What do you want to achieve?

Define a clear purpose. Meetings with a clear purpose is more likely to be effective, and more likely to be attended. (Cosapien allows you to capture the purpose for every meeting series.)

Send out the purpose, along with the invite and agenda. Repeat the purpose at the start of the meeting.

Should your meeting become side-tracked, the purpose allows you to easily steer it back on course.

How necessary is this meeting?

Is the meeting necessary at all? It might sound crazy, but many things can get done without a meeting, and this is one of the most useful productivity tips you can master. (If it can be done without a meeting, it is oft best done without a meeting.) Take the time to consider whether there are other ways to achieve your purpose.

It is often a good idea to check with your superior that they agree that your purpose is important and aligned with the needs of the company. This serves the double purpose of also aligning your work with what your superior considers to be important.

Constrain the meeting

Determine the absolute minimum amount of people needed to achieve your purpose. Only these people should be invited to the meeting. Everyone else who is important, but not critical should be on the distribution list. Check for overlap. Ie, if there are two people with largely overlapping skill then only 1 of them need to be in the meeting.

A key piece is that attendees need to have the mandate to make/approve the decisions to be taken in the meeting. Sometimes a key decision maker will want to send a representative to the meeting. Only allow fully empowered representatives. Otherwise, decisions taken will constantly be reversed. If that is not possible, run the meetings without the representative, put the key decision maker on the distribution list, and give a task to a person in the meeting to get approval on certain decisions before the next meeting.

Determine the absolute minimum amount of time needed to achieve your purpose. Add time allocations to agenda item titles, e.g., “Opening (5 min)”. This will help keep a tight schedule, and also helps people understand the weighting of the different sections.

This combination of attendees (per hour rate) and time constraints allows you to measure the cost of your meeting. You can measure the RoI by reflecting that against the purpose of the meeting.

Constraining increases the effectiveness of meetings by

• Makes conversations quicker, and more easily kept on point
• Minimises cost to company

Come prepared

Pre-minute the meeting:

• It prepares the chair better for their meeting.
• This is especially important if the chair is also the scribe, as it minimises interruptions.

Bonus tip: Ask the person responsible for each section to mail the scribe their pre-minuted section before the meeting (including presentations, reports, etc for attachment).

Before the Meeting

• Follow-up on overdue tasks before the meeting. Ie, remind attendees of overdue tasks, and that you expect to see them addressed before the meeting.
• Send the agenda out before hand. This way all parties know what the meeting will entail, and can better prepare for the meeting.

Bonus tip: Introverts perform better when they can prepare for a meeting (ie, send out the agenda at least 24h in advance).

Develop a rhythm, ie, “this is how it is done”

Have a regular cadence for meetings. Greater productivity will result if a meeting is held at a set interval (e.g., weekly) with clear expectations of each person on what they will be reporting on each time (e.g., pipeline report and all experiments ran) with the questions that will be asked (e.g., what did you learn).

Send a clear and consistent message on expectations that before meetings the tasks either be completed or that new deadlines be agreed. (Both of which can be easily done in Cosapien.)

Minute all key decision and discussions. Do this in the 3rd person so that minutes are easily read in future. Minute as if you have no insider knowledge of the meeting, so that it can be understood in 3 months. As people change on your project, these discussions and decisions will be critical to avoid scope creep, and to maintain focus (ie, avoid wasting time on rehashing past decisions). Bonus tip: Include assumptions and reasoning in decisions, so that they make sense when revisiting them

Send the minutes out to all attendees and distributees as soon as possible after the meeting. (Cosapien automatically does this for you, as soon as you publish the meeting minutes.) This way attendees receive the minutes with their tasks while the meeting is still fresh in their minds.

Follow-up after minutes are sent out that everyone agrees to do the tasks captured in the minutes. (Integrated into Cosapien, as it splits out all task request from minutes into individual requests.) Otherwise, people arrive at the next meeting claiming that the scribe captured the task wrongly or that they didn’t know about it.

The productivity tips above will help you improve the effectiveness of your meetings. Interested in using Cosapien to help you execute on those tips? Join here.

The post Productivity Tips For Minuting Meetings appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Why Do We Even Have Meetings? Aren’t They A Waste Of Time?

Yes, meetings have value- maybe even more so now than they did 20 years ago. As organisations rely on more diverse opinions and need to adopt agile decision-making processes, meetings enable strategic decisions to be made quickly and by the relevant parties. That is, of course, if you can keep them on track.

The meeting is only the beginning of a longer process to realize organisational objectives. The minutes need to call everyone to action and actualize the parameters surrounding the tasks required. The meeting minutes need to extrapolate the decisions that were taken and assign the necessary roles so that tasks can be carried out.

