Align your teams and get more done, with this meeting notes tool

Meetings are essential in any business.

We all need to connect with our colleagues, clients and managers to discuss operations and overcome hurdles. Whether an informal daily standup or a company-wide conference room session, meetings are the lifeblood of the workplace — where decisions are made and progress is achieved.

But have you ever considered just how effective your meetings are?

If you’re not careful, meetings can start off as essential… and then quickly become a waste of everyone’s time. If you’ve ever strayed from a meeting agenda without realizing, failed to follow through on team commitment, or simply forgotten what action you’d been assigned, then you’ll know how easily a meeting can fall apart.

So that’s where meeting minutes come in.

Here at EasyRetro, we have developed an effective, easy-to-use tool for taking meeting minutes. This handy software solution will help jog your memory and maximize the value of those all-important get-togethers.

What are meeting minutes and why are they important?

Important meetings take place in the office environment every single day.

It could be a sprint retrospective meeting, or an individual performance appraisal. Either way, the decisions made in meetings can have huge influence on both the organization as a whole and its employees too.

For that reason, it is important to keep a tangible written record of what has been said and agreed in a meeting. These, in essence, are your meeting “minutes”.

Minutes help with follow-ups, they inform future decisions, and let people who didn’t attend know what they missed — in turn boosting overall team productivity.

But have you ever attended a meeting and began madly scribbling notes, to then look at them with a blank expression when you revisit them later? Yep, we’ve all been there! Many people struggle to effectively take meeting minutes; unsure and confused about what information to record and what to leave out.

But it doesn’t have to cause you a headache.

How to write meeting minutes (and what you need to include)

Effective meeting minutes should be clear, concise, and cover all of the important parts of the meeting.

What specifically you include will differ depending on what type of meeting you’re having, and what you’re looking to achieve. But we’ve whittled down the general guidelines to help get you started.

• Date, time and location of the meeting
• The purpose of the meeting
• Names of attendees and those who were unable to attend
• Agenda items
• Decisions that were made
• Actions that need to be done, including the deadline and who it was assigned to
• Date, time and location of the follow up meeting

These points will provide you with a solid foundation for an effective written record of a meeting.

Meeting minutes example: how can they work for collaborative product teams?

We already touched on the benefits of taking minutes: productivity goes up and misunderstandings are few and far between. But let’s take a closer look at how meeting minutes can add meaning to your product team.

It’s no secret that product development relies on great collaboration — especially if you’re working remotely. Chances are you’ve got lots of separate sub-teams all pulling together to get your new product, or updated feature, out the door and into the market.

And the secret to making that work is for everyone to be aligned on their own individual role.

Meeting minutes can help here; giving each team member a specific action to follow up, or to concentrate, on ahead of the next meeting. Here’s an example of what a product team’s meeting minutes record might look like:

• Date, time and location of the meeting: 12/08/20, 12pm, on Zoom
• The purpose of the meeting: To recap on the previous sprint (a.k.a sprint retrospective meeting)
• Names of attendees and those who were unable to attend: Scrum Master, Product Owner, product designer, marketing, UX, and analytics
• Agenda items: What worked well? What didn't work well? What can we do to improve the situation? Any last thoughts or concerns moving forward?
• Decisions that were made: Collaboration in the last sprint was very strong, but we need more daily communication between Product Owner and product designers. Marketing team needs to be kept in the loop, but not as actively.
• Actions that need to be done, including the deadline and who it was assigned to: Product Owner will send the marketing team a weekly email round-up, and they’ll be deleted from the product Slack channel. Product Owner and product designers will do a virtual standup in the morning and afternoon, throughout each day of the next sprint cycle.
• Date, time and location of the follow up meeting: 01/08/21, 12pm, on Zoom The EasyRetro way to take meeting minutes

The EasyRetro way to take meeting minutes

Writing meeting minutes isn’t an art, it’s a science. And we’ve got the formula — and the tools — to help you get it right.

Using EasyRetro’s meeting minutes software, you can:

• Create meeting records using pre-defined templates (and customize them for your needs)
• Export your meeting minutes direct to PDF and circulate within the team
• Easily identify obstacles and discuss ideas for improvements
• Refer back to your notes from the previous retrospective and ensure all items were attended to

Cue the minute-taking magic!

Give our meeting minutes tool a spin today, and see how much faster it is to align your product team — and work better together. It’s just one way that EasyRetro makes remote team working so much easier.