Meeting minutes are a record of a meeting noted during the meeting and reported after the meeting to the concerned people. It is a formal document including the basic agenda of the meeting, mentioning the participants of the meeting along with the summary of the actions and decisions taken and assigned during a meeting.
A meeting minute template includes sections divided according to the requirements of the meeting minutes being noted. The templates are of various types depending upon the type of the meeting, but most include the basic meeting sections comprising of agenda of the meeting, the respective speakers, the decisions made, tasks assigned, deadlines decided, and other details.
The basic purpose of a template is to make the process of recording the minutes easier by saving time and enhancing the flow.
The document must include…
The nature of the meeting basically provides the guidelines for what should essentially be included in the minutes of the meeting. But mostly there are two types of meeting minutes, one is formal minutes of meeting for highly significant meetings where each detail is recorded therefore known as detailed meeting minutes.
The other is informal minutes of meeting for more generalized and regular office meetings where only the participants and major tasks/decisions are recorded. The components that must be included in the meeting minutes are:
- Company credentials
- Meeting held date
- Participants of the Meeting
- Participants who did not attend the meeting or left
- Agenda of the Meeting
- Points discussed in the meeting
- The input of the participants
- Decisions made
- Tasks assigned
Formats of the document…
The three basic formats of meeting minutes are action minutes, discussion minutes, and verbatim minutes. These are briefly explained further:
- Action Minutes: Action Minute(s) is the most common format used in organizations which focuses more on the actions taken or assigned rather than the discussions done during the meeting. Moreover, a copy of this document is always shared with those who have been assigned tasks or who are expected to take action.
- Discussion Minutes: Discussion minutes are the type of detailed meeting minutes, which must include the discussion done to decide on a specific action. But only the discussion regarding the specific action or agenda is included in it.
- Verbatim Minutes: The least specific format is of Verbatim Minutes, which does not follow the agenda at hand, rather it records each and every discussion done at the meeting or at the point of the meeting, for example in the courtrooms.
Different Types of Meeting Minutes Templates
There are various types of meeting minutes templates available online, but to summarize them, some of those are listed below:
- Formal Template
- Informal
- Agenda and Actions Template
- Staff Meeting Template
- Project Meeting Template
- Board Meeting Template
- Corporate Meeting Template
Importance of Writing Minutes of Meeting
The basic significance of the Meeting Minutes is that it helps to keep a record of the decisions taken and tasks assigned in the meeting so that they can be checked and made sure to be completed within the deadlines decided and by the person decided. In addition to this, the meeting minutes can be significant due to the following reasons:
- Legal Protection: The actions and decisions of a company are overlooked by the courts, law, and board members through the meeting minutes, and only those actions and decisions that are considered to be held, are mentioned in the document. Therefore, it serves as protection in the hour of need.
- Work Structure: The meeting minutes provide a structure of responsibilities, tasks, and discussions for the work. Since they help maintain a record of the points such as who voted for what during a discussion, who raised a conflict, who was assigned a task when are the tasks to be fulfilled and according to these points the mentioned representatives can be held accountable later if in case of violation. Also, it provides a timeline for the tasks to be fulfilled and is also a source of information for those who are not present in the meeting but are related to the task.
Steps in Writing Minutes of Meeting
The foremost step is to maintain the format of the meeting minutes as mentioned earlier. But there are three basic phases for preparing meeting minutes which are:
- Pre-meeting Preparation: The meeting details known already, should be noted before, such as the date, participants, agenda, points of discussion, etc. so that it is easy to record the details in the meeting rather than jumping from one point to another.
- Within Meeting Functions: After the meeting has begun, make sure to have a pre-planned template in which you keep noting the details according to each section so that nothing is left mistakenly.
- Post-meeting Functions: Make sure to neatly write or rewrite the meeting minutes, with clearly defined responsibilities and deadlines. One can also add short notes of instructions mentioned by the authorities. After the document is fully prepared, you need to distribute it to the authorities, participants, and the members who have been assigned the tasks.
MS Word Meeting Minute Templates
Templates make it even simpler to record meeting minutes in the most efficient form and MS Word is here to provide us with those templates. Some of these templates are listed below:
- Education meeting minute
- Classic meeting minute
- Informal meeting minute
- Minutes for Organizational Meetings (Short and Long-form)
- Triangles meeting minutes
- Formal meeting minutes
- PTA meeting minutes
- Simple meeting minutes
- Elegant meeting minutes
- Rose Suit meeting minutes
- Blue spheres meeting minutes
- Meeting Notes
- Meeting minutes with action items
- Blue curve minutes
Creating Meeting Minutes using MS Word
Creating Meeting Minutes using the MS Word template is just as easy as creating any other simple document in MS Word. The first step is to browse or select the appropriate meeting minute template from the MS Word collection. This can be done in two ways:
- In Installed MS Word: For the existing users, MS Word has templates within the application. The template section can be reached by Selecting File >New then typing Meeting Minutes in the displayed search box and it will show you all the meeting templates available.
- Online MS Word: For online users, who do not have MS Word installed in their systems they can easily access the meeting minutes templates from Microsoft Office Website, where they can Browse by Category, to select their appropriate template.
After the best-suited template is chosen, it can be downloaded or can be used as it is. It can be further customized to remove or add certain sections as per the requirement.
Benefits of Creating Template in MS Word
Every organization now prefers to have software that helps them in creating professional documents and MS Office is one of that highly used software having approximately over 60 million monthly commercial customers.
- MS Word provides its users with hundreds of pre-prepared templates to attain maximum efficiency with minimum effort. Moreover, these templates are mostly free.
- MS Word pre-designed templates help one to cut down the long hefty work hours required to make minutes of the meeting documents and rewrite them. Moreover, it helps you to not mistakenly miss one or more details under the pressure of a fast pace meeting, thus reducing the chances of errors while magnifying your productivity.
- Pre-designed templates also help to maintain consistency in an organization’s documents, as a template can be customized according to an organization’s need for example its logo and other credentials, which can be then followed for every office document including minutes of the meeting.
Templates
#1
File: Word (.docx) 2007+ and iPad
#2
File: Word (.docx) 2007+ and iPad
#3
File: Word (.docx) 2007+ and iPad
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