Let’s take a look at some of the fundamentals of taking minutes, and how to retain control of a meeting.

Preparation And Pre-Minuting: Control the Meeting

Usually when minutes are hand-written or typed into a template, it helps if the person taking the minutes does not have a major role in the meeting. Otherwise his or her focus becomes split and the minutes may not be accurate.

When you work with Cosapien, all the essential fields are captured for you, so all you have to do is fill in the information relevant to your discussion. Because the structure is taken care of, the person hosting the meeting can still capture the minutes and retain control.

The Critical Information

Effective minutes should include:

• The meeting date and time
• The purpose of the meeting
• The name of the chair or meeting lead, as well as the attendees
• The action items and who they are assigned to
• Details of the decisions captured.

Don’t Reach For The Pen And Paper

Why not? Well if you are writing your notes down, you can’t go back and re-order or re-prioritise your points. You might need to add some detail to a discussion that is three points up. You also have to contend with rushed handwriting and illegibility.

Don’t Take Minutes Verbatim

Why not? It’s neither humanly possible nor optimal, no matter how fast your PA or secretary might shorthand or type out, to get it down word for word. Focus on the actual discussion points, not what is being said. Record the decisions being taken and who is responsible for tasks being actioned.

Don’t Wait Until After The Meeting To Finalise The Minutes

Why not? It’s vital that you take minutes during the meeting not afterwards. You run a greater risk of making mistakes and omitting important information if you try to reconstruct the discussion from memory. Review your notes straight after the meeting and get clarity on any points you may not have understood. It is also a good idea to do this when everyone can still remember the events and discussions vividly. It is recommended that the meeting lead has a chance to review the minutes before they are circulated or published. Why not share the minutes on a projector at the end of the meeting to get approval from the group?

Take control of your meetings today and test our time-saving tips. Sign up for a free, no-obligation trial and see how taking care of the minutes can add hours to your organisational productivity.

The post 5 Time-Saving Tips To Take Better Meeting Minutes appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Pre-Minuting | Document The Essential Details

The first step is to give your meeting a meaningful title. Perhaps you meet with the same team a few times a week, maybe you hold regular meetings for similar purposes. Titling the meeting accurately makes it easier to index and makes the minutes easier to retrieve when you have an archive.

Next, insert the date and time of the meeting, as well as its location. Take note of the meeting duration too. It’s considerate for the other attendees and will help to prevent you from running over time.

Enter the email addresses of the chair and scribe. If anyone needs additional information before or after the meeting, they will know who to request it from.

Give Your Meeting A Clear Purpose

Meetings that are not objective-based are known time-wasters. Let the meeting participants know what the meeting’s objectives are from the outset.

Take Note Of The Attendees

When you make use of Cosapien’s pre-minuting capabilities, you can invite attendees from your dashboard. By doing this you don’t have to worry about managing different calendars, because everything is consolidated in one place.

You can also create a distribution list in Cosapien to send the meeting minutes out to people who may not have been present. It might not be practical to have 25 people sitting in a meeting, but its outcomes and the tasks generated from it may concern them all.

Enter The Agenda Items

Allow the participants to be prepared by sharing the items that are to be discussed. Keep your meeting focused on the issues that matter and minimise your chances of becoming distracted by issues that have not been tabled.

If there are any outstanding commitments from meetings held previously, Cosapien will include them in your agenda for the current meeting. Cosapien will let you know when the commitments were minuted, who they were requested from and when they are due by.

This means the margin for human error, as well as reliance on human memory, is minimised. Cosapien effectively remembers these items and raises them as agenda items. In fact, the system shows you how to write meeting minutes, without you needing to do much writing at all.

Take Note Of New Discussions And New Decisions

One of the most critical elements of how to write meeting minutes is to keep it concise. If you spend most of the meeting duration with your head buried in your computer, you won’t be able to immerse yourself fully in the discussions that are held. Capture the most salient points concisely. This may take a bit of practice. Make sure you document enough detail so that your follow-on tasks can be completed correctly.

Also ensure, if there are meeting minute recipients who are not present but who are on your distribution list, that the minutes make sense. It may not always be possible to make comprehensive notes while the discussions are going on, but remember that Cosapien allows you to make updates once the meeting is over.

Get Group Approval On The Minutes

It is a good idea to show the meeting attendees the minutes that have been recorded prior to publishing them. If you have a projector available, show the minutes on the screen and get verbal agreement before you publish.

Cosapien will archive the meeting minutes online for you, but we also make a downloadable PDF available, which is ideal if you want to print a hard copy. And, just in case people don’t read the minutes, each collaborator requested to take action will be mailed a task request by Cosapien.

If you’d like to know more about how to write meeting minutes that are accurate and useful in the future, please sign up on our link below. We look forward to collaborating with you.

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