an update to those who were unable to attend the meeting. Because the meeting minutes record important decisions, they serve as a great way to measure progress. You can use them as an accountability tool to make sure that progress is being made. Now don't worry. Meeting minutes don't have to be long and extremely detailed. Some can be short and to the point based on the nature of the meeting. Your meeting minutes can consist of a simple list of decisions made, actions that need to take place along with who is responsible for each action. And you can include dates for each action if they're time-sensitive. Here's an example of a meeting minutes document. A copy is available in the exercise files folder. Now there's no strict format for the layout of meeting minutes, but this exercise file will give you a good idea of the general structure. First, you'll notice at the top, you'll take note of the company name and department. The next areas ask for committee name, date of the meeting, the location, and who's preparing the minutes. Next we have the purpose of the meeting and who was in attendance. Box three is for the meeting agenda. If you're organizing the meeting, you can fill in this box before the meeting starts. If you're simply taking notes in a meeting, you can ask the meeting organizer to clarify the agenda at the beginning of the meeting. And this fourth box, will probably be the largest in terms of total information. Here you add your meeting notes, decisions that were made, and issues that arose. Finally, we have the action items in box number five. For each item, be sure to indicate who's responsible for getting it done, and the due date. Lastly, if a follow-up meeting is necessary, it can be added in box number six. As you can see in this one page template, meeting minutes are fairly straightforward. The idea is to make sure you complete all of those sections, ideally before the meeting is over and everyone leaves. Feel free to utilize this template for your own use and customize it to fit the work that you do.