At some point your career you might find yourself sitting on a committee or leading one. This would be an important opportunity to flex your note taking skills and then showcase your ability to convert these notes  into official meeting minutes. Minutes are one of the ways to keep track of what is discussed at meetings, and ensure action points are followed through on. Meeting minutes may seem to be insignificant, but are actually official documents of the company and can be subpoenaed as evidence in a court of law.  An essential skill for any manager is to to know how to write minutes, what should be contained in them (as well as what should not be contained in them), and how to format them for presentation.

Your task is to create an informal report. You will watch a video of a mock meeting (in the “Watch It” box below) and create a word document version of the meeting minutes. You will turn this into your instructor via email.

Required Sections

• Date and Time
• Name of attendees
• Acceptance or corrections to previous meeting minutes
• Actions to be taken including the next steps
• The person assigned to each action
• Checkpoint on tasks/progress
• The voting outcomes (if there are any)

Watch It

This meeting meeting took place on January 28th, 2016, at 3pm. The participant’s names are Sarah, Eleanor, and Julie. Click here to read a transcript of this video. (Links to an external site.)

Assignment Resources

• Watch this video (or read the transcript): 5 Minutes on Taking Minutes (Links to an external site.)
• Examples of meeting minutes:
  • Wikimedia Foundation Minutes (Links to an external site.)
  • Adoption of Minutes; interviews: discussion (Links to an external site.)
  • OSI Board Meeting Minutes, April 11, 2007