What Are Meeting Minutes? How to Take Minutes for a Meeting

Meeting minutes are meeting notes that serve as the official record of a meeting. The purpose of meeting minutes is to build a general framework and solidify the purpose of a meeting. They provide a meeting template to set the agenda before a group comes together and can function as a written record of the meeting after the fact.

Effective meeting minutes can come in many different iterations for many different groups of people. They are an invaluable source of information for meeting attendees before, during, and after a team meeting.

Good meeting minutes can give all attendees the key points and agenda items to focus on prior to the beginning of a meeting, as well as action items and next steps for future reference after the meeting’s adjournment. Any type of meeting—no matter how structured or free-flowing—can benefit from a designated note-taker who is writing the meeting minutes.

Meeting minutes can lay the groundwork for productive meetings, provide structure for discussions, and serve as documentation. For example, a corporate board of directors may set up a formal meeting and instruct the minutes-taker to operate off of Robert’s Rules of Order—a hyper-traditional framework included in an 1876 book by the same name. Drafted by US Army officer Henry M. Robert III, the book is a manual for meeting procedures. Organizations like governing bodies and other formal entities might use Robert’s Rules of Order.

Alternatively, nonprofit board members might feel the need for hard-and-fast bylaws of minute taking and structure are unnecessary for an informal meeting or webinar. They might instead simply task an individual with writing or typing up notes as the meeting occurs.

Taking notes for a meeting requires listening skills, good focus, and the ability to communicate clearly. Consult this step-by-step guide to learn how to take the minutes of a meeting:

1. 1. Consider who will attend. Before setting an agenda or even choosing the time of the meeting you’re planning, it’s important to think about who’ll be there. Make a list of attendees, including their full names and job titles or roles in your organization. This can help you determine whether they need a specific agenda item tailored to them or to their department.
2. 2. Set the meeting agenda. A great meeting is a productive meeting, and setting the agenda beforehand can ensure productivity. A meeting agenda can help you keep discussions on track, address all meeting participants’ concerns, and ensure you’ve assigned all tasks before the next meeting date.
3. 3. Provide a template to attendees. It can be useful to provide a meeting minutes template with bullet points from this agenda to all attendees so they can take their own notes and follow up on any due dates or action items provided if necessary. Including a summary of the previous meeting minutes in this initial template also helps set the current agenda.
4. 4. Take notes in real time. As the designated note-taker, it’s your responsibility to follow along with the meeting as it happens and record all relevant and important information. This can include voting results, assigned tasks, and decisions that affect the team or organization as a whole. Don’t worry about writing everything down verbatim—meeting minutes are more about recording the gist of what has occurred.
5. 5. Flesh out the notes. After the meeting concludes, you can go through your notes and expand the brief timeline of what you’ve recorded into a more legible, eloquent, and detailed account of what the meeting covered. This can help attendees remember the important information long after the gathering concludes, or it can help to update anyone who was absent.
6. 6. Distribute the notes. Once you’re happy with the final minutes, you can distribute them to your fellow attendees. They will be able to rely on your work to execute their own action items, since a hard copy of everything covered in the meeting is now on record and accessible at all times.

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